Sorry about this slip up, and thanks again to all 75 of you who have purchased copies. If there are any further problems please let me know.

UPDATE: after a little reorganisation, a colleague of mine here at the Gatsby Unit, Demis Hassabis will be talking about how systems neuroscience can inform AGI design. I’ll then give a follow up talk on measuring machine intelligence.

“In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering chose as one of its grand challenges to reverse-engineer the human brain. When will this happen? Some are predicting that the first wave of results will arrive within the decade, propelled by rapid advances in both brain science and computer science. This sounds astonishing, but it’s becoming increasingly plausible. So plausible, in fact, that the great race to reverse-engineer the brain is already triggering a dispute over historic firsts. The backdrop for the debate is one of dramatic progress.”

You can find the whole article here. For those who don’t know, Sejnowski is one of the most respected neuroscientists in the world.

It’s certainly been quite a week. Last Friday I headed back to my old home town of Lugano in Switzerland for the AGI 10 conference. I had a great time. In a way it was a bit like the Singularity Summit for me in that the talks were not where the interesting stuff was going on — all the action was taking place in the coffee breaks, over lunch and over dinner. That’s when you get to see what people really think!

Overall, my (biased) summary is that there seemed to be a greater sense of focus among the community than I’ve picked up before, plenty of passion and even a tiny touch of excitement creeping in there. That said, there also seemed to be some significant disconnections in the community, with instances of people being shocked to discover than what they thought was a discredited minority view wasn’t a minority view at all. To me that’s a good sign that the conference is working. Another theme that I picked up was how central Hutter’s AIXI and my work on the universal intelligence measure has become: Marcus and I were being cited in presentations so often that by the last day many of the speakers were simply using our first names. As usual there were plenty of people who disagree with our approach, however it was clear that our work has become a major landmark in the area.

I think the most important missing ingredient of the conference was a lack of discussion about AGI safety issues. From what I recall, during the main conference presentations Mark Waser was the only person to directly take on the topic. During the final workshop session Roko Mijic appeared out of the blue and gave a talk on Yudkowsky style Friendly AI. A show of hands revealed that while half the audience had heard of SIAI, few had heard of CEV. Roko then kicked off his talk by describing the creation of an AGI as likely being worse than the Sicilian mafia combined with grey goo. It’s hard to say what the audience who’d never encountered CEV etc. were thinking at this point, but I’d hazard a guess that they’d written him off as some kind of paranoid crackpot. In any case, what did become clear is that a sizable part of the AGI community is not familiar with FAI thinking.

FHI, Oxford

On Wednesday I gave a talk at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, along with Robin Hanson. My talk was on what neuroscience can teach us about how to build an AGI. Going by all the praise afterwards, it seems that my talk went over very well indeed. I have to say that it was a real pleasure for me too: the topic is a passion of mine and getting to visit Oxford, meet everybody there and stay in one of the colleges was great fun. I often complain when visiting churches (to admire the building and art) that it’s a pity that researchers don’t get such nice buildings. Oxford seems to be one of the exceptions in this regard.

I’m a bit busy for blogging at the moment, but I will be at AGI 2010 this weekend. I’ll also be giving a talk at Oxford next week on how developments in theoretical neuroscience are giving us significant insights into AGI design.

Another interesting paper is Coherence Potentials: Loss-Less All-or-None Network Events in the Cortex by Thiagarajan, Lebedev, Nicolelis and Plenz. They have evidence that above a certain threshold level of activity LFP information is sometimes transmitted across regions of cortex with surprisingly high fidelity.

Another cool recent paper is Rewarded Outcomes Enhance Reactivation of Experience in the Hippocampus by Singer and Frank.  They show that, well, basically what the title says.  This is not surprising, but until now there hasn’t been good evidence to show that this was happening.  If this can be replicated, and some people I know here are considering doing this, it would fill out another part of our understanding of reinforcement driven learning in the brain.

I’m coming across so many interesting neuroscience papers these days I can hardly keep up with reading them, let alone blogging about all of them.  The thing that amazes me is how the architecture of the brain is so logical — it almost looks designed.

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 cinematography, the fact that it’s entirely computer generated, or that one guy did it alone in his spare time — including putting the sound track together.  Be sure to watch it full screen and in high definition.

I’ve been scratching my head about these predictions for the last few days.  By and large, I feel like I’m just predicting the obvious — which is a bit of a let down.  However, when I look at the noughties, while the specific details were not predictable, the general trends were pretty obvious already in 2000.  So perhaps predicting the seemingly obvious is not such a bad idea.  And what seems obvious to me often is anything but obvious to others, indeed many will flatly disagree with my predictions.  So, here goes.  Hopefully these precitions are specific enough that I’ll be able to perform a decent analysis come 2020 to see how well I fared.

First up, things generally will become more energy efficient and we will see more solar power.  But overall not much will change in energy — we’ll keep on using oil and coal and pumping out lots of CO2.

Chinese GDP on a PPP basis will be roughly comparible to that of the US and the EU (i.e. within 25%).  India will be about half their size.  The UK and France won’t be in the top 10 countries anymore, though they will still like to think that they are.  China will become increasingly associated with luxury designer goods.

Computers will become about 50x faster, though I’m a bit nervous about this prediction.  Later in the decade we will have major trouble with silicon chip technology.  We might also see computer power overshoot general consumer demand which would spell serious trouble for the big chip manufactures.  Everything goes very multi-core, even your cell phone.  The graphics card market collapses due to them overshooting consumer demand* and possibly being subsumed by new CPUs.

All things internet and mobile will continue to grow.  Smart “phones” will become fully funcational computers.  You’ll be able to connect your smart phone to a large monitor, keyboard, mouse, projector etc., just like you’d do with a PC today.  It will even become your wallet as you’ll be able to use it to pay for things at the supermarket.  The expanding internet will swallow up most of TV and radio.  High definition video conferencing will become common, making distance collaboration significantly more natural.  High definition matters as it will allow people to have a wider field of view and to more clearly see facial expressions.

Machine learning will grow in importance due to ever increasing quantities of data, computer power, and better algorithms.  It mostly won’t be publically seen, however, much like how it’s heavily used in Google and a few financial and pharmaceutical companies at the moment.

Significant progress will be made in understanding the brain.  We will have a rough high level sketch of how the brain works, and some of its processes we will understand quite well.  We probably still won’t understand cortical function very well, that will take longer.

More groups will start AGI projects, particularly from 2015 onwards.  These groups will become increasingly mainstream, serious and well funded.  This will be driven by faster computers, better machine learning algorithms and a better understanding of the brain’s architecture.  Some of these groups will produce small AGIs that will learn to do some interesting things, but they will be nowhere near human level intelligence.  They will, however, be preparing the way for this.  Concern at the dangers of artificial intelligence will become less fringe but it won’t go mainstream.

In short, I’m predicting a bigger brighter expanded version of the last few years — nothing particularly radical.  I think the real significance of the teenies will be to lay the foundations for more important things to come.

* UPDATE 15/1/2010: I’ve thought a bit about the main criticism of my predictions above, namely that the graphics chip business will collapse.  As a result I’ve decided to soften my prediction.  I’m now thinking that 10 more years probably won’t be enough for it to collapse due to overshooting demand.  Going to 3D creates 2x the computational demand, going to higher resolution can create 5x demand, and better quality and more sophisticated graphics techniques can drive another 10x, maybe a bit more.  Overall this approximately 100x might be enough to drive demand through until the end of the teenies.  If a collapse does come, I think it will more likely be due to somebody like Intel getting aggressive and building cutting edge GPUs into their CPU chips thus making GPUs redundant.

It’s hard to believe that almost everybody was on dial-up internet in 2000, broadband existed, but it was slow and not many had it. The rise of blogging was interesting. To start with many more traditional media sources were freaking out about the idea that some 15 year old from his bedroom could get as much exposure as their latest newspaper article. Now blogging is just another part of the information ecosystem. Wikipedia: the encyclopedia’s went through the classic Ghandi stages of ignore, ridicule, attack and then lose. The iPod completely changed the music business, espeically combined with file sharing. Nobody I knew had DVD‘s before 2000, this was the decade they became big. Same for flatscreen monitors and TVs. I got a digital camera in 2000 when they were just coming out and still cost a fortune. During the Noughties they revolutionised photography. Wifi, nobody I knew had it in 2000, now it’s almost everywhere. Same for internet to the phone. Or text messages, that’s been quite a change. I remember when online banking was seen as strange and a bit risky, now it’s how many people do most of their banking. Google existed, but they really only became huge during this decade. Youtube, another big change in how many people used the internet. Same for Facebook. I still remember how people would react to my enthusiasm for open source software, basically it was seen as a hippy movement that wasn’t something that most serious business people would entertain. That certainly has changed. The iPhone revolutionised the smart phone industry.

In a nutshell, I’d say that the Noughties were all about a massive proliferation of digital communication. In a way the dot coms had roughly the right idea, but it took another decade for the vision to mature.

Outside of technology, 9/11, Bush and Iraq feature strongly in my mind. I think the rise of robotic weapons is something that is currently under appreciated. The rise of China and the way in which global warming went from fringe to mainstream were also significant. For me seeing a black man elected president of the US was one of the most surprising, and thrilling, things to happen in the last ten years. If you’d asked me in 2000 about the probability of that happening, I’d have put it at something like 1%. Was I grossly mis-calibrated, or was Obama really a rare event? I’m still not sure. Then finally we have the financial crisis and the continuing repercussions from that now. I can only presume that the next decade is likely to bring a similar amount of change. It should be an interesting time to be alive…

First question, what will we call the next decade? The “teens”? That seems kind of lame to me! Second question, what do you think are likely to be the changes of the coming decade? Are we in for some big surprises, or just a continuation of current trends?

I’ll be covering topics from my PhD thesis, such as the definition of intelligence, Solomonoff’s model of Induction, Hutter’s AIXI and more recent work such as the Monte Carlo approximation of AIXI by Veness et. al. I’ll also include a few thoughts on how recent discoveries in theoretical neuroscience might help guide work towards AGI.

You can find the event on facebook here, and the announcement of the event on the Extrobritannia list here.

Dressing as a witch, wizard, ghost, etc. is optional.

To visit the US from many countries one must now apply online to something called ESTA in order to obtain a so called “visa waiver”. We’ve been doing this for many years on the plane, recently it’s gone online and now you must to do it online before your travel. Knowing this, I googled for US visa waiver and up came a site for applying for US ESTA visa waivers online. I went through the usual process and at the end had to pay a processing fee. A few hours later I went to the site to see if I had been processed. Then I noticed a typo in the word “New Zewland”, weird. Then I saw a grammatical mistake in their faq, a simple mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Really strange. Oh oh… was this registration site for real?

So I went back to Google and searched again. The EIGHTH link that google returns when searching for “US visa waiver” is in fact the real US government site that you want. The service is free and I was approved in a few seconds. There is even a warning about the scam sites there: of course if you’re reading their warning you must already be on the right site! Anyway, there is now some shady group with money from me, all my credit card details and even my passport details. Bugger. At least I realised my mistake and made a real application and was accepted. It would have been much worse if it had caused me to miss gaining entry permission to the US and messed up my travels.

What’s really clever about this scam is that it might actually be legal. I can imagine that it’s possible to pay somebody to apply for a visa waiver for you, and this is the “service” these companies are providing. Of course, nobody who knew what they were doing would do that given that you have to provide the same information online in both cases, and one costs you money and you don’t know for sure if they will actually make the application for you. Indeed, in my case I suspect they will not as there were a few things on the real application form that they didn’t ask for. With tens of thousands of people going through this process each day I guess that these sites are making piles of money.

I think this is pretty morally dubious from Google’s perspective: they are taking money to put up a bunch of sponsored links that direct people to scam sites ahead of the real government site. I emailed Google saying that they were accepting money to promote scams, if they reply I’ll post it in the comments below.

UPDATE: The money did go out of my account, but then a few days later a reverse payment was made. I’m not really sure why. So at least it appears that I haven’t lost any money. Nevertheless, these are pretty shady characters and I’d rather not have given them all my details. As for Google, to date their response to my complaint has been silence. They are still taking money to promote links on their search engine that direct people to scam sites… that’s pretty evil by my books, and seemingly all the people I’ve since talked to agree.

Let’s start with what was going on in 1999: I had my first cell phone. Black and white LCD screen. No text messaging. I started working for Intelligenesis (later called Webmind, founded by Ben Goertzel). The machines we had were 500 MHz and had 256 MB of RAM. I discovered Google. Internet at home at 56k, but something like 256k at work. I was using Linux and was well aware of open source software. Quake was popular. Computers had CD drives, but DVD drives were starting to come out. Nobody had LCD monitors except on laptops. Dot.com boom was going crazy. The Matrix was a big hit.

Ok, so what would be the biggest surprise for 1999 me? I think the single biggest surprise would be that a black man had been elected president of the United States.  I thought it would be at least another generation or two before this would be possible.  The next most surprising thing would have been Wikipedia. Though given that Linux development was working well at the time, I guess with the right control structures in place it shouldn’t have been all that surprising.  Still, it continues to amaze me at just how good it in fact is.

Many other things seem to have been fairly predictable: internet got faster, bigger, computer specs all went up, people started watching video on the internet, voice and video chatting over the internet, more mobile internet… Would any of these things have surprised me in 1999?  I don’t think so.  Even the recent rise of social networking: I couldn’t have predicted what that would have looked like, but it’s not all that surprising.  Same for internet banking.  A lot of what seems to have been going on over the last 10 years is just the maturation of the internet and mobile devices.

What are the most surprising things for you over the last 10 years?

EDIT: Add to my list: free email service with almost 10 GB of storage (gmail), and Google street view.

The first is an editorial in Nature called A risk worth taking.  I think this quote sums it up, “Researchers long ago learned that the last people they should tell about their big ideas are their sources of financial support.”  It then goes on to describe the radical approach that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is taking to overcome this problem.  Good on them, but even if this works it only solves part of the problem: if you do obtain funding to undertake radical research and your research fails, which is rather likely, what then becomes of you?  Will you get the next job/grant, or will the guy who did less risky research and got some not-altogether-surprising results that were then published in a mainstream journal?

I know this dilemma.  I guess you could call me a Black Swan Researcher by nature.  I mostly do fairly conventional research because that’s at least close to what I’d really like to be doing, and it keeps me in this line of business by delivering semi-regular conventional results.  I think the only work I’ve ever done that was purely based on interest was the work on defining intelligence and the limits of prediction algorithms.  The rest has been selected based on some combination of interest and necessity.  I wondered if I’d ever fall in love with doing conventional research, and yeah, I do like it, but no, deep down I’m just far too radical.  It’s the stories of Black Swans in strange lands that get my eyes shining and it’s too much a part of my character to ever change.

One thing I admire about my PhD supervisor, Marcus Hutter, is his ability to successfully walk this line.  One of his strategies is to have a diversified portfolio of research that ranges from crazy stuff like AIXI and radical new ideas on model selection, to far more conventional work on… actually, come to think of it, most of his work is a bit radical!  I guess the point is that some of his work is high risk, while some is less so.  Thus, if some of his more risky ideas don’t work out, then he still has a bunch of less risky bits of research that almost certainly will produce publishable results.  It takes some real self discipline and planning to pull this off.  One method, that he used to enforce on me, was to “time box”, that is, to set a deadline for some research into some crazy idea.  If, after say a week of work, I didn’t have something fairly convincing to justify working more on the idea, it had to stop.  But during that week, I had free reign to go crazy.  That’s how I initially developed the limits of prediction work: I thought I had a workable idea, I came back a couple of weeks later and it seemed like it was going somewhere, and so I continued with it.  Other ideas didn’t work out and got stopped.  It takes self discipline, but I think it’s a really good idea.  Another approach that I’ve heard researchers talk about is to have ongoing high risk research, but to only allow it to occupy a specific amount of time each week.  Say, Fridays after lunch.  I remember reading that Andrew Wiles, the guy who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, did something like this due to the very high risk of failure with this ground breaking piece of work.

A related article, again from Emerson’s twitter feed, is the Physics World article In search of the black swans by Mark Buchanan.  As the article notes, “The publish-or-perish ethic, in particular, strongly rewards those scientists doing more or less routine technical work in established fields, and punishes more risky work exploring unproven ideas that may take a considerable period of time to reach maturity.”  I think this is especially true of AGI research.  With this kind of high risk but potentially high impact research, most of us can only play around at the edges if we want to keep our lines of funding in operation.  Somehow, science needs to get out of this conservative mindset and into a more risk tollerant culture.  The model suggested by the article is that of the venture captial companies in Silicon Valley where they expect most of their investments to fail, but to occasionally have huge successes that more than make up for the losses.  I particularly like the ideas on all this from the physicist Lee Smolin, but I’ll let you read the article for that and other thought provoking ideas.