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 …
“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 »
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 »
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 »