A short comment on Drexler’s paper Biological and Nanomechanical Systems: Contrasts in Evolutionary Capacity: He distinguishes two types of design, O-style (like organic) and M-style (like mechanical) systems. He points out that O-style systems are much more robust to incremental design modification, where M-style systems require coordinated changes that are much, much less likely to happen… Continue reading Organic vs machine evolution
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Engineering and analysis in the field of SRMs is unusual in many ways. Eric Drexler has posted a paper about differences in evolutionary capacity in mechanical and biological systems that’s worth a look. Purely coincidentally, we at Foresight have been discussing self-replication in the context of the Feynman Path and I came up with an… Continue reading Self-replicating machines and risk
Yesterday I wrote that we don’t have a clue how learning works. If that were as categorically true as I made it sound, the prospects of AGI would be pretty much sunk. AGI requires getting up to the universal level of a learning machine: one that can in theory learn anything any other learning machine… Continue reading Learning and AGI
There’s a very nice post at IEET by Marcelo Rinesi entitled Education and Learning: Still in the Middle Ages. He points out that we’re pretty damn bad at education compared to the improvements we’ve seen in most other endeavors: Our lecture halls are better than those of the Middle Ages, our textbooks friendlier than those… Continue reading Education
In 1902, H. G Wells penned a book, remarkably prophetic in some respects, that can be taken as the definition of the fin de siecle take on the probable course of the 20th century. It was called Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought. You can find it… Continue reading Where is my flying car?
The CCC/CRA, a consortium of academic computer science departments (essentially), has a roadmap to future robotics that has some implications for the Feynman Path. Some highlights (from the chapter on manufacturing): Vignette 2: One-of-a-kind, discrete-part manufacture and assembly A small job shop with 5 employees primarily catering to orders from medical devices companies is approached… Continue reading CCC / CRA Robotics Roadmap
The evolution of science moves, in Kuhn’s famous theory, not in a smooth accretion of knowledge but in a series of punctuated equilibria. This means that before a paradigm shift happens, there is an overhang where the majority of scientists believe something that the mojority won’t a scientific generation later. Thomas Bouchard, the psychologist who… Continue reading Foreseeing the next paradigm shift
The word “planet” means wanderer. The ancients, with their lives lived largely outdoors and without artificial lighting, were much more intimately acquainted with the heavens than are we moderns, unless we specialize in astronomy. They noticed that although there was a fixed pattern of stars for the most part, some of them wandered around in… Continue reading Saving the Planet
It’s really amazing that Armstrong and Aldrin actually landed on the Moon. Not that they survived the trip in the huge rocket, nor the rigors of space travel, the radiation, the vacuum, the meteors. It was the software. Don Eyles, one of the programmers of the code that ran in the Lunar Module computer, has… Continue reading AI and space travel
