Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI - Revision history

Robert.adlington at 07:14, 14 July 2025

2025-07-14T07:14:16Z

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	* What's the difference between a rock and a box of a trillion downloaded souls? The details of what's happening in the box were derived from the long history of human civilization, whereas the rock has its long geological history but not the particular history of our civilization.		* What's the difference between a rock and a box of a trillion downloaded souls? The details of what's happening in the box were derived from the long history of human civilization, whereas the rock has its long geological history but not the particular history of our civilization.
	* Realizing that there isn't a genuine distinction between intelligence and mere computation leads you to imagine that future - the endpoint of our civilization as a box of a trillion souls, each of them essentially playing a video game forever. What is the "purpose" of that?		* Realizing that there isn't a genuine distinction between intelligence and mere computation leads you to imagine that future - the endpoint of our civilization as a box of a trillion souls, each of them essentially playing a video game forever. What is the "purpose" of that?
			[[Category:Consciousness]]
			[[Category:Books]]

Robert.adlington: /* Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization */

2025-07-13T16:20:27Z

Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization

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	== Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization ==		== Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization ==

			* I see technology as taking human goals and making them automatically executable by machines:
			** Previously we wanted to move objects from here to there.
			** Now the work is mental rather than physical.
			* A brain receives certain input, it computes things, it causes certain actions to happen, it generates a certain output. Like the weather. All sorts of systems are, effectively, doing computations - whether it's a brain, or a cloud responding to its thermal environment.
			* What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which give us our notions of purpose and goals. When the box on our desk thinks as well as the human brain does, what it still won't have, intrinsically, are goals and purposes. Those are defined by our particulars - biology, psychology, and cultural history.
			* Today we've got all kinds of purposes. 1000 yrs ago it was do I have food and am I safe. Now, many of us barely think about those purposes.
			* There isn't a bright line between what is intelligent and what is simply computational.
			* You can take a large collection of the world's knowledge and automatically answer questions on the basis of it, using what are essentially merely computational techniques. This is much more analogous to what biology does in evolution.
			* My approach was to make a language that panders not to the computers but to the humans, to take whatever a human thinks of and convert it into some form that the computer can understand.
			* There are maybe 5000 picturable common nouns in English, 10,000 if you include things like special kinds of plants and beetles that people would recognize with some frequency. We trained our system on 30 m images of these kind of things. It's a big, complicated, messy neural network, which takes about a quadrillon GPU operations to do the training.
			* It's impressive because it pretty much matches what humans can do. It has about the same training data that human have - about the same number of images a human infant would see in the first couple of years of its life. roughly the same number of operations have to be done in the learning process, using about the same number of neurons in at least the first 3 levels of our visual cortex.
			* In the late 1600s, Leibniz, Wilkins and others were concerned with what they called philosophical languages - complete, universal, symbolic representations of things in the world.
			* How has knowledge been transmitted:
			** Genetics
			** Physiological recognition
			** Natural language
			** Knowledge-based programming, which is immediately executable, with the knowledge of the world knitted into the language you're using to write code.
			* There's computation all over the universe; in a turbulent fluid producing some complicated pattern of flow, in the celestial mechanics of planetary interactions, in brains. But does it have a purpose? Does the weather have a goal? Does climate have a goal?
			* I don't think there is abstract purpose per se or abstract meaning. Does the universe have a purpose? Then you're doing theology in some way. Purpose is something that comes only from history.
			* There are computational processes that you can go through in which there is no way to shortcut that process. Much of science has been about shortcutting computation done by nature. If we're doing celestial mechanics and want to predict where the planets will be in a million years, we follow the equations step-by-step to reduce the computation. We can be smarter than the universe and predict the endpoint without going through all the steps, but some details are irreducible. That's why history means something. If we could get to the endpoint without going through the steps, history would be, in some sense, pointless.
			* How do you determine whether abstract AI has a purpose?
			* What's the difference between a rock and a box of a trillion downloaded souls? The details of what's happening in the box were derived from the long history of human civilization, whereas the rock has its long geological history but not the particular history of our civilization.
			* Realizing that there isn't a genuine distinction between intelligence and mere computation leads you to imagine that future - the endpoint of our civilization as a box of a trillion souls, each of them essentially playing a video game forever. What is the "purpose" of that?

Robert.adlington: /* Peter Galison: Algorists Dream of Objectivity */

2025-07-13T15:55:06Z

Peter Galison: Algorists Dream of Objectivity

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 == Peter Galison: Algorists Dream of Objectivity ==
 == George M Church: The Rights of Machines ==
 == Caroline A Jones: The Artistic Use of Cybernetic Beings ==
 == Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization ==

Robert.adlington: /* Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords? */

2025-07-13T15:38:25Z

Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords?

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 == Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords? ==
 == Alex "Sandy" Pentland: The Human Strategy ==
 == Hans Ulrich Obrist: Making the Invisible Visible: Art Meets AI ==
 == Alison Gopnik: AIs vs Four-year-Olds ==
 == Peter Galison: Algorists Dream of Objectivity ==
 == George M Church: The Rights of Machines ==
 == Caroline A Jones: The Artistic Use of Cybernetic Beings ==
 == Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization ==

Robert.adlington: /* W Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences */

2025-07-13T11:56:55Z

W Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences

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 == W Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences ==
 == Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords? ==
 == Alex "Sandy" Pentland: The Human Strategy ==

Robert.adlington: /* Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings */

2025-07-13T11:37:03Z

Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings

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 == Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings ==
 == Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation ==
 == Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent ==
 == David Kaiser: "Information" for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us ==
 == Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling ==
 == W Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences ==
 == Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords? ==

Robert.adlington: /* Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas */

2025-07-09T16:35:15Z

Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas

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 == Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas ==
-* Knowledge - Patterns in matter or energy that stand in systematic relations with states of the world, with mathematical and logical truths, and with one another.
+* Three abstract concepts that fit with the computational theory of mind:
-* Reasoning - Transformations of that knowledge by physical operations that are designed to preserve those relations.
+** Knowledge - Patterns in matter or energy that stand in systematic relations with states of the world, with mathematical and logical truths, and with one another.
-* Purpose - The control of operations to effect changes in the world, guided by discrepancies between its current state and a goal state.
+** Reasoning - Transformations of that knowledge by physical operations that are designed to preserve those relations.
 == David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment ==
 == Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings ==
 == Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation ==

Robert.adlington: /* Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages */

2025-07-09T11:43:39Z

Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages

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	== Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages ==		== Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages ==

			* The only (meta)stable entities are messages - patterns of information that propagate through time, like waves propagating across the surface of a lake. Even we humans can be considered messages, because the atoms in our bodies are too fleeting to attach our identities to. Instead, we are the "message" that our bodily functions maintain. "It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity.
			* In some very real sense, big corporations are nonhuman machines that pursue their own interests - interests that might not align with hos of any particular human working for them.

	== Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas ==		== Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas ==

			* Knowledge - Patterns in matter or energy that stand in systematic relations with states of the world, with mathematical and logical truths, and with one another.
			* Reasoning - Transformations of that knowledge by physical operations that are designed to preserve those relations.
			* Purpose - The control of operations to effect changes in the world, guided by discrepancies between its current state and a goal state.

	== David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment ==		== David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment ==
	== Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings ==		== Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings ==

Robert.adlington: /* Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete */

2025-07-06T10:31:11Z

Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete

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	** Self-assembling with interactive sculpting, tuned by the child's interactions with the external world		** Self-assembling with interactive sculpting, tuned by the child's interactions with the external world
	** Integrated with sensors and actuators		** Integrated with sensors and actuators
	*

	== Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete ==		== Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete ==

			* Consciousness is the cosmic awakening: it transformed our universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty, hope, meaning, and purpose.
			* Intelligence is simply a certain kind of information processing performed by elementary particles moving around, and there's no law of physics that says one can't build machines more intelligent in every way than we are, and able to seed cosmic life.
			* First, we humans discovered how to replicate some natural processes with machines, making our own heat, light, and mechanical horsepower. Gradually we realized that our bodies were also machines, and the discovery of nerve cells blurred the boundary between body and mind. Finally, we stared building machines that could outperform no only our muscles but our minds as well. We've now been eclipse by machines in the performance of many narrow cognitive tasks, ranging from memorization and arithmetic to game play, and we are in the process of being overtaken in many more, from driving to investing to medical diagnosing. If the AI community succeeds in its original goal of building AGI then we will have, by definition, been eclipsed at all cognitive tasks.
			* Darwinian evolution endowed us with powerful fear of concrete threats, not of abstract threats from future technologies that are hard to visualize or even imagine.
			* Since intelligence is the ability to accomplish goals, a superintelligent AI is by definition much better at accomplishing its goals than we humans are at accomplishing ours, and will therefore prevail.

	== Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages ==		== Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages ==
	== Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas ==		== Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas ==

Robert.adlington: /* Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into */

2025-07-06T10:22:04Z

Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into

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 == Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into ==
 == Frank Welczek: The Unity of Intelligence ==
 == Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete ==
 == Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages ==