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Why You Are Obsolete at Almost Every Level and Live Largely in Fiction
My topic today is Ari Heljakka's brief, beautifulphilosophical work, delightfully titledModel Zero: Why You Are Obsolete at Almost Every Level and Live Largely in Fiction This will be a mix of review...
View ArticleIs Google Deep Mind Close to Achieving AGI?
Some folks on the AGI email list have gotten very excited by a video of Demis Hassabis's latest talk about his work with Google Deep Mind, so I thought I'd briefly chip in with my own...
View ArticleTime, Entropy & Entanglement (just a brief note)
A recent article posits that time is a side-effect of quantum entanglement ... a more thorough discussion of the same ideas seems to be here ...Actually, this makes perfect sense ... since the...
View ArticleCreating Human-Friendly AGIs and Superintelligences: Two Theses
IntroductionI suppose nearly everyone reading this blog post is already aware of the flurry of fear and excitement Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has recently stirred up with his book...
View Article(Interesting but Limited) Progress in Neural Net Based Language Learning
A team of UK-based researchers has published an interesting paper on language learning & reasoning using neural networks. There has also been a somewhat sensationalist media article describing...
View ArticleWhat does Google’s tensorflow mean for AI?
Google’s release of their tensorflow machine learning library has attracted a lot of attention recently. Like everyone else in the field I’ve felt moved to take a look.(Microsoft's recent release of...
View ArticleGetting Human-Like Values into Advanced OpenCog AGIs
Some Speculations Regarding Value Systems for Hypothetical Powerful OpenCog AGIsIn a recent blog post, I have proposed two general theses regarding the future value systems of human-level and...
View ArticleTransparent AGI: Benefits and Risks
p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120%; }a:link { }A recent article by Bill Hibbard, myself and other colleagues on the value of openness in AI development (linked to a petition in favor of...
View ArticleThe film “Machine of Human Dreams” – some comments by the human dreamer
p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120%; }a:link { }In which the primary subject of a recent documentary film rambles on a bit about the events the documentary covers, and some things that it...
View ArticleWhy the Good Guys Will Generally Win
This is a brief post, typed hastily, but it captures some ideas that have been germinating in my mind for quite some time.It's definitely a “stoned college sophomore” type of post (though at the moment...
View ArticleAn Alternate Formulation of MaxEnt and Maximum Entropy Production
This (rather technical) blog post observes that, via using tensorial linearization of Boolean functions, one can make a novel formulation of the maximum entropy and maximum entropy production...
View ArticleDeriving Quantum Theory from Basic Symmetries -- a slightly new approach
Quantum mechanics remains intuitively mysterious, in spite of its practical successes. It is, however, very mathematically elegant. A literature has arisen attempting to explain why, mathematically...
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The Semantic Primitives Enabling Universal Computation and Probabilistic...
I have been musing a bit about combinatory and probabilistic logic, and what they have to teach us philosophically. It’s perhaps an obvious sort of point, but to me it’s interesting to reflect on...
View ArticleIn What Sense Does Deep Learning Reflect the Laws of Physics?
“Technology Review” is making a fuss about an article by Lin and Tegmark on why deep learning works. To wit:Physicists have discovered what makes neural networks so extraordinarily powerfulNobody...
View ArticleDoes Modern Evidence Refute Chomskyan Universal Grammar?
Scientific American says, in a recent article, “Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning” …Does it? Well, sort of. Partly. But not as definitively as the article says. Michael...
View ArticleKafka in the morning
As Ruiting lay in bed this morning,, I handed her a book I was reading — some lit-crit essays by Walter Benjamin — so she could read a passage about Kafka (a conversation between Max Brod and Kafka):‘I...
View ArticleWild-ass shit: P-adic physics, p-adic complex probabilities and the Eurycosm
This was a fun post to write – it was written on a flight from the Milken conference in Singapore, where I served on a panel about the future of AI in Asia, back home to Hong Kong. After blowing much...
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