Category: AI
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An end to copyright?
I suspect that AI generated content is (eventually, not any of the current versions) going to destroy copyright as a concept. The generally-stated reason for copyright is to incentivise the creation of more works: artificial scarcity, which drives up prices, introduced around the time the printing press was invented (but the idea goes back much…
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Not a Singularity but an Event Horizon
I was never a fan of the term “Singularity” for the AI thing. When mathematical singularities pop up in physics, it’s usually a sign the physics is missing something. Instead, I like to think of the AI “event horizon”, the point in the future — always ahead, yet getting ever closer — beyond which you…
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LaMDA, Turing Test, sentience
A chatbot from Google called LaMDA made the headlines last weekend. It seems it convinced Blake Lemoine (someone at Google) that it was sentient. While, like the majority of real AI researchers[0], I do not actually think it is sentient, the transcripts make it plain why it caused this belief. When Alan Turing originally described…
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Arguments, hill climbing, the wisdom of the crowds
You ever had an argument which seems to go nowhere, where both sides act like their position is self-evident and obvious, that the other person “is clearly being deliberately obtuse”? I hope that’s common, and not just one of my personal oddities. Ahem. In the current world of machine learning (yes these two things are…
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Memetic monocultures
Brief kernel of an idea: Societies deem certain ideas “dangerous”. If it possible to technologically eliminate perceived dangers, we can be tempted to do so, even when we perceived wrongly. Group-think has lead to catastrophic misjudgments. This represents a potential future “great filter” for the Fermi paradox. It does not apply to previous attempts at…
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Pocket brains
Total iPhone sales between Q4 2017 and Q4 2018: 217.52 million Performance of Neural Engine, component of Apple A11 SoC used in iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X: 600 billion operations per second Estimated computational power required to simulate a human brain in real time: 36.8×1015 Total compute power of all iPhones sold between Q4 2017…
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Thought crime in 2084
A new meaning to the words “Thought crime”: a crime for which the only evidence is a scan of your brain.
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A.I. safety with Democracy?
Common path of discussion: Alice: A.I. can already be dangerous, even though it’s currently narrow intelligence only. How do we make it safe before it’s general intelligence? Bob: Democracy! Alice: That’s a sentence fragment, not an answer. What do you mean? Bob: Vote for what you want the A.I. to do 🙂 Alice: But people…
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Unfortunate personhood tests for A.I.
What if the only way to tell if a particular A.I. design is or is not a person, is to subject it to all the types of experience — both good and harrowing — that we know impact the behaviour of the only example of personhood we all agree on, and seeing if it changes…
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