Emergence

The Constraints of Life

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 …

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GPT-X, Paperclip Maximizer? An Analysis of AGI and Final Goals

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 …

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Thinking Bottom-Up

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 …

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Emergence and Control

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 …

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