Renovatio

We should all pour one out for the cool project ideas that never got off the ground, or were never completed in 2020.

One of the benefits future AI technology is said to bring about is the end of having to work just to pay bills for a lifestyle that at best makes having that job bearable. *that’s a lot of b’s. The actual economics of such a system are still Star Trek levels of fantasy, and I have no desire to play someone else’s game on that issue. Of interest to this post is human leisure. …

Everyone is allowed to have an opinion, but we live in a time when they are often used as political currency. This post is meant as a kind of somber realization that a good faith effort to engage in constructive dialog for the better part of 2 years, on the topic of ethics around the field of artificial intelligence, was never about ethics or artificial intelligence. As both terms remain open to interpretation, they provide easy cover for any and all ideas and motivations. …

Everyone knows about the fatal 2018 crash in Tempe, Arizona where an Uber SUV driving in semi-autonomous mode failed to avoid hitting Elaine Herzberg as she was walking her bike across a darkened street. This past September, 2 years later, the “backup” driver was charged with negligent homicide by a Grand Jury.

Is AI Safe?

The first issue I will address might seem like the biggest, but only from a marketing and stature perspective. In playing a game of who has advanced AI more than anyone else in current month, tech companies have been allowed to make broad claims in the media that…

by Steven Marlow

Imagine a clear view of a wide expanse, a kind of flat plain nothingness as far as you can see. From where you stand, extending to the horizon directly in front of you, is a set of railroad tracks (don’t worry, this isn’t a trolley thing). The tracks seem to merge at the vanishing point, that literal point in the distance where your eyes can’t see anything further, and stereo vision fails you. On many levels, that works as a metaphor for Artificial Intelligence. Obvious is the notion of a Singularity, where the human mind and the…

*for entertainment purposes only*

We don’t know the earliest moment of human consciousness, and can only speculate that it was on the lowest end of any measure we might use to describe what being conscious even means. There was no Aristotle 15,000 years ago. I would say there was no Aristotle until the actual Aristotle came into being. It’s likely that tiny groups of early humans developed their own forms of verbal communication, with each new generation having to start from scratch since there was no real way to convey lived experiences. Verbal descriptions of objects and activities may have…

A formal reply to another article.

Carlos E. Perez recently posted an article (AGI via “Selves and Conversations all the way up”) that seemed to occupy the space between the GOFAI and Deep Learning divide, where some form of general intelligence can be reached while still based on neural networks. On the first read, there seemed to be criticism of the current models used and some unclear formulation or explanation of another way. I had no interest in trying to connect the dots as it felt like the same kind of thinking that takes a concept we can’t fully explain…

This was a comment I posted in response to a video on The Royal Institution YouTube account (https://youtu.be/1grXMbvZOi0). Felt it was best to give it a place of it’s own.

OK. I’m gonna stop you @ 1:06 to say that this “mostly random” idea is wrong. It’s a highly dynamic system on a grand scale. We don’t say that cloud formations are mostly random. Difficult for us to model, but there are no unknown actions taking place. And this outward pressure you speak of… it’s a dense cloud of material in a vacuum, which means there is an external suction…