Author Archives: Shane

“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer” — Neil Armstrong, 2000 On the topic of space, I thought this video from the ISS was spectacular.  Flying over the aurora borealis is just magic.

I’ve decided to once again leave my prediction for when human level AGI will arrive unchanged.  That is, I give it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028 and a mode of 2025, under the assumption that nothing crazy … Continue reading →

Some of you might remember the talk I gave at the 2010 Singularity Summit about Algorithmic IQ, or AIQ for short.  It was an attempt to convert the theoretical Universal Intelligence Measure into a working practical test of machine intelligence. … Continue reading →

Prof. Rich Sutton, probably the most famous person in the field of reinforcement learning, gave a talk today at the Gatsby Unit.  I was expecting a standard introduction to reinforcement learning to begin with, but it wasn’t to be.  Instead … Continue reading →

Looking over my predictions for the teenies from a year ago, they already look pretty lame. Take 1/3 off USA’s PPP GDP and you already get China, the latest Sony portable device has a 4 core processor, Intel’s latest set … Continue reading →

Well, well, another year is drawing to a close. That means it’s once again time to review what has happened and where things are going. It’s been a very eventful year for me, both personally and on the work front. … Continue reading →

Another great Singularity Summit. I liked the focus on neuroscience this time. I think it will be a major driving force behind AGI over the next 20 years. The talk by Demis Hassabis is the one to look for in … Continue reading →

This short film, The Third & The Seventh, by Alex Roman, is a great example of cutting edge computer graphics.  The airy elegant style reminds me a bit of Kubrick.  I’m not sure what impressed me the most: the wonderful … Continue reading →

I’ve decided to christen the next decade the teenies.  Firstly, I’ve still heard no other suggestions; secondly, it’s phonetically consistent with the noughties and the twenties; and thirdly, the name is so downright awfully bad it’s almost quite good.  So the … Continue reading →

The start of the Noughties for me was Y2K. It was a non-event, thanks, I might add, to people like me making ourselves mentally unwell fixing endless date issues in crappy database code. Next was the massive dot com crash … Continue reading →