" This is the first time in history that we have no idea what the world will look like in 10 years" Great interview with Lex Fridman. Numerous great books: "What is suffering" rather than "meaning." Observe what is happening when you observe suffering  Very good advice on mindfulness Deep insight into the role of stories in the way we see the world Insight into where AI is going and how it's surprising even though he's been writing about it Fear of death and how we die a bit when we lose anything People expect a story to answer fear of death

This was a good time to update my old essay on intelligence . It is now possible to ask real AI (CHAT-GPT) if it can "understand" analogies. It's also possible to get AI assistance with the essay using Grammarly . Grammarly suggested that I rewrite several sentences for clarity. All of its suggestions were accepted. I hope you enjoy the rewrite. CHAT-GPT (Slightly corrected by Grammarly) Summarized the essay as follows: The SE-I (Surfaces and Essences Intelligence) definition of intelligence is the ability to rapidly and accurately identify the core elements of a new situation by drawing upon insightful precedents stored in memory. This involves finding strong and useful analogies. In contrast, the commonly equated intelligence quotient (IQ) focuses on individual performance on standardized tests, which may only partially capture the essence of intelligence. SE-I suggests that intelligence can be developed and is influenced by culture, and it emphasizes the importance of ...

  Don't Worry; Nothing to See Here . Don't worry; people will all be out of work, and tremendous social upheaval will happen but AI will solve all conceivable problems. Lots of talk about what "we" need to do.

A tornado made of sharks crashing into a skyscraper.  Painting in the style of abstract cubism. The above "painting" was made by  Google Parti from the caption . In 1969, I won my Master's degree with a project in "good old-fashioned AI" and I've been following the field in detail ever since. For the most part, what people now mean by "AI" is "deep learning", which is sophisticated pattern recognition - handy if you want to make a self-driving car or a phone that accepts your face to unlock. "Deep learning" was around in 1969 but needed vastly more computer power to make it work, plus a "tweak" to feedback results back into the decision matrix (you can think of this as a "guess" or "recognition"). Other than that, it's all very impressive but not fundamentally new. This is something different.  It shows more "creativity" than what you see in 99% of commercial graphic art; It shows deep...

I'm an avid reader, often getting through two or three books a week. This partly due to my enviable status as a retired armchair philosopher and partly due to a thirst for knowledge - asking impertinent questions - that goes back as far as I can remember. A persistent feeling I get with all this reading is: (a) there is so much to know and (b) almost every great idea I thought I had has already been written about by somebody smarter than me. At length. Today, I read a special kind of book, namely Melanie Mitchell's " Artificial Intelligence: A Guide For Thinking Humans ". Melanie's mentor was Douglas Hofstadter, someone we have both admired for a good part of 50 years. She "gets" Hofstader in a way few do. Inspired by Hofstader's alarm at the way the fiel d of AI is heading, she provides us a deep, knowledgeable and informative overview of how "AI" actually works and what still remains as its fundamental challenges. As it happens, h...

I s "thinking" a "computation"? If so, making a computer "think" should be a simple problem of engineering. Almost all popular movies featuring "intelligent machines" make this assumption. Sooner or later, machines with "out-think" us. What would be another way of seeing this? As a starting point, let me create an image of a "mind" as  local disturbances in meme space . I visualize this "disturbance" as typically not confined to a single brain, but more typically a "wave" spreading through connected minds. This is an evocative image but the word "meme" is itself a "meme" that suffers greatly from over-use and lack of rigor .  To make the idea more rigorous, I recommend " Surfaces and Essences " by Sandler and Hofstadter.  This gives a more close-up view of how humans "think" and it hints that the "computation" underlying thinking is the  analo...

The project draws an extensive parallel between computer technology, specifically computer programming languages and the open-ended aspect of culture that includes language but also the wider methods, especially those aspects of technology that are used to explain or communicate culture. Humans interact with computers in many other ways, including paying for them and using them to "make money" (computers become actors in the "real economy" with huge impact on the "economy", which is right-wing word for "society").You can't entirely ignore the broad issue of "automation", which is perhaps the topic of most interest to the average reader. Seen from this angle, Part 1 (below) is a primer on the nature of automation, especially "computerization". Most primers on computers ignore the way computers actually "work" in the world and focus on aspects that most people do not need to know (such as CPU's, disks, RAM etc....

This is a great talk by Kasparov, the chess master who "lost" to the Deep Blue computer. Stuart Russel has more to say on the subject. Stuart Russell is a professor (and formerly chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley. His book  Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach  (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI; it has been translated into 13 languages and is used in more than 1,300 universities in 118 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring and philosophical foundations. He also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty. Intelligent machines (or even dumb ones) are a model of the human mind, or, mo...