Looking for trouble in Brasília’s infrastructure data

Brasília is a notoriously corrupt city. 72% of federal infrastructure projects seem to be overdue. A R$2.5 million health unit is planned to take a day. A three-year engineering study costs under R$5,000. Someone named Ronald has been testing in production. What does it all mean?…

Is psychoanalysis a pseudoscience?

Psychoanalysis has long been accused of being a pseudoscience (Popper, 1963; Meyer, 2011; Pasternak & Orsi, 2021; Ferreira et al., 2022). Despite its influential status in disciplines such as continental philosophy and literary studies, its standing as both science and therapy remains controversial. Critics argue that psychoanalysis does not follow…

AI safety as an interdisciplinary endeavour

It seems that these days every text on artificial intelligence (AI) must begin by talking about the duality of AI: its incredible potential and its terrible danger. We are now at an inflexion point in which technological advancements are measured by months instead of years. The future is uncertain. By…

How AI embeddings compel us to question being itself

This post belongs to a series called AI for humanists. The previous post introduced general terminology (such as AI, LLMs, etc). This one is about a specific technology called embeddings and also a brief critique of humanism. We will be talking about the following concepts: * Token * Vector * Matrix * Tensor * Embedding…

AI terminology for poets

This is a brief explanation of the following concepts and how they relate to the latest interest in AI: * Artificial Intelligence (AI) * Generative AI (GenAI) * Machine learning (ML) * Deep learning * Neural networks * Large language models (LLM) * Natural language processing (NLP) * Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) * Superintelligence (ASI) Nobody really knows what…