The Browser - Government Dolittle

A City With No Government

Jacob Kushner | Noema | 31st August 2023

Canaan was a town in Haiti flattened by the 2018 earthquake. Croix-des-Bouquets was a town next door with a can-do mayor called Rony Colin. Colin decided to take charge of Canaan, which had no government. He arrived with guns and money. How did it go? Not so well. Canaan had its own strongman. A small war ensued. Colin fled to Florida. Canaan relapsed into crime-ridden anarchy (3,000 words)

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The Doctor Dolittle Challenge

Yossi Yovel & Oded Rechavi | Current Biology | 7th August 2023

Will AI enable us to talk with animals? The potential is there, subject to three main constraints. We can collect animal utterances to train our AIs, but we won't know much about the context of the utterances, which is a big part of the training. We will have to figure out how to get animals to validate our models. And it may be that animals don't talk about the things we want to talk about (4,600 words)

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