Category Archives: Uncategorized

Creating deliberately evil AGI

It was just a matter of time before somebody started working on something like this.  Amusement aside, I’m impressed that Prof. Bringsjord managed to make a magazine as serious as Scientific American with this topic. In order to make a … Continue reading

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Most surprising thing since 1999?

I just read this article on the scale of time by Mike Treder. Part the way through it has an interesting question: What would surprise a person from the year 2000 most about the year 2010? As I don’t know … Continue reading

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Black swan research

A month or so ago I became a “twit”, in internet speak.  I didn’t really see the point in Twitter, but given that it’s the new big thing in internet land I figured that the only way to understand it … Continue reading

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The innovator’s dilemma

The way in which technological change occurs in industries has always interested me. One quite well known book on this subject is “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen. Here’s a nice post on a friend’s blog that summarises the … Continue reading

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Tick, tock, tick, tock…

I recently read about IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer that will be operational in 2011.  It will perform 20 Peta FLOPS and have 1.6 Peta bytes of RAM.  To put that in perspective: if it were to attempt to simulation a human … Continue reading

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Learning to predict the future

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the prediction of the future.  Many people really enjoy doing this and come up with all sorts of wild speculations.  It’s kind of like having the liberty to write your … Continue reading

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AGI: To create, or not to create?

People interested in the technological singularity often have strangely contradictory attitudes regarding AGI development.  On one hand, progress towards AGI in terms of hardware, software, design and theory is all very exciting and generally super cool.  Yay, all hail AGI … Continue reading

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Comprehending the scale of the human brain

Imagine the world: all the countries, all the towns, all the cities, all the mega cities, and all the 6 billion people living in them.  Think about all the places you’ve been too, and all the places you haven’t been … Continue reading

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An imitation test for moral capacity

Yudkowsky has been posting a lot on Overcoming Bias recently about his theory of metaethics.  Today he posted a summary of sorts.  Essentially he seems to be saying that morality is a big complex function computed by our brain that … Continue reading

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2.4 Tera FLOPS per card

Remember when I was raving about nVidia’s new GTX 280 graphics card that crunches 1 Tera FLOPS? Yeah, well, that was 3 weeks ago. Today, Radeon’s new HD 4870 X2 graphics card has 1600 stream processors that crunch 2.4 Tera … Continue reading

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