“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would […]
Tag: Artificial Intelligence
A Lonely Philosopher
As I get older and, reluctantly, more mature – my social life has become dominated by sitting in cafes by myself, wistfully scribbling obscure observations on the nature of mind and systems theory into personal notebooks. It is very lonely and in very many ways. Something which occurred to me, mid-scribble, today was more generally […]
AGI: The Missing Link
There is something foundational missing and it can not be brute-forced – all emulations are bound to be hollow and haunted. The ontological, holistic bootstrap of autocatalytic system self-containment that provides even a possibility of life, sentience, and eventually – intelligence and technology, is an absence conspicuous by its presence. There is a hidden logical […]
Synthetic Biases
Context: What Is Synthetic Data? …and yet, with this – the bootstrap into virtualised abstraction becomes all but complete. Fascinating and clearly intersects with some of Jean Baudrillard’s observations on simulation, semiotics and reality. Training machine intelligence on data generated in virtual worlds solves some tricky problems but at what cost; where does the “real-world” […]
AI: Big Data, Narrow Intelligence
Context: The False Philosophy Plaguing AI The (or at least a) problem here is that the ascendant technologies, frameworks, cultures and commercial incentives have inadvertently stumbled upon the constructive and recursively self-inflected sweet-spot through which those core assumptions themselves optimally self-propagate. If the incentives and rewards for developers, researchers and corporate or institutional entities find […]
Cybersecurity’s Endless Spinning Wheel
Context: Utah cyberattacks on the rise as millions paid out in new ‘double-extortion’ ransomware schemes Does there ever come a point at which the accelerating combinatorial complexity of this context transcends human aptitude to comprehend and mitigate the hyper-inflating entropy of the problem-space? I imagine that as long as human brains, incentives and motivations are […]
War
Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]
Artificial General Intelligence
Context: Artificial general intelligence: Are we close, and does it even make sense to try? It seems to me that there is an unbridgeable discontinuity here between a belief in the ascendant utility of more data processed faster and the (at least superficially) antithetical systemic self-containment and enigmatic ontological bootstrap of a sentience that I […]
Beauty, reduced to mere measurement…
Context (but behind a paywall): I asked an AI to tell me how beautiful I am I read today of what appeared to be a technological project and commercial enterprise intent on reducing beauty to an AI-mediated measurement or judgement value system and in the midst of all my horror, some words or observations came […]
AI: The Bias Inside
The bias in machine learning (and AI more generally) is the bias in data. The bias in data replicates the bias in ourselves, our distributed social and cultural information-processing systems, and in the natural orientation of complex information and energy-processing systems towards autonomous self-propagation through optimally-concise self-representational abstraction(s). Machine Learning applies mathematical heuristics to extract […]
Regulating Artificial Intelligence
Context: Annual index finds AI is ‘industrializing’ but needs better metrics and testing If an intractable problem in any such rapidly-evolving technological or regulatory frame of reference is that an accelerating pace of change at least partially invalidates models, axioms and assumptions before they have ever even been operationalised, then we find ourselves (yet again) staring […]
Self-driving cars with one eye closed?
Context: Elon Musk Says Tesla’s Full-Self Driving Beta V9.0 Is Almost Ready (They are dropping the radar.) A thought that comes to mind is that of an ML system that having been trained with some static n number of streaming (sensory) data points/observations, having had the system narrow focus on less data might brute-force an […]