City on the Moon.
Senses of self.
“Succinct and smart…News Items boils it down like no other newsletter.” — Tom Freston, Firefly3 LLC and author of “Unplugged - Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu”.
1. A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea — if it’s caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea daily. People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years. “This is a very large, rigorous study conducted long term among men and women that shows that drinking two or three cups of coffee per day is associated with reduced risk of dementia,” said Aladdin Shadyab, an associate professor of public health and medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the study. (Sources: jamanetwork.com, nytimes.com)
2. Researchers at the University of Michigan have created an AI system that can interpret brain MRI scans in just seconds, accurately identifying a wide range of neurological conditions and determining which cases need urgent care. Trained on hundreds of thousands of real-world scans along with patient histories, the model achieved accuracy as high as 97.5% and outperformed other advanced AI tools. (Source: sciencedaily.com)
3. The Wall Street Journal:
Amanda Askell knew from the age of 14 that she wanted to teach philosophy. What she didn’t know then was that her only pupil would be an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Claude.
As the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, Askell spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the AI model, building its personality and addressing its misfires with prompts that can run longer than 100 pages. The aim is to endow Claude with a sense of morality—a digital soul that guides the millions of conversations it has with people every week.
“There is this human-like element to models that I think is important to acknowledge,” Askell, 37, says during an interview at Anthropic’s headquarters, asserting the belief that “they’ll inevitably form senses of self.”
