Author Archives: Shane

Neil Armstrong

“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.

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Goodbye 2011, hello 2012

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

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AIQ

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

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Sutton on human level AI

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

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Technological themes

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

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Goodbye 2010

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

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Summit 2010

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

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Short film by Alex Roman

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

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The Teenies

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

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The Noughties

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

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