Less Wrong: I’m Not Saying People Are Stupid. The real question isn’t whether people are stupid. The real question is whether people make decisions that matter a lot incorrectly. I claim that we’ve already, as a society, decided that they do. We’ve replaced kings — human beings — with artificial rule-based decision procedures based on… Continue reading Eliezer doth protest too much, methinks
“Matter and Beyond” is a webcast / local cable program in New Jersey, and they won an Emmy for the episode about future AI and machine ethics. It featured interviews with, among others, your humble narrator: TV PROGRAM EXPLORING SCIENCE, ETHICS & SPIRITUALITY WINS 2009 MID-ATLANTIC EMMY AWARD SOMERSET, NEW JERSEY – Ebru Television Network,… Continue reading "Matter and Beyond" wins an Emmy
YouTube – IBM DNA Transistor. It isn’t really a transistor, it’s a gadget for sequencing DNA through a nanopore. But it’s getting close to the way one expects nanotech to read a molecule, as it it were a magnetic tape or the like. Now if they could only come up with a way to write… Continue reading IBM DNA "Transistor"
There were talks by two of SIAI’s researchers, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Salamon, on the general subject of producing a friendly AI as opposed to whatever the alternative is, presumably the Terminator scenario or the like. Eliezer did his usual thing on cognitive biases in humans, and Anna ended the conference with a very nice… Continue reading Yet More Thoughts on the Singularity Summit
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct 06, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology education and public policy think tank based in Palo Alto, has announced the winners of the prestigious 2009 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology. Established in 1993 in honor of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, two $5,000 prizes are awarded in… Continue reading Foresight Institute Announces Feynman Prize Winners
The Space Review: The other 40th anniversary. Less than three months after billions of people were transfixed by “one small step” a Princeton physics professor named Gerard K. O’Neill walked into a classroom with less than a dozen undergraduates and asked a seemingly simple question: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place… Continue reading The Space Review: The other 40th anniversary
Potential leap forward in electron microscopy. from Eurekalert. Why it matters: A non-invasive electron microscope could shed light on fundamental questions about life and matter, allowing researchers to observe molecules inside a living cell without disturbing them. If successful, such microscopes would surmount what Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor concluded in 1956 was the fundamental limitation… Continue reading Potential leap forward in electron microscopy
Secrets of the Cell – Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life – Series – NYTimes.com. Lysosomes are versatile garbage disposals. In addition to taking in shrouded material, they can also pull in individual proteins through special portals on their surface. Lysosomes can even extend a mouthlike projection from their membrane… Continue reading Secrets of the Cell – Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life – Series – NYTimes.com
Several of the talks at the Summit might be lumped together under the heading “AI — when and how?” The two main pathways were the synthetic approach, talked about by people like Juergen Schmidhuber, Ben Goertzel and Itamar Arel, and brain emulation, talked about by such people as Anders Sandberg, David Chalmers, and Ray Kurzweil.… Continue reading More Thoughts on the Singularity Summit
Thoughts on the Singularity Summit Congratulations to the people of the SIAI for putting on an interesting, stimulating, really well-run conference. Note for those who weren’t able to be there, that the talks were recorded and will be available on SIAI’s website singinst.org. The following comments are not an attempt to explain the talks but… Continue reading Thoughts on the Singularity Summit
