Science, Tech and Fundamental Questions.
When robots take over jobs, who decides what they do? Robotics, AI and post-labour economics are often feared because they undermine the bargaining power of workers. If people earn income mainly by selling labour, then a world that needs less labour can become a world where most people lose power. The key point is: who owns the robots? Who decides what the robots will do? I argue that robots that…
We are probably 5-6 orders of magnitude short of the real robotic data we will need to train a foundational model for robotics, so how do we get that? I believe simulation or video can be a complement, but there is no substitution for a ton of real robotic data. I’ve been exploring approaches to scale robotic teleoperation, traditionally relegated to slow high-value use cases (nuclear…
Simulating humans is incredibly hard, as it would require as an intermediate step to simulate the human brain. Yet, recent advancements in AI exposed a new line of attack, making the problem of human simulation somewhat tractable by restricting to simulating behaviour as opposed to physical processes. In this short blog post we will cover why approaching the human simulation problem from biology…
I implemented a Universal Dovetailer in Python. This is a peculiar computer program capable of running every possible computer program without halting, by dovetailing the execution of each program. To my knowledge this is the first code implementation of a Universal Dovetailer, but I might very well have missed it. Yes, it builds ALL possible programs and executes all of them! Of course you need…
This one is about answering a fundamental question. Why something rather than nothing? Or equivalently, why does anything exist at all? This is clearly a hard question. It’s not even clear if it is a meaningful question. Certainly not the kind of questions we answer everyday, nor a scientific question. Time is valuable and everyday you choose how to invest it. When investing money we are not…
Posting this a bit late, but sometime ago I published a paper exploring microscopic-sized space-time perturbations and discovered a quite interesting result. Why not, when you are thrown some government funding to do it and you got a background in quantum gravity! TLDR: One can engineer microscopic warp bubbles in a weird way as message carriers, leading to effectively superluminal communications…
Accelerate. Fast, Safe and Fair. Technology has been a transformative force for our civilisation and it is poised to play an increasing role going forward. Recent progress in Artificial Intelligence spurred discussions about how we should approach the development of the next generation of AI applications, potentially leading to human-level performances on a wide range of tasks and ultimately to…
Language models powered AI agents are promising, but nearly useless at the moment. I cover what is not working, why and what can be done to get us to useful AI agents that anyone can use. The promise of AI agents and AutoGPT Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT4 and ChatGPT have shown impressive capabilities in dialogue based interactions and summarization, but sometimes talking is not enough.…
Quick post to mention two open lists I’m maintaining: AI Techniques for the Modern Problem Solver https://github.com/lorepieri8/ai-techniques A curated list of AI techniques to solve problems. No background knowledge is assumed, ideal for newcomers to the field. As head of AI I’ve been using this list to introduce AI techniques to problem solvers with backgrounds in software engineering,…
Picture this future scenario. It’s a busy Monday morning, the streets are buzzing and the robo-taxi you called has barely found some space for a temporary stop. Wow it’s real: no driver, as your friend Mark told you. You jump in the back seat and shout your destination out loud. The taxi speeds up slowly and you are on your way. Just 15 minutes later you hop off, you check your phone: payment…