vetta project

My thesis is now available at lulu.com.  As promised, it’s at cost, which works out at $18 plus shipping.  It’s all under a creative commons licence and in a few months I’ll put the pdf online for free.  I’ll also write a post shortly on all the tricks involved in publishing on lulu.com with LaTeX, [...]

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This morning I received the wonderful news that I’ve won the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - Canada Academic Prize for 2008!
The award is in “recognition of [my] efforts to improve AI theory” and is worth CAD $10,000.  This will certainly help my budget over the next two years while I study at the Gatsby [...]

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Currently the foremost thinker on the ethics and safety of artificial general intelligence is Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.  On a few occasions I have tried to read some of his writings on this topic.  Every time, however, I would give up after about ten pages.  I found the ideas [...]

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I don’t trust philosophical arguments all that much. I think this comes from studying mathematics. To start with I try to see or feel a result and I then use this to either understand the essence of an existing proof, or to give me guidance in constructing a proof myself. I remember [...]

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Once again Kurzweil has hit the mainstream media: this time an article on the BBC. It’s currently the “most emailed” article on the website, so it’s getting a good share of attention. Although he influenced me strongly many years ago, I’m not a big fan of his writings since 2000. In my [...]

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Intelligence is the general ability to achieve goals. When an intelligent agent tries to achieve a goal, two factors matter: Firstly how many resources it can bring to bear on the problem, and secondly, how effectively it can use these resources. Thus, if a very powerful agent were to try to achieve some [...]

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Trying to prove that an AI is friendly is hard, trying to define “friendly” is hard, and trying to prove that you can’t prove friendliness is also hard. Although it is not the desired possibility, I suspect that the latter is actually the case. Of course if I want to really establish this, [...]

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One of my recent posts to my old blog has generated quite a bit of interest. As I wasn’t able to reply to the comments due to the blog being broken, I’m going to repost it here along with the comments.
In case the title of the post gives the wrong impression, I’d also like [...]

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