Latest news with #Searle
Daily Record
26-05-2025
- Daily Record
Liverpool parade disaster: Emergency crews lift car to free child and three others
Twenty seven people were hurt following the horror crash at the end of Liverpool's Premier League trophy parade last night, with four of those suffering serious injuries Emergency services rushed to the scene last night after four individuals, i ncluding a child, were trapped under a car during a traumatic incident at the Liverpool parade. The quick actions of firefighters saw them successfully lifting the car and freeing those caught underneath it in a city centre accident that police have classed as "a major incident". Nick Searle, chief fire officer of Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, provided details at a late Monday press briefing: "We immediately mobilised three fire engines to Water Street and were in attendance in four minutes." He gave an account of the emergency response: "On arrival, the crews were met with numerous injured... and four persons trapped under a vehicle. Our crews rapidly lifted the vehicle, removed three adults and one child from beneath and passed them to our ambulance service colleagues." Searle further elaborated: "We then worked with emergency service partners to ensure casualties received medical treatment and transport to hospital as quickly as possible. My fire crews will maintain a visible and reassuring presence in the coming days and weeks." Injuries sustained by the four, inclusive of the child, have been described as serious by Merseyside Police. The force also disclosed the arrest of a 53 year old white British man from Liverpool in connection to the event, reports the Mirror. Keep up-to-date with developments on the Liverpool parade horror through our live blog. Tragedy struck amidst the revelry in Liverpool's city centre as a car tragically ploughed into jubilant fans during the team's victory parade. The scene, packed with approximately 800,000 supporters, turned from elation to alarm when a vehicle careered into the crowd on Water Street before grinding to a resolute stop. Authorities swiftly addressed the public in a press briefing held this evening to discuss the calamity. A total of twenty-seven individuals were injured in the distressing event, according to Assistant Chief Constable Jenny Sims, who expressed her gratitude at the news conference: "I want to thank all of the emergency services, partner agencies and members of the public who came to the assistance of the injured following this evening's shocking incident, which we declared a major incident. "This had been a joyous day in Liverpool with hundreds of thousands of people lining the streets to celebrate Liverpool Football Club's victory parade. "A number of people have been injured and were taken to hospital. In addition, a large number of people of all ages were treated at the scene, but did not require hospital treatment." Earlier statements from Merseyside Police confirmed that a 53 year old white British man from the Liverpool area has been apprehended. Intensive inquiries are underway to ascertain what precipitated the unfortunate incident. North West Ambulance Service's David Kitchin updated: "We can confirm our teams treated 20 patients at the scene for minor injuries, and these did not need hospital treatment." A total of twenty-seven individuals were transported to hospital by ambulance following an incident, and it is understood that this number includes one child who is amongst the two reported to have suffered serious injuries. Liverpool FC released a statement earlier in the evening saying: "We are in direct contact with Merseyside Police regarding the incident on Water Street which happened towards the end of the trophy parade earlier this evening." Expressing their concern, the club added: "Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have been affected by this serious incident. We will continue to offer our full support to the emergency services and local authorities who are dealing with this incident."
Business Insider
02-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Analysts Offer Insights on Technology Companies: Universal Display (OLED) and Logitech (LOGI)
There's a lot to be optimistic about in the Technology sector as 2 analysts just weighed in on Universal Display (OLED – Research Report) and Logitech (LOGI – Research Report) with bullish sentiments. Protect Your Portfolio Against Market Uncertainty Discover companies with rock-solid fundamentals in TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter. Receive undervalued stocks, resilient to market uncertainty, delivered straight to your inbox. Universal Display (OLED) In a report released yesterday, Scott Searle from Roth MKM maintained a Buy rating on Universal Display, with a price target of $213.00. The company's shares closed last Thursday at $141.20, close to its 52-week low of $140.17. According to Searle is a 4-star analyst with an average return of 6.8% and a 40.9% success rate. Searle covers the Technology sector, focusing on stocks such as Sequans Communications S A, Digi International, and Ceragon Networks. Currently, the analyst consensus on Universal Display is a Moderate Buy with an average price target of $176.71, a 35.4% upside from current levels. In a report issued on April 17, Goldman Sachs also maintained a Buy rating on the stock with a $172.00 price target. Logitech (LOGI) Kepler Capital analyst Torsten Sauter maintained a Buy rating on Logitech on April 30 and set a price target of CHF75.00. The company's shares closed last Thursday at $75.99, close to its 52-week low of $74.72. According to Sauter is ranked #2594 out of 9437 analysts. Logitech has an analyst consensus of Moderate Buy, with a price target consensus of $86.27, which is a 13.1% upside from current levels. In a report issued on April 24, Wedbush also maintained a Buy rating on the stock with a $110.00 price target.
Forbes
23-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Can AI Understand? The Chinese Room Argument Says No, But Is It Right?
Artificial intelligence is everywhere these days. AI and the tools that enable it, including machine learning and neural networks, have, of course, been the subject of intensive research and engineering progress going back decades, dating back to the 1950s and early 60s. Many of the foundational concepts and mathematics are much older. But throughout its history, up to the present state-of-the-art large language models, the question remains: Are these systems genuinely intelligent, or are they merely sophisticated simulations? In other words, do they understand? At the heart of this debate lies a famous philosophical thought experiment — the Chinese room argument — proposed by the philosopher John Searle in 1980. The Chinese room argument challenges the claim that AI can genuinely understand language, let alone possess true consciousness. The thought experiment goes like this: A person who knows no Chinese sits inside a sealed room. Outside, a native Chinese speaker passes notes written in Chinese through a slot to the person inside. Inside the room, the person follows detailed instructions from a manual, written in English, that tells them exactly how to respond to these notes using a series of symbols. As they receive input characters in Chinese, the manual tells the person, in English, what output characters in Chinese and in what sequence they should pass back out the slot. By mechanically and diligently following the instructions, the person inside the room returns appropriate replies to the Chinese speaker outside the room. From the perspective of the Chinese speaker outside, the room seems perfectly capable of understanding and communicating in Chinese. To them, the room is a black box; they have no knowledge about what is happening inside. Yet, at the core of Searle's argument, neither the person inside nor the room itself actually understands the Chinese language. They are simply systematically manipulating symbols based on the rules in the instruction manual. The essence of the argument is that understanding requires something beyond the mere manipulation of symbols and syntax. It requires semantics — meaning and intentionality. AI systems, no matter how sophisticated, Searle argues, are fundamentally similar to the person inside the Chinese room. And therefore cannot have true understanding, no matter how sophisticated they may get. Searle's argument did not emerge in isolation. Questions about whether AI actually learns and understands are not new; it has been fiercely debated for decades, deeply rooted in philosophical discussions about the nature of learning and intelligence. The philosophical foundations of questioning machine intelligence date back much further than 1980 when Searle published his now famous paper. Most notably to Alan Turing's seminal paper in 1950 where he proposed the 'Turing Test'. In Turing's scenario, a computer is considered intelligent if it can hold a conversation indistinguishable from that of a human. In other words, if the human interacting with the computer cannot tell if it is another human or a machine. While Turing focused on practical interactions and outcomes between the human and the computer, Searle asked a deeper philosophical question: Even if a computer passes the Turing Test, does it have or lack genuine understanding? Can it ever? Well before Searle and Turing, philosophers including René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz had grappled with the nature of consciousness and mechanical reasoning. Leibniz famously imagined a giant mill as a metaphor for the brain, arguing that entering it would reveal nothing but mechanical parts, never consciousness or understanding. Somehow, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Searle's Chinese room argument extends these ideas explicitly to computers, emphasizing the limits of purely mechanical systems. Since its introduction, the Chinese room argument has sparked significant debate and numerous counter arguments. Responses generally fall into a few different key categories. One group of related responses, referred to as the 'systems reply', argues that although the individual in the room might not understand Chinese, the system as a whole — including the manual, the person, and the room — does. Understanding, in this view, emerges from the entire system rather than from any single component. The focus on the person inside the room, for these counter arguments, is misguided. Searle argued against this by suggesting that the person could theoretically memorize the entire manual, in essence not requiring the room or the manual and becoming the whole system themselves, and still not understand Chinese —adding that understanding requires more than following rules and instructions. Another group of counter arguments, the 'robot reply', suggest that it is necessar to embed the computer within a physical robot that interacts with the world, allowing sensory inputs and outputs. These counter arguments propose that real understanding requires interaction with the physical world, something Searle's isolated room lacks. But similarly, Searle countered that adding sensors to an embodied robot does not solve the fundamental problem — the system, in this case including the robot, would still be following instructions it did not understand. Counter arguments that fall into the 'brain simulator reply' category propose that if an AI could precisely simulate every neuron in a human brain, it would necessarily replicate the brain's cognitive processes and, by extension, its understanding. Searle replied that even perfect simulation of brain activity does not necessarily create actual understanding, exposing a deep fundamental question in the debate: What exactly is understanding, even in our own brains and minds? The common thread in Searle's objections is that the fundamental limitation his thought experiment proposes remains unaddressed by these counter arguments: the manipulation of symbols alone, i.e. syntax, no matter how complex or seemingly intelligent, does not imply comprehension or understanding, i.e. semantics. To me, there is an even more fundamental limitation to Searle's argument: For any formally mechanical syntactic system that manipulates symbols, in the absence of any understanding, there is no way for the person in the room to be able to make decisions about which symbols to send back out. In the use of real language, there is an increasingly large space of parallel and equal branching syntactic, i.e. symbol, decisions that can occur that can only be resolved and decided by semantic understanding. Admittedly, the person in the room does not know Chinese. But this is by the very narrow construction of the thought experiment in the first place. As a result, Searle's argument is not 'powerful' enough — is logically insufficient —to conclude that some future AI will not be able to understand and think, because any true understanding AI must necessarily exceed the constraints of the thought experiment. Any decisions about syntax, i.e. what symbols are chosen and in what order they are placed, must necessarily be dependent on an understanding of the semantics, i.e. context and meaning, of the incoming message in order to reply back in a meaningful way. In other words, the number of equally possible parallel syntactic choices are really large, and can only be disambiguated by some form of semantic understanding. Syntactic decisions are not linear and sequential. They are parallel and branching. In any real conversation, the Chinese speaker on the outside would not be fooled. So do machines 'understand'? Maybe, maybe not, and maybe they never will. But if an AI can interact using language by responding in ways that clearly demonstrate branching syntactic decisions that are increasingly complex, meaningful, and relevant to the human (or other agent) it is interacting with, eventually it will cross a threshold that invalidates Searle's argument. The Chinese room argument matters given the increasing language capabilities of today's large language models and other advancing forms of AI. Do these systems genuinely understand language? Are they actually reasoning? Or are they just sophisticated versions of Searle's Chinese room? Current AI systems rely on performing huge statistical computations that predict the next word in a sentence based on learned probabilities, without any genuine internal experience or comprehension. Most experts agree that, as impressive as they are, they are fundamentally similar to Searle's Chinese room. But will this remain so? Or will a threshold be crossed from today's systems that perform sophisticated but 'mindless' statistical pattern matching to systems that truly understand and reason in the sense that they have an internal representation, meaning, and experience of their knowledge and the manipulation of that knowledge? The ultimate question may be if they do cross such a threshold would we even know it or recognize it? We as humans do not fully understand our own minds. Part of the challenge in understanding our own conscious experience is precisely that it is an internal self-referential experience. So how will we go about testing or recognizing it in an intelligence that is physically different and operates using different algorithms than our own? Right or wrong, Searle's argument — and all the thinking it has inspired —has never been more relevant.
Sky News
03-04-2025
- Sky News
Andrew and Dawn Searle: Deaths of British couple in France 'treated as murder-suicide'
Officials investigating the deaths of a British couple in rural southwest France are treating it as a murder-suicide. The bodies of Andrew and Dawn Searle were discovered on 6 February at their home in the hamlet of Les Pesquies. Mrs Searle's body was found outside the property with a significant head injury, while Mr Searle's body was discovered hanging inside and "did not show any visible defensive injuries", a statement issued by French prosecutors said at the time. Prosecutor Fabrice Belargent has now said that "the analysis carried out does not so far show any evidence that a third party was involved". Mr and Mrs Searle, who previously lived in Musselburgh in East Lothian, had been living in the Aveyron region for five years. They lived in Les Pesquies and were married in 2023 in the nearby town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue. Jean-Sebastien Orcibal, the mayor of Villefranche-de-Rouergue who conducted the couple's wedding, told Sky News they were "very happy, very friendly and didn't seem to have any problems". Mrs Searle, 56, grew up in Eyemouth in the Scottish Borders, while Mr Searle, 62, was originally from England. According to his LinkedIn page, Mr Searle retired in 2015 after previously working in financial crime prevention at companies including Standard Life and Barclays. Following the deaths, investigators were said to be following several lines of inquiry - including whether the couple were killed during a burglary or potential links to Mr Searle's previous work in the UK. Mrs Searle's son, country musician and former Hollyoaks star Callum Kerr, issued a statement on Instagram at the time of the deaths. Mr Kerr, who walked his mum down the aisle when she married Mr Searle, said in the post that both he and his sister Amanda Kerr were "grieving the loss of their mother". He added that Mr Searle's two children, Tom and Ella Searle, were "mourning the loss of their father" as he requested the family's privacy be respected during this "difficult period".
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Yahoo
Scots mum was killed by husband in murder suicide at home in France
The deaths of a Scots mum and her husband at their home in France has been ruled as a murder-suicide. Dawn Searle, 56, and her husband Andrew, 62, were discovered dead at their property in Les Pequies near Toulouse, on February 6. Mrs Searle's body was found in the garden with severe wounds to her head, while her husband's body was found hanging inside. READ MORE: Girlfriend of Glasgow M8 crash victim left brain damaged blasts 'cruel' jail time for ketamine driver READ MORE: Sir Rod Stewart and wife Penny Lancaster 'heartbroken' after death in the family French prosecutors in charge of the case confirmed there was no evidence to suggest anyone else was involved in their deaths. The mum-of-two, also known as Dawn Kerr, was originally from Eyemouth in the Borders. The couple previously lived in Musselburgh and married in France two years ago. It is understood they had emigrated 10 years ago. Their bodies were discovered after neighbours became worried as they hadn't seen the couple walk their dogs. Mrs Searle's body was found outside their home by a horrified friend. She had suffered a head injury and there was jewellery scattered around her. The area around the property was sealed off while investigations took place, and local police called in expert help from Toulouse. A helicopter and drone were sent to the site. Initially it was believed the couple had fallen victim to a home invasion and dawn had fled an attacker. This theory was supported by the fact cupboards and drawers were discovered open, with furniture upended. Mr Searle was a retired fraud investigator specialising in financial crime prevention who worked at companies including Standard Life and Barclays Bank. Detectives considered the possibility of a revenge attack because of his work. French prosecutors have since concluded Dawn was killed by her husband who went on to botch a staged burglary. Post-mortem examinations confirmed Mr Searle died from hanging and Mrs Searle suffered "multiple blows to the head with a blunt and sharp-edged object." The announcement follows weeks of speculation about what happened to the couple, who friends described as "comfortable" and "happy." Dawn Searle's son, the Hollyoaks actor Callum Kerr, issued a statement on social media at the time of their deaths. It read: "At this time, Callum Kerr and Amanda Kerr are grieving the loss of their mother, Dawn Searle (née Smith, Kerr) while Tom Searle and Ella Searle are mourning the loss of their father, Andrew Searle." Mr Kerr, 30, walked his mother down the aisle when she married Mr Searle at a ceremony in France in 2023. The Record earlier revealed Dawn had been planning a trip to Scotland in the weeks before her death. The project manager had posted an advert looking for a house to stay in when she visited for her son's wedding. A post shared on Facebook group 'House and Pet Sitters UK' on January 3 read: "Hello, my name is Dawn and I lived in Scotland all my life before moving to France nine years ago. "I have family in the Edinburgh area and often visit this beautiful city. I would much prefer to house sit on my trips which would help me and also help someone wanting to go away on holiday."
