In his book Determined, the biologist Robert Sapolsky presents his case against free will, arguing that because our actions are fully determined by what’s happening in our brains, genes, and environment in the seconds, minutes, and years beforehand, there’s no room for any separate “I” to play a role. As I’ve written about before, this …
Let’s play a simple statistics game. I’m looking at a normal distribution with unit variance (which you can’t see) and I’m going to randomly sample a point from it, which I’ll share with you. You’ll then guess the mean of the distribution. Let’s say the random sample has a value of 6. What would your …
On the surface, Rocks, Paper, Scissors (RPS) is among the simplest games. Each player chooses from among only three options, with clear (and even) rules about how different options win, lose, or tie. However, this simplicity doesn’t make the game easy to win. To determine the best approach, you need to think not only about …
While all logic puzzles defy intuition to some degree (hence their being “puzzles”), the Green Eyes one is among the few where the solution remains difficult to grasp even after it is known (at least for me). When I stumbled back across it recently, I spent a good hour thinking the answer must be wrong, …
The other night, the championship game for my rec basketball league got fairly heated, and during a play late in the game I reacted in a less than ideal way. One of the more talkative players on the other team and I were both chasing down a loose ball, and as I grabbed it his …
Since I started lifting weights, I’ve found curious the lack of any heuristics to calculate a one rep max based on a particular number of sets and reps. A number of calculations exist for a single set (see below chart from Wikipedia), but as pretty much all programming involves both sets and reps (e.g., bench …
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Mother Night What does it mean to be authentic? A quick Google search on the question shows a standard definition of “being true to your own personality”. This framing suggests that we have a “core” personality, and …
After spending more time with GPT-4, I have to admit I’m surprised at the level of “understanding” possible via simple next token prediction (given massive scale). On a wide variety of tasks the answers it provides are almost uncannily useful, and in domains like test-taking I did not think scale alone would drive the high …
Large language models have been all over the news the last couple months, with the launch of chatGPT (and the subsequent investment in OpenAI by Microsoft) kicking off an arms race of sorts within big tech. The capabilities of these latest models are impressive, and they do seem to represent a step change vs. prior …
In Repugnant Intuitions, I took a look at Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion through the lens of behavioral science. The Repugnant Conclusion states that: For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are …
With 2022 coming to a close, it seems a good time to reflect on the advances made in AI over this last year. The most high profile ones have come in the domains of image generation (DALL-E 2, Lensa, Imagen) and dialogue (ChatGPT), with the impacts starting to have broad reach. AI-generated pictures are now …
Recently, while walking through a cemetery, I came across the gravestone pictured below. Initially, I only glanced at it and walked past, but I turned around after attempting to reconcile Anne’s motherhood with her young age. Upon further inspection, I realized that Anne had been fifty-seven when she passed, not five, and that her motherhood …
I recently submitted an entry for the Inverse Scaling Prize, and while it wasn’t selected, I think it still reveals some interesting properties of model scaling that are worth exploring (and are similar to those analyzed in one winning submission from Cavendish Labs). The goal of the competition is to identify machine learning tasks where …
I remember marveling as a child at the fact that each word used in the dictionary was also defined in that same dictionary. At the time, it seemed like one could learn English (or any other language) simply by taking each word and looking up all the words used in the definition, then all the …
I recently came across the unexpected hanging paradox, and it’s been a surprisingly tricky one to work through. The paradox goes as follows (from Wikipedia): A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. …
Although GPT-3 was released ages ago (in AI time), it continues to generate interesting conversations, particularly with regard to the path toward general artificial intelligence. Building off a discussion of some others in the field (centered around the potential upside of scaling deep learning models), Scott Aaronson (a quantum computing expert who writes Shtetl-Optimized) and …
“Learning” is another one of those abstract concepts which reveals significant complexity upon further examination. In the context of people, learning represents our ability to incorporate experience in a beneficial way; we can learn facts, skills, or social norms (among countless other things) through repeated (or one-time) exposure. The exact mechanics underlying the learning process …
With the recent passing in the Senate of the Sunshine Protection Act, which seeks to move the US to permanent Daylight Savings Time (DST), there’s been wider discussion on the benefits and downsides of changing our clocks twice a year. Marco Rubio, the main sponsor of the bill, provides a list of potential benefits in …
With the massive degree of progress in AI over the last decade or so, it’s natural to wonder about its future – particularly the timeline to achieving human (and superhuman) levels of general intelligence. Ajeya Cotra, a senior researcher at Open Philanthropy, recently (in 2020) put together a comprehensive report seeking to answer this question …
Examining Evolution as an Upper Bound for AGI Timelines Read More »
Mathematics is full of difficult problems, most of which correspondingly seem difficult to solve. However, within the domain of difficult problems also exist those that seem easy to solve, or at the very least, easy to understand. The P vs. NP problem may be the most famous problem in this category, but another interesting (and …
If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Daniel Dennett Dennett’s quote is a favorite of mine, as it seems to capture much of the nuance of the free will discussion in just a few words. As a proponent of “free will” (at least of the type of free will that he …
During a recent email exchange, a reader of the blog brought up the question of technology / AI timelines and what progress in that domain might look like. His question struck a chord, reminding me of the uneasy feeling I often get when reading the optimistic predictions of others (including futurist Ray Kurzweil and philosopher …
About a year and a half ago, OpenAI rolled out GPT-3, a massive text-prediction transformer model which shattered many assumptions about the difficulty of understanding and creating written language. GPT-3’s predecessors (GPT and GPT-2) had shown that generating sensible responses to a variety of input texts was possible with enough data, but GPT-3 took that …
In the comments of https://mybrainsthoughts.com/?p=327, a discussion sprang up on goals and optimization that seems worth diving into further. That post covers some ideas on criminal justice and optimal sentencing approaches, and the idea that came up in the comments was using AI to optimize our laws, so as to take the human emotion out …
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” His friend: “Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going around the Earth.” Wittgenstein: “Well, what would it have looked like …
A friend recently shared The Brain on Trial, an article by David Eagleman, and I found it to raise some interesting questions in the domains of criminal sentencing and agency. Eagleman also wades into the realm of “free will”, but the treatment seems to be only surface-level (at least from a philosophical standpoint) and not …
One important concept in data science is that of signal. Signal represents the ability of data to inform accurate predictions in the target domain; a dataset that can tell you more has more signal. For example, say you’re trying to predict the weather in New York for the next day (repeatedly). For the sake of …
I’m often torn between the competing ideas that: Understanding the brain, with its repeating structures and distinct modules, will be relatively easy (i.e. within the short-term grasp of humanity) Understanding the brain, with its structures crafted through millions of years of random evolution, will be relatively hard (i.e. will not happen for multiple generations) For …
A Circuit-Level View of Evolutionary Interpretability Read More »
In General Intelligence and Context Switching, we examined how the brain brings to bear different operational strategies depending on the requirements of a given situation, and discussed how that flexibility gives rise to general intelligence (vs. the narrow intelligence exhibited by computers today). The argument focused mainly on more academic activities such as physics and …
As previously discussed in this post, deep learning models designed to predict and create natural language have become quite powerful, and are now able to do things like write news articles or compose poetry at a level similar to (or even better than) the average human. This is a significant achievement which will likely have …
Deep Learning Language Models and Exact Procedures Read More »
Throughout history, people have sought to identify accurate statements about the world, so as to better understand the state of our existence. In many domains, this is a difficult endeavor – the world is often messy and inexact, and does not lend itself to easy classification. However, certain simplified domains have yielded more easily; particularly …
It’s interesting how difficult it can be to go on a diet. One can be fully set on the idea, ready to eat less and watch the pounds come off, and yet still fail to avoid that second helping of dinner or the ice cream for dessert. What happens in these situations when we fail …
Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, in part because of the variety of ways in which we see it manifested in the world. From humans, to mice, to ant colonies, to bacteria, to computational algorithms, we see intelligence all around us, but it’s difficult to put a finger on a single definition which covers all …
General intelligence is a remarkable adaptation. We humans are able to learn a near infinite variety of things, from language to physics to etiquette to chess. Our brains never “fill up”; in fact, increased capability in one domain often enhances our ability to learn others. It doesn’t take much for us to learn, with facts …
Consciousness is a difficult problem to grapple with, mainly due to its inherently subjective nature. We don’t yet understand the brain well enough to say much about how it does anything, let alone to describe how it gives rise to (or doesn’t give rise to) conscious experience. Due to this limitation, we’re currently reliant on …
A Different Perspective on Searle’s Chinese Room Read More »
The desire for control seems to be deeply rooted in the human psyche. We all seek control over our own lives, and oftentimes reach further and attempt to control the lives of others (generally, of those close to us, or those with a degree of control over us). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that …
Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion has long been a focus area in the field of population ethics, as it seems to imply counterintuitive (or repugnant) tradeoffs when taking a utilitarian view. As Parfit states it, the Repugnant Conclusion suggests that: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality …
The field of machine vision has progressed rapidly over the last decade, with many systems now achieving “better than human” results on standardized image recognition tests. Deep convolutional neural networks have been a main driver of these improvements, and have been enabled by increasing data availability and computing power. ImageNet Competition Best Error Rate Performance, …
Merriam Webster: meaning \ˈmē-niŋ \ noun 1 a the thing one intends to convey especially by language b the thing that is conveyed especially by language 2 something meant or intended 3 significant quality 4 a the logical connotation of a word or phrase b the logical denotation or extension of a word or phrase …
This post contains spoilers for “1984” by George Orwell George Orwell’s classic 1984 pressures readers to think deeply on numerous topics, including (but certainly not limited to) the definition of reality, the role of government, and human nature. I found his examinations of human nature to be especially interesting, as in the first half we …
Author’s Note: For any French readers, this post has recently been translated by Azurisme! Metals are a unique form of matter, especially with regards to their behavior under heating and cooling. While metals are described by the material they’re made of (e.g. copper or iron), their properties are determined by their arrangement of atoms, and …
Playing Conway’s Game of Life is an easy way to spend an afternoon. The game is based on the concept of cellular automatons; essentially, it consists of a grid of cells where each cell can be either on or off (also referred to as alive or dead), and at each time step each cell updates …
A couple hundred thousand years ago, our species reached a point where we could pass knowledge directly (through language and demonstrated action), rather than relying on adaptations to be passed on through genes. With this shift, culture was born – and it allowed us to very rapidly acquire a great deal of knowledge about our …
In his book I am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter paints a powerful analogy involving the careenium, symms, and symmballs. I highly recommend reading the book (as well as all his other works, if you have the time), but I’ll summarize the analogy briefly to start, as this post involves extending it to help drive …
2040: “Hm, that’s odd,” thought Dr. Newerton. He peered back over his notes, trying again to make sense of the study he had just reviewed on cortex function. Two years ago, his group had thought they were on the cusp of understanding the brain, but now that goal was feeling more and more elusive. The …
In the artificial intelligence literature, it’s common to see researchers examining the question of “what is the right final goal to give an AGI (artificial general intelligence)”. Here, “final goal” means the ultimate task we want the system to achieve – for example, playing Go well (Alpha Go) or classifying images well (VGG19). Researchers frequently …
GPT-X, Paperclip Maximizer? An Analysis of AGI and Final Goals Read More »
Imagine we have a man in a room, and we can ask him to perform any task (we’ll assume he’s motivated to do the tasks). These tasks range across the entire domain of the world, for example: Shoot a bow and arrow at a target (given a bow and arrow and a target) Point to …
The Kernel of Narrow vs. General Intelligence: A Short Thought Experiment Read More »
Humans (and all other brain-having organisms) interact with the world in a hierarchical manner, starting from the top and working down. When we decide to engage in an action, we make the decision at the highest level (for example, deciding to write a blog post), and then break up that action into its lower level …
From its inception, the field of artificial intelligence has separated program specification into two key concepts: “goals” and “intelligence”. The “goal” is the problem a program or agent must solve; “intelligence” is the means by which it solves it. For example, the goal might be to play chess, and the intelligence might be a neural …
A new natural language AI model launched by OpenAI, GPT-3, has been making waves in the artificial intelligence community. GPT-3 is a transformer model (simplifying greatly, a neural network approach with modifications for better performance on text) trained on one specific task: predicting the next word, given all previous words within some text. This simple …
In “The Absurdity of Free Will”, Hugo argues that we do not have free will, as conventionally understood. The basic premise is as follows: The universe is either deterministic (can be calculated) or indeterministic (random) If the universe is deterministic, then there’s no room for us to influence it If the universe is indeterministic, then …
Free will sits among the most explored philosophical topics (among other giants like Ethics and Rationality), and for good reason, as it has seemingly direct consequences for the way we (choose to?) live our lives. The question has existed since ancient times, but recent scientific advances have added structure to the question, as we’ve discovered …
As researchers and philosophers discuss the path towards human-equivalent / superhuman general artificial intelligence, they frequently examine the concept of control. Control of our world has always been of central importance to our species, so it’s no surprise that we’d look to extend our control in the future. However, most of the currently discussed control …
I recently shared my last post on the Chinese room to Reddit, which led to some productive discussions in the comments. I thought it may be helpful to share some excerpts from one of those threads here, as it provides a slightly different way of thinking about the issue. Hope you find this discourse interesting …
The Chinese Room Argument is a thought experiment designed by John Searle to show why computers are not capable of consciousness or intentionality. For those unfamiliar, Searle’s concise version of the argument goes: “Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) …
We’ve now touched on the idea of general artificial intelligence (i.e. above human level) in a couple posts, and so it seemed time for a more thorough examination of how we might get there, and of what this type of “superintelligence” might look like. We’ll start out by taking a step back, and looking at …
A number of other posts so far have touched on what it is that brains do – and for the most part, it’s been summarized as “creating a model of the world”. By this, we’ve meant that certain patterns of neural activity can be understood as representing or standing for some observed pattern of material …
This post, and all posts published on this site, will be constructed using words. I imagine this seems reasonable enough (though there may be hope for some pictures as well!) – words are the foundation of communication across our world. But how well do we actually understand the nuance of this tool? In this post, …
It can be easy to take for granted all that our brains do when understanding the world, particularly in the realm of language. While many early philosophers recognized some of this complexity, the computer age brought about attempts to get computers to understand our communication tool – language – and these attempts brought home just …
Basketball hoops were invented by James Naismith Read More »
Consciousness is, and may always be, a slightly thorny subject to discuss. For many people, no physical explanation is suitable, as it never seems to address questions along the lines of “but why does it feel like something to be me? I can think and see things and do things – we need to explain …
Dedicated to Sam Rendall – you and your ideas are greatly missed. What is intelligence? What does it mean to be intelligent? A starting point for a very high level definition might be an ability of an agent to accomplish its goals in its environment. From this definition, we can see three pieces to assessing …
“Open your eyes, Harry.” The noise wakes me up, and I open my eyes. The light from the room floods my eyes, and then I begin to make sense of my bearings, remembering with a jolt where I am. Has the experiment worked? I see Dr. Chet looking at me intently, jotting down notes, with …
Since the time of Socrates, there has existed a sentiment among certain people that the pursuit of philosophy (including the philosophy of science) is a critical part of a worthwhile existence – summed up in Socrates quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. This view has its basis in human’s greater ability to understand …
While the question of whether we live in a simulation is a relatively new one, it’s really just a modernized version of a more persistent question throughout humanity’s past – why are there things, and why are we part of those things? In the early days of humanity, there were few tools or methods available …