Question 1

“Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that while AI was better than humans at data-driven decision-making tasks, it was still inferior to humans for cognitive and creative ones. But in the past two years, language-based AI has advanced by leaps and bounds, changing common notions of what this technology can do.

The most visible advances have been in what’s called “natural language processing” (NLP), the branch of AI focused on how computers can process language like humans do. It has been used to write an article for The Guardian, and AI-authored blog posts have gone viral — feats that weren’t possible a few years ago. AI even excels at cognitive tasks like programming where it is able to generate programs for simple video games from human instructions.” Adapted from: Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2022/04/the-power-of-natural-language-processing)

Using your understanding of the biological basis of humans and the theories of language acquisition, discuss, and compare and contrast, humans versus Artificial Intelligence.

Question 2 

“One common complaint about psychiatry is its subjective nature: it lacks definitive tests for many diseases. So the idea of diagnosing disorders using only brain scans holds great appeal.v A paper published recently in PLOS ONE describes such a system, although it was presented only as an initial proof of concept. News reports, however, trumpeted the advent of “objective” psychiatric diagnoses.

The paper used data from several earlier studies, in which researchers outlined key brain regions in MRI scans of people with bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia or Tourette’s syndrome; people with low or high risk of developing major depressive disorder; and a healthy group. The scans were also labelled with the disorder or depression risk level of the original study participant.”

Question 3 

“Many children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty communicating and establishing social bonds with others. A good deal of brain research seeking to explain why this might be the case has focused on the visual system and the processing of visual signals, as manifested, for example, in the interpretation of facial expressions or the ability to maintain eye contact.

Now, a research team that has turned its attention to sounds and the processing of vocal signals has reported its results. They sought to discover the neural basis for another source of difficulty in social communication: the fact that many children with autism have difficulty recognizing the emotional inflection in voices—something called emotional prosody. An example would be whether a voice is expressing happiness, sadness, or emotionally neutral content. Being able to do this accurately is a vital part of interacting and bonding with others.”