More on Kurzweil's Predictions
After I wrote my last blog post reacting to Alex Knapp's critique of Ray Kurzweil's predictive accuracy, Ray Kurzweil wrote his own rebuttal of Alex's argument.Ray then emailed me, thanking me for my...
View ArticleSomeone Should Build a Psychedelic Resort/Lab Seastead
While taking the train from Hong Kong to Shenzhen last night, I started chatting with Ruiting about seasteading, and before long I came up with what may possibly be the wackiest workable business model...
View ArticleTHE UNIVERSE IS CONTINUING
A brief fictional dialogue to brighten up your July ....A:So, I understand that, in a quest to get new insights into how to guide the Singularity in a positive direction for everyone, you took a...
View ArticleFinding the "Right" Computational Model to Support Occam's Razor
(This is a rather abstract science-y post, beware.... If you don't like theoretical computer science, you'll be bored and/or baffled.... But if you do -- or if you like being bored and/or baffled,...
View ArticleReports of Reincarnation: What's Really Going On?
For most of my life I considered belief in reincarnation completely ridiculous, and an obvious example of wishful thinking. These people just don't want to face the reality of their impending doom, I...
View ArticleCan Computers Be Creative?
Can Computers Be Creative? -- A Dialogue on Creativity, Radical Novelty, AGI, Physics and the BrainOver the years, I've repeatedly encountered people making arguments of the form: "Computers can't be...
View ArticleAvoiding the Tyranny of the Majority in Collaborative Filtering
One of the more annoying aspects of the modern Internet is crap comments. For instance, it's improved in recent years, but for a while the typical comments on Youtube music videos were among the most...
View ArticleComplex-Probability Random Walks and the Emergence of Continuous...
(A post presenting some interesting, but still only half-baked, physics ideas....)The issue of unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity is perenially bouncing around in the back of my mind....
View ArticleWhat Will Come After Language?
I just gave a talk, via Skype from Hong Kong, at the Humanity+ San Francisco conference…. Here are some notes I wrote before the talk, basically summarizing what I said in the talk (though of course,...
View ArticleThe Dynamics of Attachment and Non-Attachment in Humans and AGIs
A great deal of human unhappiness and ineffectiveness is rooted in what Buddhists call "attachment"… roughly definable as an exaggerated desire not to be separated from someone, something, some idea,...
View ArticleQuasi-Mathematical Speculations on Contraction Maps and Hypothetical Friendly...
While eating ramen soup with Ruiting in the Tai Po MegaMall tonight, I found myself musing about the possible use of the contraction mapping theorem to understand the properties of AGI systems that...
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Musing about Mental vs. Physical Energy
Hmmm....I was talking with my pal Gino Yu at his daughter Oneira's birthday party yesterday … and Gino was sharing some of his interesting ideas about mental energy and force… Among many other notions...
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RIP Ray Manzarek
What a bummer to read that Ray Manzarek has died. I was born in 1966, and the psychedelic rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s was the music I grew up on. Later I became more interested in jazz...
View ArticlePhysicists Rediscover Sheldrake's Morphic Fields ... and my Morphic Pilot...
Today Damien Broderick pointed out to me an Edge interview with physicist Lee Smolin, which led me to a fascinating article by Smolin titled "Precedence and freedom in quantum physics."Smolin's article...
View ArticleRobot Toddlers and Fake AI 4 Year Olds
Oh, the irony...At the same time as my OpenCog project is running an Indieogogo crowdfunding campaign aimed at raising funds to create a robot toddler, by using OpenCog to control a Hanson Robokind...
View ArticleHawking's new thoughts on information & chaos & black hole physics...
Interesting new paper by Stephen Hawking, though I only half-understand it... (ok maybe 2/3 ...)http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.5761v1.pdfBasically: He is discussing a certain case [stuff happening inside a...
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Why Humans Are So Screwy
Aha!!! ... Last night I had the amusing and satisfying feeling that I was finally grokking the crux of the reason why we humans are so screwy -- I never saw it quite so clearly before!Here's the...
View ArticleLessons from Deep Mind & Vicarious
Recently we've seen a bunch of Silicon Valley money going into "deep learning" oriented AI startups -- an exciting trend for everyone in the AI field. Even for those of us who don't particularly...
View ArticleReview of "More Than Nature Needs" by Derek Bickerton
I've been a fan of Derek Bickerton's writing and thinking on linguistics since happening upon Language and Species in a Philadelphia bookstore, disturbingly many decades ago. More Than Nature Needs,...
View ArticleConceptor Networks
I read today about a new variant of recurrent neural nets called Conceptor Networks, which look pretty. interesting,In fact this looks kinda like a better-realized variant of the idea of "glocal neural...
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