#human-perception

#human-perception

'Orcas are psychos,' quipped a close friend recently. He wasn't joking, nor was he ill-informed. In fact, he is probably the world's leading historian of whales and people. He had just watched a BBC Earth clip, narrated by David Attenborough, in which three killer whales separate a male humpback calf from his mother in the waters of Western Australia. The video's closing footage, with two of the orcas escorting the naive youngster to his imminent death, resembles nothing so much as a kidnapping:

"As funny as I find some of the Moltbook posts, to me they're just a reminder that AI does an amazing job of mimicking human language," Suleyman wrote. "We need to remember it's a performance, a mirage."

Think you can distinguish between a human voice and a robot? Think again, because the numbers are starting to say otherwise. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London found that people can no longer reliably distinguish between genuine speech and cloned AI voices. Their study, published in open-access journal PLOS One, found that when people were played recordings of real people together with AI-generated versions of the same voices, their judgments were little better than random chance.

Mars isn't just a planet. It's a philosophy, an ideology. The way humans think about it changes over time, reflecting the unstable mix of assumptions, hopes, dreams and anxieties that define each historical moment.