Michael Muntisov's Blog, page 2

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

In the ongoing buzz following the launch of ChatGPT, people are once again predicting a near-future singularity, when artificial intelligence will match and then exceed human intelligence.

Author Erik J. Larson makes a strong case that this is a myth.

In his book “The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do” Larson describes three levels of reasoning – deductive, inductive and abductive.

In deduction, there is a clear logical outcome. For example: All hu...

Nuclear War

“Today…every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

John F. Kennedy.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s citizens and schoolchildren in the USA practiced atomic bomb drills, and nuclear disaster movies such as Dr Strangelove (1964), Fail Safe (1964) and On the Beach (1959) pulled in curious but nervous audiences.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been l...

A Short History of Humanity

In his book How Economics Explains the World, author Andrew Leigh describes events that affected the course of world history. These range widely from discussions on Slavery to Climate Change; from War to Artificial Intelligence. In each case the author tries to draw on economic theory to explain why historical events occurred the way they did. The result is a compendium of interesting titbits.

For example, Leigh points out that the plough was the most important invention that kicked off the a...

Democracy 3.0

Democracy is withering. A majority of people in democracies like America, France and others believe that corruption is widespread in government. How has this come about? Author John MacGregor believes it is because our constitutions are rooted in a world no living person can remember, where liberties, elections and separation of powers are defined but in the gaps there has arisen a capture by an elite which governs more for their own self-interest than for the public good.

In his book The Mec...

Reasons not to worry

Psychologist and professional grandfather Dr Bob Rich offered this advice to people suffering from climate anxiety: “Do the best you can, then don’t worry”. His advice follows the rich tradition of stoic philosophy.

The word stoic in modern usage has devolved to describe people who bottle up their emotions. This interpretation fails to acknowledge Stoicism’s core underpinning: by recognizing that we live in an uncertain world we can avoid much unnecessary anxiety and grief.

Brigid Delaney’...

What leads to war?

With wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, and a looming USA-China conflict over Taiwan, one might ask what factors lead to war especially those that involve the great powers. There are a range of theories but the one that I find most compelling is that proposed by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago.

His theory, which is known in the literature as “offensive realism”, says that there are five determinants that drive nation state behaviour. First is that there is no higher authority t...

Sapiens

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

Yuval Noah Harari

Author Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens is about the history of humankind and provides a new perspective on human life and development. I thought it was worth summarizing:

The forefathers of Homo sapiens domesticated fire at least 300,000 ...

Fall of Civilizations

The collapse of society on Easter Island is an oft-repeated cautionary tale of man-made ecocide, which blames an ignorant indigenous population for deforesting the island out of an obsession with stone statue building and greed, leading to societal collapse. But author Paul Cooper’s new book Fall of Civilizations makes a compelling case that the failure on Easter Island was actually due to the exploitation of the island by Europeans, and their introduced diseases.

The most recent evid...

The Overstory

Read it! One of the best works of literature I have ever read.

The Overstory by Richard Powers follows nine individuals with disparate backgrounds who, to greater and lesser degrees, get connected to each other over the course of the novel. The connective force is Trees.

The novel starts with the backstories of the nine individuals. These vignettes are powerful in their own right: The daughter of an immigrant Chinese electrical engineer, a Vietnam vet and survivor of the Stanford Experimen...

Natural Hydrogen

Over the last three years alone, more than forty countries have developed a Hydrogen Strategy which aims to decarbonize energy emissions while providing a boost to their local economies. All of the strategies are based around the concept of manufacturing hydrogen or using manufactured hydrogen. This strategic position is underpinned by the ‘fact’ that…

“Pure hydrogen is not found naturally on Earth” Australian National Hydrogen Strategy 2019

“Hydrogen…is rarely found in its natural state o...