Rob Brooks – Evolutionary Biologist & Author
My second book is to be published by NewSouth Books (Australia and New Zealand) on 1 May 2021. Columbia University Press are publishing it in the remainder of the English-Speaking World.
Here are some snippets from blurbs and from independent reviews, together with information on places to preorder or buy the book.
Welcome to issue 20 of Artificial Intimacy News. Here I pick out some of the most interesting research, long-form pieces and news about how machines tap our evolved human impulses to make friends, build intimacy and fall in love. In…
Welcome to issue 19 of Artificial Intimacy News. Here I pick out some of the most interesting research, long-form pieces and news about how machines tap our evolved human impulses to make friends, build intimacy and fall in love. In…
ChatGPT prompt: Please generate an image of a half-used card of contraceptive pills, sitting on a counter. On the card of pills is a white glowing apple logo like the one on the startup screen of the iPhone, as if…
Darwin Among the Machines. Prompt: Darwin in the middle ground with a steam train in the background. In the style of JWM Turner. In this issue: What happens when AI can evolve? Humans pretending to be chatbots, bringing back early-Internet…
Credit: Alejandro Quintanar/Pexels What happens when natural selection, the most powerful process driving change in the living world, shapes artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps the most potent technology humanity has invented to date? We might be about to find out. According…
If OpenAI were to ask me how to ensure users don’t form social relationships with voice-ChatGPT, I would recommend:
(1) Don’t give it a voice. (2) Don’t make it capable of holding up one end of an apparent conversation. Basically don’t make the product you made.
What happens when it’s not a human bringing on the heartache, but an AI-powered app? That’s a question a great many users of the Replika AI are crying about this month.
“Pro-lifers” consider the termination of a pregnancy the moral equivalent of taking a newborn life. Their strategies seek to blur distinctions between aborting a fetus and killing a newborn. I argue that an understanding of that relationship—drawing on evidence from centuries of history and millennia of evolution—leads to the conclusion that abortion is the most humane alternative to infanticide, adding to the case for safe, legal, accessible abortion for women who need it.
The association between diamond rings, matrimony, hetero sex, and the intention to spend one’s life with another provides a fascinating tale of economics, marketing, biology, and culture. And it teaches us about that which glitters more than gold and scintillates more than gems.
Of the 50 plus shades of online anger, one fascinates me more than the rest: the anger of the Incel. Beneath the euphemistic portmanteau of “involuntary” and “celibate” lurks a sinister mass of self-loathing men. They know they are unattractive,…