The Tech-Startup Attractor: Musings on the Thiel Fellowships, Singularity...
This Business Insider article on the outcome so far of the Thiel Fellowship experiment is interesting, though not surprising..As you may recall, Peter Thiel launched the Thiel Fellowship program as a...
View ArticleHow To Save the World
How to Save the World: The Biggest Risks Humanity Faces and How to Militate Against Them by Building a New Democratically-Oriented Global Techno-Social Fabric(Last week I had the opportunity to spend a...
View ArticleQigong in Shanghai
I'm on the way home from a consciousness conference in Shanghai — CSTS (Consciousness, Science, Technology and Society) conference. One of the more intriguing aspects of the conference, for me, was...
View ArticleMachine Learning for Plant Disease Diagnosis and Prediction
AI is being applied to everything these days -- including various fields of endeavor generally thought of as low-tech and backwards, such as agriculture.In this vein, I gave a talk last week in Leshan,...
View ArticleWho Owns Your Medical Data?
Questionable Relationship Between UK Government and Google Deep Mind Health Highlights the Need for Decentralized Medical Big Data and AIWhile my main interest remains in the algorithmics of creating...
View ArticleGoogle Deep Mind’s Bogus AI Patent Filings
I hadn't intended to write a second post in a row about politically weird stuff related to Google Deep Mind, but the news just keeps coming....This one gets filed in the “don’t know whether to laugh or...
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Toward an Analytical Understanding of Unconditional Love
Unconditional Love, Pattern Appreciation and Pareto-Optimal EmpathyOne of the ways we have been thinking about the "Loving AI" project, in which we are using the Sophia robot and other robotic or...
View ArticleSoftly, as in a Hard Takeoff
Ben (staring at the avatar face on his phone screen): Wait a minute, are you serious? You're telling me right now a phase transition to superhuman-level AGI has been achieved?GINA (Generally...
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The Simulation Hypothesis -- Not Nearly Crazy Enough to Be True
The "Simulation Hypothesis", the idea that our universe is some sort of computer simulation, has been getting more and more airtime lately. The rising popularity of the meme is not surprising since...
View Article"Deriving" Quantum Logic from Reason, Beauty and Freedom
One Basic Principle of this Corner of the Eurycosm: The Universe Maximizes Freedom Given Constraints of Reason and BeautyI was musing a bit about the basic concept at the heart of quantum logic and...
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Toward an Abstract Energetics of Computational Processes (in Brains, Minds,...
To ground the mappings he outlines, Tadaki gives a simple statistical mechanical interpretation to algorithmic information theory. He models an optimal computer as decoding equipment at the...
View ArticleLogical Inference Control via Quantum Partial Search — Maybe
Hmmm...While running SingularityNET and thinking about next-generation OpenCog and helping Ruiting with our charming little maniac Qorxi are taking up most of my time, I can’t help thinking here and...
View ArticleCan We "Discover" Semantic Primitives for Commonsense and Math via Semantic...
Once more wild-ish train of thought completely unrelated to anything immediately practical … I was thinking about Chalmers’ idea from Constructing the World that the notion of universal semantic...
View ArticleThe Likely Nasty Social, Economic and Surveillance Aftereffects of COVID-19...
A lot of attention right now is going into the question of flattening the curve of global COVID-19 infection -- and this is exactly right. I've been trying to do my own part here, via organizing the...
View ArticleGTGI -- General Theory of General Intelligence... coming gradually...
In the background, using spare time here and there, over the last few years I've managed to write down a series of sketchy research papers summarizing key aspects of what has been a long-running thread...
View ArticleMorphic Anti-Resonance
Morphic resonance — in which patterns that have previously occurred are more likely to re-occur — is a powerful force, characteristic of human minds and cultures and also of the quantum world (cf...
View ArticleSimplificational Causal Decision Theory
In a few spare moments lately, I found myself revisiting issues regarding the foundations of decision theory, and came up with a few ideas that are somewhat new and maybe useful.TL;DR version is:I...
View ArticleFoundations of Coherent Value
The relation between minds, goals and values is complex and subtle. Here I will sketch a theory that aims to come to grips with key aspects of this subtlety -- articulating what is means for a value...
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Approximate Goal Preservation Under Recursive Self-Improvement
There is not much controversial about the idea that an AGI should have, among its goals, the goal of radically improving itself.A bit dodgier is the notion that an AGI should have, among its goals, the...
View ArticleThe Developmental Role of Incoherent Multi-Value Systems in Open-Ended...
So I have written in a recent post about what it would mean for a value system to be coherent -- i.e. fully self-consistent -- and I have noted that human value systems tend to be wildly incoherent....
View ArticleGPT3 -- Super-Cool but Not a Path to AGI
The hype around GPT3 recently has been so much that even OpenAI founder/CEO Sam Altman has endeavored to dial it down a notch. Like everyone else who has looked carefully, Altman knows that GPT3 is...
View ArticleGPT-f -- One More Funky Experiment in Guiding Theorem-Proving without...
… and some Thoughts on Syntactic vs. Semantic Approaches to Guiding Automated Theorem ProvingQuite a few people have been asking me these last few days about GPT-f, OpenAI's new foray into the domain...
View ArticleSand Talk, Singularity and Psi
It’s not that often I encounter a newly authored book that I consider a “must read” and avidly recommend to all my friends and colleagues -- but Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta genuinely falls into this...
View ArticleEternal Childhood of the Post-Singularity Mind
It has occurred to me many times, as I played with my various offspring (4 kids and one grandchild so far, one more little daughter due February!), that in many respects our post-Singularity selves are...
View ArticleThe Plight of the Humans
I haven't written song lyrics for quite some years but was recently inspired to update the lyrics of a song I wrote back in the late 90s or early aughts -- "Plight of the Humans" aka "I see it"Some of...
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