Ave atque Vale
In case anyone wonders where I've gone, I'm resigning from Foresight for medical reasons (adhesive capsulitis -- long and painful course of therapy) and to concentrate my few remaining neurons [...]
Off to AGI-10
I'm on my way to AGI-10, the general AI conference, in Lugano. If any readers are attending, let's get together. Among other things, we'll be unveiling a preliminary take on [...]
IOP comments on Climategate
The UK-based Institute of Physics (IOP) publishes, among other things, the journal Nanotechnology, one of the leading journals in the field, and has had special issues with papers from Foresight [...]
Snow thoughts
It's been snowing continuously here for about 2 days. The heaviest snows I've experienced in my life (for any significant amount of time) were an inch an hour, [...]
Alien Invasion
Robin Hanson comments on David Brin's response to a New Scientist editorial. As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has [...]
AI: Summing up
Let's try to pull all the threads together, as futurists -- which is the whole point here -- and get some idea about when it might be reasonable to expect [...]
New Freitas paper: Diamond Trees
Rob Freitas has a new paper up: Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Diamond Trees (Tropostats): A Molecular Manufacturing Based System for Compositional Atmospheric Homeostasis,” IMM Report 43, 10 February 2010 Abstract. [...]
Stackless brain
Why we should suspect that the brain has a limited ability to recurse, but prefers to daisy-chain instead: The house the malt the rat the cat the dog the cow [...]
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Ethics for machines
... to boldly go where no man has gone before! This final phrase of the classic Star Trek opening spiel had two problems with it, one as seen by people [...]
NLP: State of the Art
Over the past ten to fifteen years, research in computational linguistics has undergone a dramatic “paradigm shift.” Statistical learning methods that automatically acquire knowledge for language processing from empirical data [...]