New Philosopher

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can’t know if we’ll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.” — Stephen Hawking What happens when a machine can do something better than we can? Well, it’s simple: when machines outperform us – either physically or intellectually – typically we assign the activity to them. A vehicle can transport us faster than our own legs, a dishwasher can wash dishes more thoroughly than we can, and a GPS works better than an old-fashioned map, so we delegate these tasks to machines. Typing on a computer has replaced handwriting. Vacuum cleaners have taken…

Howard Gardner Howard Gardner is Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. The author of thirty books translated into 32 languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences. Zan Boag Zan Boag is Editor-in-Chief of New Philosopher and Editorial Director of the international newsstand magazine Womankind. In 2017 he won the Australasian Association of Philosophy Media Professionals Award and was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in the international Stack Awards. Boag is the co-founder and host of the monthly…

“Rationality gives us greater knowledge and greater control over our own actions and emotions and over the world… It enables us to transform ourselves and hence transcend our status as mere animals, actually, and also symbolically.” — Robert Nozick How important is intelligence in getting ahead, in conquering goals, and generally making a success out of one’s life? Is intelligence the gold standard for who succeeds and who doesn’t? Intelligence tends to be ‘measured’ by the intelligence quotient, or IQ, an assessment of brain processing speed. Smart people can quickly commit to mind facts, digits, and vocabulary, and can retrieve such information from their memory at rapid speed. Ask a high IQ person to remember a six-digit number, and then to repeat it backwards, or to rotate a 3D object in their…

Forty-nine years ago, a radio message, known as the Arecibo message, was sent from Earth to anyone in outer space who might listen. The radio transmission was directed towards a cluster of some 300,000 stars, called Messier 13, or M13 for short, a stellar snowball in the sky, easily spotted in the European summer months. The message was devised by Frank Drake, a radio astronomer who had been listening for radio signals from intelligent life for years. Drake shot the message on a narrow beam from the largest radio telescope at the time, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, a collecting dish made up of over 30,000 perforated aluminium panels and measuring over three football fields in diameter. The message was broadcast at 20 trillion watts – powerful enough to be…

Most of us would have met a conspiracy theorist. They’re typically breathless with ideas, over-confident in their hunches, and a touch paranoid. Conspiracy theorists base their theories mostly on anecdotes, or information passed on to them by a friend or acquaintance, a person they identify with, someone from their own ‘in group’. And these ideas turn a chaotic, messy, and uncertain world into something much simpler: there’s an underlying theme, characters, and a sometimes even an evil plot. Canadian psychologist Gordon Pennycook researches why otherwise smart people fall for oddball ideas. He believes that conspiracy belief is linked to an overreliance on intuition and a lack of reflection. It happens to all of us at times – your gut instinct is aversion or suspicion, and so you think you’re on to…

When Socrates searched Athens for someone intelligent – specifically a person who was wiser than he was – he encountered something unexpected. “Those with the greatest reputations seemed to me,” he proclaimed, “practically the most deficient [in common sense].” On the other hand, those who were “supposedly inferior” came across to the Greek philosopher as being “better endowed when it came to good sense”. In his quest to find the wisest man in Athens, Socrates approached politicians, poets, and craftsmen. He encountered political experts with, indeed, tremendous knowledge in political matters, but who weren’t necessarily wise, nor exercised common sense in matters of daily living. The same could be said of the poets. Socrates discovered that a poet’s talent with words did not spill over into other capabilities. Often, they make…