In this week’s eSkeptic:
SKEPTIC MAGAZINE 22.1
Bill Nye Saves the World!
The latest issue of Skeptic magazine (22.1) contains a Science Dialogue between Bill Nye and Michael Shermer on Climate Change, Travel to Mars, Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear Power, GMOs, and more based on Nye’s new Netflix Original Series which airs April 21, 2017.
Other topics in this issue include: Miracle Water • Lone Wolf Terrorism • Cyber Radicalism • Mass Hallucinations • Shoddy Journalism • ET v. Earth Pathogens • Trouble in the Multiverse • Science v. Subjectivity • Functional Medicine • Prejudice • Determinism • Cosmic Consciousness • Conjuring Magic • Baloney Detection, and more…
Read Skeptic magazine on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Kindle Fire HD, Mac, and PC. Get the digital edition instantly from PocketMags.com, or via the Skeptic Magazine App. Or, pre-order the print edition from Shop Skeptic. The print edition won’t likely hit newsstands for another week or two.
30-DAY FREE TRIAL
on new digital subscriptions on iOS & Android
We offer a 30-day free trial to new digital subscribers on annual subscriptions within the Skeptic Magazine App for iOS and Android devices. Here’s a sneak peak at this issue for iPad…
JUNIOR SKEPTIC #62
An Easy Guide to Baloney Detection
Physically bound inside each and every issue of Skeptic magazine is Junior Skeptic: an engagingly illustrated science and critical thinking publication for younger readers (and the young at heart).
In this special issue of Junior Skeptic we’ll learn many valuable tricks for sorting truth from nonsense. We need them! We’re bombarded by claims every day of our lives. Friends tell us stuff. Labels and advertisements make claims about products. Books and websites make claims about the world. TV and YouTube channels show us amazing sights and tell us astonishing stories. But some of the things we hear sound too good to be true. How do we tell the difference between fact and baloney? Let’s find out!
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN “SKEPTIC” COLUMN FOR MARCH 2017
Apocalypse A.I.: Artificial Intelligence as Existential Threat
In 2014 SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted: “Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” That same year University of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking told the BBC: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also cautioned: “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence.”
March 2017
How the AI apocalypse might unfold was outlined by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky in a paper in the 2008 book Global Catastrophic Risks: “How likely is it that AI will cross the entire vast gap from amoeba to village idiot, and then stop at the level of human genius?” His answer: “It would be physically possible to build a brain that computed a million times as fast as a human brain…. If a human mind were thus accelerated, a subjective year of thinking would be accomplished for every 31 physical seconds in the outside world, and a millennium would fly by in eight-and-a-half hours.” Yudkowsky thinks that if we don’t get on top of this now it will be too late: “The AI runs on a different timescale than you do; by the time your neurons finish thinking the words ‘I should do something’ you have already lost.” […]
The Enfield Poltergeist — Part 1
MONSTERTALK EPISODE 123
In this episode of MonsterTalk we present an interview with Guy Lyon Playfair, one of the original investigators into perhaps the most famous British poltergeist case in modern times.
Get the MonsterTalk Podcast App and enjoy the science show about monsters on your handheld devices! Available for iOS, Android, and Windows devices. Subscribe to MonsterTalk for free on iTunes. Follow the RSS feed.
