Hot off the Press! Interview on Progressive vs Degenerative Research Programmes with Leslie Allan!

Progressive research programs, like daring astronauts, catapult us into the vast unknown, making bold, untested predictions that stretch the fabric of our comprehension. Degenerative programs, in contrast, linger in well-trodden territories, shoring up existing knowledge with complex embellishments rather than breaking new ground. Yet, like celestial bodies in the cosmic ballet, each performs an essential role in the dance of discovery, together tracing the contours of the ever-expanding sphere of human understanding.

Leslie Allan is a philosopher & humanist — here are some of his papers: https://latrobe.academia.edu/LeslieAllan.

See related blog post:

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- Science, Technology & the Future — #SciFuture — http://scifuture.org

It’s online and it’s free (via zoom). It will be fun & exciting — I hope you can all make it. Many of the synopses of coming talks are already online (linked to from the agenda) — so check them out.

Synopsis: No sentient being in the evolutionary history of life has enjoyed good health as defined by the World Health Organization. The founding constitution of the World Health Organization commits the international community to a daringly ambitious conception of health: “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing”. Health as so conceived is inconsistent with evolution via natural selection. Lifelong good health is inconsistent with a Darwinian genome. Indeed, the vision of the World Health Organization evokes the World Transhumanist Association. Transhumanists aspire to a civilization of superhappiness, superlongevity and superintelligence; but even an architecture of mind based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss cannot yield complete well-being. Post-Darwinian life will be sublime, but “complete” well-being is posthuman – more akin to Buddhist nirvana. So the aim of this talk is twofold. First, I shall explore the therapeutic interventions needed to underwrite the WHO conception of good health for everyone – or rather, a recognisable approximation of lifelong good health. What genes, allelic combinations and metabolic pathways must be targeted to deliver a biohappiness revolution: life based entirely on gradients of well-being? How can we devise a more civilized signalling system for human and nonhuman animal life than gradients of mental and physical pain? Secondly, how can genome reformists shift the Overton window of political discourse in favour of hedonic uplift? How can prospective parents worldwide – and the World Health Organization – be encouraged to embrace genome reform? For only germline engineering can fix the problem of suffering and create a happy biosphere for all sentient beings.

https://www.scifuture.org/the-end-of-suffering-genome-reform…id-pearce/

The ‘Stepping Into the Future’ conference is coming up soon — April 23-24th to be exact. It’s online and it’s free (via zoom). It will be fun & exciting — I hope you can all make it. Many of the synopses of coming talks are already online (linked to from the agenda) — so check them out.

About | Speakers | Agenda.

We are in the midst of a technological avalanche – surprisingly to many, AI has made the impossible possible. In a rapidly changing world maintaining and expanding our capacity to innovate is essential.

Topic: James Hughes — The Future of Work (Future Day Talk) Time: Mar 1, 2022 08:00 AM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81306102463?pwd=eDBldno3cUdZZGcxVHoxNEJ1RkgrUT09 Meeting ID: 813 0610 2,463 Passcode: Q6VzpF

As part of the annual Future Day celebration, James Hughes will join us that may concern you — ‘The Future of Work’. Zoom details coming soon!

Abstract: The pandemic has launched a debate about the future of work around the world. Those who can work remotely have often found they prefer remote or flexible, hybrid options. The Great Resignation has put upward pressure on wages and benefits in the service sector, encouraging the implementation of automation. Climate change mitigation is encouraging a shift towards “green jobs.” Rapid changes in the labor market have made the payoffs of higher education uncertain for young people, while many societies are entering an old-age dependency crisis with too few workers paying taxes for growing numbers of pensioners. Before the pandemic proposals for universal basic income (UBI) were seen as necessary adaptations to imminent technological unemployment, and the during the pandemic many countries provided temporary UBI to keep people safe. We are now poised for a global discussion about whether we need to work at all, and what kinds of jobs are desirable.

Recent interview with Ben Goertzel on GPT-3/transformer networks, understanding and meaning generation — and what’s missing in AI atm.

This version is audio only — I will post the video version shortly smile

On GPT-3, achieving AGI, machine understanding and lots more… Will GPT-3 or an equivalent be used to deepfake human understanding?

Joscha Bach on GPT-3, achieving AGI, machine understanding and lots more
02:40 What’s missing in AI atm? Unified coherent model of reality
04:14 AI systems like GPT-3 behave as if they understand — what’s missing?
08:35 Symbol grounding — does GPT-3 have it?
09:35 GPT-3 for music generation, GPT-3 for image generation, GPT-3 for video generation
11:13 GPT-3 temperature parameter. Strange output?
13:09 GPT-3 a powerful tool for idea generation
14:05 GPT-3 as a tool for writing code. Will GPT-3 spawn a singularity?
16:32 Increasing GPT-3 input context may have a high impact
16:59 Identifying grammatical structure & language
19:46 What is the GPT-3 transformer network doing?
21:26 GPT-3 uses brute force, not zero-shot learning, humans do ZSL
22:15 Extending the GPT-3 token context space. Current Context = Working Memory. Humans with smaller current contexts integrate concepts over long time-spans
24:07 GPT-3 can’t write a good novel
25:09 GPT-3 needs to become sensitive to multi-modal sense data — video, audio, text etc
26:00 GPT-3 a universal chat-bot — conversations with God & Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
30:14 What does understanding mean? Does it have gradients (i.e. from primitive to high level)?
32:19 (correlation vs causation) What is causation? Does GPT-3 understand causation? Does GPT-3 do causation?
38:06 Deep-faking understanding
40:06 The metaphor of the Golem applied to civ
42:33 GPT-3 fine with a person in the loop. Big danger in a system which fakes understanding. Deep-faking intelligible explanations.
44:32 GPT-3 babbling at the level of non-experts
45:14 Our civilization lacks sentience — it can’t plan ahead
46:20 Would GTP-3 (a hopfield network) improve dramatically if it could consume 1 to 5 trillion parameters?
47:24 GPT3: scaling up a simple idea. Clever hacks to formulate the inputs
47:41 Google GShard with 600 billion input parameters — Amazon may be doing something similar — future experiments
49:12 Ideal grounding in machines
51:13 We live inside a story we generate about the world — no reason why GPT-3 can’t be extended to do this
52:56 Tracking the real world
54:51 MicroPsi
57:25 What is computationalism? What is it’s relationship to mathematics?
59:30 Stateless systems vs step by step Computation — Godel, Turing, the halting problem & the notion of truth
1:00:30 Truth independent from the process used to determine truth. Constraining truth that which can be computed on finite state machines
1:03:54 Infinities can’t describe a consistent reality without contradictions
1:06:04 Stevan Harnad’s understanding of computation
1:08:32 Causation / answering ‘why’ questions
1:11:12 Causation through brute forcing correlation
1:13:22 Deep learning vs shallow learning
1:14:56 Brute forcing current deep learning algorithms on a Matrioshka brain — would it wake up?
1:15:38 What is sentience? Could a plant be sentient? Are eco-systems sentient?
1:19:56 Software/OS as spirit — spiritualism vs superstition. Empirically informed spiritualism
1:23:53 Can we build AI that shares our purposes?
1:26:31 Is the cell the ultimate computronium? The purpose of control is to harness complexity
1:31:29 Intelligent design
1:33:09 Category learning & categorical perception: Models — parameters constrain each other
1:35:06 Surprise minimization & hidden states; abstraction & continuous features — predicting dynamics of parts that can be both controlled & not controlled, by changing the parts that can be controlled. Categories are a way of talking about hidden states.
1:37:29 ‘Category’ is a useful concept — gradients are often hard to compute — so compressing away gradients to focus on signals (categories) when needed
1:38:19 Scientific / decision tree thinking vs grounded common sense reasoning
1:40:00 Wisdom/common sense vs understanding. Common sense, tribal biases & group insanity. Self preservation, dunbar numbers
1:44:10 Is g factor & understanding two sides of the same coin? What is intelligence?
1:47:07 General intelligence as the result of control problems so general they require agents to become sentient
1:47:47 Solving the Turing test: asking the AI to explain intelligence. If response is an intelligible & testable implementation plan then it passes?
1:49:18 The term ‘general intelligence’ inherits it’s essence from behavioral psychology; a behaviorist black box approach to measuring capability
1:52:15 How we perceive color — natural synesthesia & induced synesthesia
1:56:37 The g factor vs understanding
1:59:24 Understanding as a mechanism to achieve goals
2:01:42 The end of science?
2:03:54 Exciting currently untestable theories/ideas (that may be testable by science once we develop the precise enough instruments). Can fundamental physics be solved by computational physics?
2:07:14 Quantum computing. Deeper substrates of the universe that runs more efficiently than the particle level of the universe?
2:10:05 The Fermi paradox
2:12:19 Existence, death and identity construction.

The audio of the fascinating talks & panel at the Future Day Melbourne 2020 / Machine Understanding event:

Kevin Korb — https://archive.org/searchresults.php Wilkins — https://archive.org/details/john-wilkins-humans-as-machines (John, sorry about the audio — also do you have the slides for this?) Hugo de Garis — https://archive.org/details/hugo-de-garis-future-day-2020 Panel — https://archive.org/…/future-day-panel-kevin-korb-hugo-de-g…

The video will be uploaded at a later date.

There is much public concern nowadays about when an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) might appear and what it might go and do. The expert community is less concerned, because they know we’re a long ways off yet. More fundamentally though: we’re a long ways off of API (Artificial Primitive Intelligence). In fact, we have no idea what an API might even look like. AI took off without ever reflecting seriously on what I, either NI or AI, really is. So, it’s been streaking along in myriad directions without any goal in sight.

Fascinating talk on a fun topic.

How does quantum logic differ from classical logic? How do we live in a universe that accommodates both?
Is it possible to observe quantum logic at work in our macroscopic world?
Surprisingly a little bit of quantum logic can disentangle some of our clumsy everyday conceptualisations of biology, language and culture.

Slides / Prezi: https://prezi.com/sellcdridu0v/quantum-logic-the-rise-of-the-memes-2019

Speaker: Chris Guest — President of Vic Skeptics

Meetup Link: https://www.meetup.com/Science-Technology-and-the-Future/events/263849500

Many thanks for watching!

Consider supporting SciFuture by:
a) Subscribing to the SciFuture YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=TheRationalFuture b) Donating
- Bitcoin: 1BxusYmpynJsH4i8681aBuw9ZTxbKoUi22
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- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scifuture c) Sharing the media SciFuture creates: http://scifuture.org

Kind regards.
Adam Ford
- Science, Technology & the Future.

Panelists: andy gelme, jon oxer, greg adamson, jeremy negal at humanity+ melbourne.

Panelists and audience members weigh in on a variety of topics: technology adoption across demographics, technology used to harvest your data / the rights to your data, technology changing the world — what used to be value choices with regard to technology use and adoption now just seem to be matters of fact, and social implications of technology in general.

While the video is newly produced, the conference was held in 2011.

Panelists and audience members weigh in on technology adoption across demographics, technology used to harvest your data / the rights to your data, technology changing the world — what used to be value choices with regard to technology use and adoption now just seem to be matters of fact… and social implications of technology in general.

Panelists include: Andy Gelme, Jon Oxer, Greg Adamson & Jeremy Nagel.

Audience members who asked questions include Lorin Ford, Cobina Crawford, Colin Kline, Hugo de Garis, Rosemary Watson, Adam Ford, Avatar Polymorph, Tony Smith, John Donovan, Sean McMullen…

While the video is newly produced, the conference was held in 2011.
This was filmed at the Humanity+ @Melbourne 2011 Conference — website (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20131106021014/http://au.humanit…onference/

Also see Jon Oxer’s related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EOPKBbW9Hs

#HumanityPlus #SciFuture #TechnologyAtHome

@geekscape @jonoxer @GregAEngineer @jeznag @HumanityPlus