Persons cited in Populscience

Poisson distribution of person names

I enjoy compiling statistics on many things. Naturally, I also do it for this blog. One of the statistics I often compile is that of the names of people (scientists or otherwise) most frequently mentioned in the blog, which now has 564 posts. I presented such a table in January 2024, when 449 articles had been published, in the post titled Ten years of Divulciencia-Populscience, and I think it's time to update it. Here is the corresponding table, showing 40 people who have been mentioned at least 10 times.

Natural and artificial intelligence

As we saw in the previous post, the book Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell deals with the origins of human consciousness and free will. In a brief epilogue, the book addresses the topic of strong artificial intelligence—the real kind, which doesn't yet exist—and formulates some hypotheses about the possibility of its becoming feasible.

It emphasizes that one of the most active branches of research in AI, especially in recent years, is the field of artificial neural networks, which has led to advances such as Large Language Models (LLMs). It compares these neural networks in our programs with those that exist in our brains and in the brains of many animals more or less similar to us. It says that we are witnessing impressive advances in fields such as image recognition, text prediction, speech recognition, and language translation, based on the use of deep learning, remotely inspired on the architecture of the cerebral cortex.

Is research on LLM AI slowing down?

John McCarthy

It looks like the fate of the field of computer technology, wrongly called artificial intelligence, is to alternate between excessive optimism and unbridled pessimism. Here is a sketch of the history of this technology:

1. At the Dartmouth College summer school in 1956, the name artificial intelligence was proposed for computer programs that could perform tasks that had traditionally been considered exclusively human, such as playing chess and translating from one human language to another. The attendees, led by John McCarthy, predicted that within ten years these two problems would be solved. They hoped that by 1966 there would be programs capable of beating the world chess champion, and others that could translate perfectly between any two human languages. When these objectives were not achieved so early, research into artificial intelligence stopped. At universities, research topics in this field were frowned upon, because they were thought to have no future.