Lifeboat Foundation

To listen to more of John Wheeler’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB

American physicist, John Wheeler (1911−2008), made seminal contributions to the theories of quantum gravity and nuclear fission, but is best known for coining the term ‘black holes’. A keen teacher and mentor, he was also a key figure in the Manhattan Project. [Listener: Ken Ford]

Continue reading “John Wheeler — Kurt Gödel and the Closed Time-like Line” »

The most widely used machine learning algorithms were designed by humans and thus are hindered by our cognitive biases and limitations. Can we also construct meta-learning algorithms that can learn better learning algorithms so that our self-improving AIs have no limits other than those inherited from computability and physics? This question has been a main driver of my research since I wrote a thesis on it in 1987. In the past decade, it has become a driver of many other people’s research as well. Here I summarize our work starting in 1994 on meta-reinforcement learning with self-modifying policies in a single lifelong trial, and — since 2003 — mathematically optimal meta-learning through the self-referential Gödel Machine. This talk was previously presented at meta-learning workshops at ICML 2020 and NeurIPS 2021. Many additional publications on meta-learning can be found at https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/metalearning.html.

Jürgen Schmidhuber.
Director, AI Initiative, KAUST
Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, NNAISENSE
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/blog.html.

Continue reading “Meta-Learning Machines in a Single Lifelong Trial” »

This video discusses what it would mean to live forever or to have a greatly expanded lifespan. Would we inevitably grow bored with existence? Why do we even want to live longer?

We also discuss the philosophy of the Ship of Theseus as it applies to mind upload or body transfer. If you transfer your mind to a new body, are you still the same person? We conclude that the answer is yes if and only if you experience no discontinuities in consciousness.

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Physicists have used the famous particle smasher to investigate the strange phenomena of quantum entanglement at far higher energies than ever before.

By Alex Wilkins

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James Somers on how A.I. chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard will continue to learn and the contradictions entailed in their mission.

A record-setting feat on the world’s first exascale supercomputer contends for a Gordon Bell award.

In 1980, Hamish Robertson was a tenured professor at Michigan State. He’d been there since his postdoc in 1971, and he was content. “I want to stress how valued and happy I felt there,” he says. “It was, and still is, an outstanding place.”

But he and his friend and colleague, Tom Bowles, had begun to hatch an idea that would take him far from MSU. They were devising a new experiment to measure the mass of the elusive and perplexingly light neutrino.

Neutrinos are the only fundamental particles whose mass we still don’t know. As their name implies, neutrinos are very, very small. But they outnumber the other fundamental particles by a factor of 10 billion.

An explanation of the Bundle Theory of Self, including the theories offered by Derek Parfit, and David Hume, and how these fit into the larger picture of personal identity, and the persistence problem. Special thanks to João Costa Neto for funding and supporting this video!

Sponsors: João Costa Neto, Dakota Jones, Joe Felix, Prince Otchere, Mike Samuel, Daniel Helland, Dennis Sexton, Yu Saburi, Mauricino Andrade, Will Roberts and √2. Thanks for your support!

Continue reading “What is the Bundle Theory of Self? (Philosophical Definition)” »