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 …
“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 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 »
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …