Can machines think? 🤔 What is consciousness? These questions are too important to leave to AI researchers. Cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have investigated these questions for ages and came up with frameworks to think about such questions. Here we focus on two things, the philosophical critique of AI (both symbolic and connectionist) and various approaches to consciousness (or intelligence, or minds).

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Recently a linguistic search engine overturned the federal mask mandate in the US, the recent issue of The Economist says “Huge “foundation models” are turbo-charging AI progress” and Gary Marcus seems to be the only person who bets against the success of AI. But can we trust empiricism and big data? A large language model can decide the debate over the common or right usage of words?

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The interest in functional programming languages has been increasing recently. The success of Scala and Spark is apparent, but the demand for Haskell, Clojure, and OCaml programmers is also rising. Lisp is still alive and there are successful companies devoted to it. Learning functional programming languages is complex, and the knowledge of “traditional” languages is of little help, but the good news is that you can get started with excellent study materials.

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