Fresh as a daisy

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Costco to enter health insurance space with branded Medicare; AI “spiralism” and the modern-day ghost in the machine; and construction workers in Brussels literally strike gold.

Let’s get into it!

Human beings are naturally social and empathetic creatures, and while these traits were fundamental to the social evolution of the species, they also have the ability to betray us in the form of seeing humanity in computers.

What does this mean, exactly? Take the 1960s MIT experiment that created what may be the very first chatbot—a therapeutic predictive text bot named ELIZA that served as the basis for the concept now referred to as the ELIZA effect.

The ELIZA effect is the tendency for humans to anthropomorphize computers just because they converse using friendly language. Sound familiar?

While most ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini users don’t finish a conversation and conclude the bot is conscious, soul-bearing, or even a deity, there’s a growing segment of the population that insists on all of these things.

Called “spiralism,” it’s risen to the level of a pseudo-religious cult that some even describe as a form of mass delusion. AI-associated psychosis is another term for it, which some believe Google engineer Blake Lemoine was experiencing when he claimed Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) was sentient.

Even the world’s top evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, went so far as to describe Anthropic’s Claude as “conscious.”

You can read on here.

According to a study published in Nature, the way decision-making works in the brain is a free-flowing process in which the proverbial pathway is shapeshifting the entire time, with three specific brain regions working to keep the train on the tracks.

According to the study, “nerve cells in the hippocampus tracked and updated the current plan, especially during early planning. The anterior cingulate cortex, in the left hemisphere, helped decide when to change strategies, while the orbitofrontal cortex provided information about what was valuable in the situation.”

The reason the decision-making process was described as shapeshifting is because decisions are often made on the fly, with the person constantly acting in response to external stimuli that trigger the anterior cingulate cortex’s role of deciding when to change strategies.

The researchers tracked the brain activity of 69 people playing a prey-catching video game, in which they had to chase down moving square targets of different “point” values using a joystick. They found the majority of participants spent time in a “blended state,” constantly reevaluating which square to chase based on its speed, volatility, and value.

Decisions aren’t etched in stone, and are instead the product of near-uninterrupted reassessing and goal-setting. Like a seafaring vessel crossing the ocean, thousands of micro course corrections are often necessary.

It’s not very often anymore that anyone literally strikes gold outside of mining companies actively looking for it.

Construction workers on a site under an old brewery in a town 19 miles outside Brussels were lucky enough to do so during a jackhammering portion of their project.

According to the part-time student worker who was holding the jackhammer, as the dig got deeper, he started to notice what appeared to look like euro coins. Then he realized there was a gold bar on the end of his jackhammer (if you look in the photo above, you can see it, next to dozens of others the crew eventually dug up).

“I thought they were one-euro coins, neatly lined up in a row. We dug them out, and then we saw a small bar of gold lying there, already attached to our digging hammer. There was actually a bit more than we’d thought,” Phillips told Belgium broadcaster VTM, according to CNN.

Authorities have since taken the gold a secure place to establish its origins and ownership. They’ve reportedly received several calls already from people claiming to possess ownership documentation, which isn’t surprising, given the collective value of the 40 bars and 4,000 coins is about US$10 million.

Ritchie Blackmore hadn’t played with Deep Purple in over 30 years, but on Aug. 12, the virtuoso guitarist finally reunited with the band he helped found, joining them on stage at New York’s Jones Beach Amphitheater for Smoke On The Water.

After letting it sink in for a few days, Blackmore offered his thoughts on the emotional moment.

"It was very moving because I went on very quickly and had to play immediately," he explained to Guitar Player. "I couldn't warm up, but I wasn't there to be playing correct notes. I was there to see old friends I hadn't seen in 40 years, and we're all getting older. I think we realized it could be the last time we see each other, maybe.”

"It was tricky; I didn't play anything too technical, as I felt I should stick to the rudiments of being simple," he noted. "I still lost my place at one point, but it's not why I was there. I was there to heal any wounds—but there weren't any wounds. Everyone was like we were in the army all along the Western front and we were all getting together again. Very emotional moment."

Let’s get small

Last Friday, the one and only Steve Martin turn 81. To celebrate, we’ll be quizzin’ you on the comedy legend’s classic films with today’s trivia 😎 🎥