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 the newer portions of the lyrics are morphed from lines in the most insane prose-poem any of my subpersonalities ever came up with, A pretty crude, off-the-cuff solo version of the song is here ,…
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 going to closely resemble children today. When children play, they’re not just randomly experimenting and exploring and enjoying themselves -- they are doing that, but they’re also whimsically…
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 category. I was introduced to the book by Jim Rutt who interviewed the author on his podcast -- an episode I also strongly recommend. Yunkaporta is an Australian Aboriginal whose core goal in the…
… and some Thoughts on Syntactic vs. Semantic Approaches to Guiding Automated Theorem Proving Quite a few people have been asking me these last few days about GPT-f, OpenAI's new foray into the domain of automated theorem proving (ATP). It’s not often that AITP (AI for Theorem Proving, an AI field with a long history and exciting recent progress, but a fairly high level of obscurity compared to…
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 very far from constituting the profound AI progress that some, dazzled by exciting but cherry-picked examples, have proclaimed. All but the most blurry-eyed enthusiasts are by now realizing that, while…
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. I have posited that coherence is an interesting property to think about in terms of designing and fostering emergence of AGI value systems. Now it's time for the other shoe to drop -- I want to talk a…
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 goal of updating and improving its goals based on its increasing knowledge and understanding and intelligence. Of course, this sort of ongoing goal-refinement and even outright goal-revolutionizing…
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 system to be coherent, and how one can start with incoherent value systems (like humans currently have) and use them as seeds to evolve coherent value systems. I will also argue that as AGI moves…
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 define "simplificational causality", as a slight generalization of the definition of causality using algorithmic Markov conditions I give a (semi-)formalization that tells a system what properties it…
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 Smolin’s Precedence Principle) But it’s also interesting to think about cases in which morphic anti-resonance holds... I.e. with morphic anti-resonance, when a pattern occurs, it is then LESS likely than…
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 in my mind for a very long time: A general theory of general intelligence. And by that I mean a REALLY REALLY general theory of general intelligence ... including the phenomenological aspect of…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE 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 COVIDathon blockchain-AI-against-COVID-19 hackathon, and working with my SingularityNET colleagues on using some of our AI code for simulating COVID-19 spread…
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 primitives underlying all human concepts might be rendered sensible by use of intensional logic … i.e. extensionally reducing all concepts to combinations of a few dozen primitives [plus raw…
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 there about quantum AI … Quantum computing is moving toward practical realization — it’s still got a long way to go, but clearly the Schrodinger’s cat is out of the bag … the time when every server…
Normal 0 false false false false EN-US JA X-NONE Given the successes of energy-based formalisms in physics, it is natural to want to extend them into other domains like computation and cognition. In this vein: My aim here is to sketch what I think is a workable approach to an energetics of computational processes (construed very broadly). By this I mean: I will explain how one can articulate…
One Basic Principle of this Corner of the Eurycosm : The Universe Maximizes Freedom Given Constraints of Reason and Beauty I was musing a bit about the basic concept at the heart of quantum logic and quantum probability: That a particular observer, when reasoning about properties of a system that it cannot in principle ever observe, should use quantum logic / quantum probabilities instead of…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE 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 virtual reality and associated tech have been steadily advancing, and at the same time physicists have further advanced the formal parallels between physics…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE 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 Intelligent Neuro-symbolic Assistant -- the personal-assistant face on Ben's smartphone): Earlier today, yes. An automated theorem proving AI at the Czech Institute…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE Unconditional Love, Pattern Appreciation and Pareto-Optimal Empathy One of the ways we have been thinking about the " Loving AI " project, in which we are using the Sophia robot and other robotic or animated agents as meditation and consciousness guides for humans, is as "creating AIs with unconditional love toward humans." Having AIs or robots help…
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 barf” department, I suppose.... So I saw today that Google Deep Mind has filed a bunch of patent applications for well-known AI techniques , all or nearly all of which certainly are not their…
Questionable Relationship Between UK Government and Google Deep Mind Health Highlights the Need for Decentralized Medical Big Data and AI While my main interest remains in the algorithmics of creating powerful AGI, issues regarding the social and political aspects of narrow AI in the contemporary world keep jumping to my attention.... And intriguingly, to the extent that AGI is going to emerge…
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, in Szechuan province (mainland China), on the application of AI to diagnosing crop diseases (from images of leaves) and predicting disease course, disease response to treatment, etc. In the talk, I…
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 the significant number of Chinese researchers and practitioners there who were involved with parapsychology, qigong and other related areas… I’ve been reading for a while about a multi-decade project in…
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 few days brainstorming with my friends at the Economic Space Agency, an unusual and fascinating California startup organization. Among our technical conversations we also touched here and there on…
This Business Insider article on the outcome so far of the Thiel Fellowship experimen t is interesting, though not surprising.. As you may recall, Peter Thiel launched the Thiel Fellowship program as a "20 under 20" initiative, with a stated aim of showing that - for bright ambitious youth anyway -- college is not necessary and is in many ways not the best way to spend 4 years of one's young…