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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …