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Substrates part 1
The term "substrate" comes up often in discussions about AI, especially in the context of comparing AI to biological intelligence. The meaning of the term is pretty straightforward: the substrate is the hardware that embodies a particular intelligence. Human intelligence, then, runs on a meat substrate: all the neurons that make up the human ( Read more... ) -
Deconstructing AI
Imagine that you want to colonize Alpha Centauri. Your task is daunting, but it's conceptually fairly straightforward: you're gonna need propulsion systems, life support, radiation shielding, power sources, etc. Some of those individual problems may be very hard, but it's clear what they are, and in every case, there's a pretty obvious starting ( Read more... ) -
Pulling the trigger, part 2
In my original post on this topic, I opined that AI developers should in general regard each other as collaborators, not as competitors. I'd like to expand on that claim, and to demonstrate that even developers who are solely motivated by selfish considerations will find that the best way to achieve their goals is to collaborate with their ( Read more... ) -
The Human Security Report
The most important news item you've never read is the Human Security Report, published in 2005 by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, is IMHO one of the most important pieces of news to come out in the last decade, and also one of the least widely covered. Briefly, it's an in-depth look at the human impact of war, ( Read more... ) -
The Doomsday argument
Very briefly, the doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that near-term human extinction is much more likely than is normally believed. Although the argument doesn't feel quite right to most people (including me), it's surprisingly hard to come up with a definitive counter-argument.
Nick Bostrom has a particularly good synopsis. Wikipedia has ( Read more... ) -
Flight patterns
A nifty video of US air traffic patterns. -
Infovore in a hurry
If you're already getting your full RDA of data from RSS, you probably already know all of this. If you're not, it's time to wake up and smell the 21st century. RSS is a dramatically better way of getting all kinds of information, and has profoundly changed how I find out about the world. Not only does it give me access to all kinds of information ( Read more... ) -
Brain simulation
There are two basic approaches to building an AI. The traditional approach is to write an artificial intelligence from scratch. A less sophisticated but perhaps more tractable approach is to simply simulate the workings of an actual human brain. For a variety of reasons that I'll detail below, I don't think this is the best approach, but I ( Read more... ) -
Pattern recognition, part 1
I've been promising for a while now that I'd talk a bit about my recent Optical Character Recognition project. I spent a few months last fall working on a simple OCR project, and although I never finished it, I learned a great deal from it (which was the point of the whole exercise). I chose OCR for a number of reasons:
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Five million PCs
I recently made the pretty standard claim that the computational capacity of the human brain is equivalent to that of 5,000,000 modern PCs. There are probably many ways of building an AI that require a great deal less power than that. However, it's very likely that that level of power will be readily available within a few decades, and it's ( Read more... )