Give me presents!

Posted on 10 November, 2008 by Shane

Today is my birthday and as such I’ve decided to demand presents!  Lots of presents!  Gimme gimme gimme!

Now, I don’t have much use for material things, so they don’t interest me.  (Ok, so a life long stipend to allow me to work on what I think really needs to be done would be useful…)  Besides, from a purely practical perspective, I don’t want more heavy things to have to cart with me to London next year.  No, I want something more valuable and enlightening (and light).  I want your wisdom.

Here’s the deal: Give me a suggestion, a pearl of wisdom, or just something you think I really should consider doing, or changing, or what ever.  It can be as specific or general as you like.  It could be something I’ve never heard before, or something you’ve told me a million times but I always seem to ignore.  But just one thing!  My part of the deal is that over the next two months while I’m in New Zealand I will do my best to put my prior beliefs aside and seriously consider each of your gifts.  That’s the deal.

I’ve already sent a similar request to a few friends and have received some gifts, but I thought I’d also throw it out to a wider audiance.

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AGI: To create, or not to create?

Posted on 7 September, 2008 by Shane

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 progress!  On the other hand, many of these people, often the very same people, believe that the development of a powerful AGI might well spell the end of humanity.  Hssss, booo!  I’ll admit to being one of these somewhat contradicted people myself.

Now, I understand that a really wonderfully nice AGI is probably a very good thing, and a flawed one is probably bad news.  We can all support efforts to push AGI towards the more desirable types of outcomes.  But what about AGI research in general?  That is, the work that goes into trying to figure out how to make artificial systems more powerful and general, in other words, more intelligent.  Is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing?

More pointedly: Imagine that you seriously thought that you might be able to build the first AGI.  Other people might think you’re deluded, and maybe they are right.  Nevertheless, from where you stand it looks like you have a real chance of making it happen.  Would you go ahead and actually try to do it?

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Comprehending the scale of the human brain

Posted on 14 August, 2008 by Shane

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 to, and just try to get a sense of the vastness of this for a moment…ok?

Now, try to imagine 20 times this scale.  A street with 100 people on it now has 2,000 people.  Regular two story family homes are now 40 story apartment blocks.  Big skyscrapers now have 2,000 floors and are 10 km high, taller than Mt. Everest.  Or if you prefer to go out, rather than up, take New York and drop another 19 of them around the United States.  Then do the same for Los Angeles… and so on for every city and every town, and continue this way across the whole world.  The planet would be burried under a seething mass of humanity.

That’s 120 billion people, approximately the number of neurons in your brain.

Now give each of these 120 billion people a cell phone, and load each one up with something like 5,000 phone numbers, mostly of people who live in the individual’s area.  Get everybody on this planet to start sending messages to each other.  Some only slowly send messages, others are busy sending 200 messages a second to all 5,000 people that they know.  Now let this system start to adapt in order to control which messages go where and when…

That’s about the scale of your brain.

When people say they can’t believe that the human brain is “just a machine”, I suspect they are suffering from a lack of imagination — have they seriously tried to wrap their mind around how unbelievably profoundly gigantic this machine actually is?

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An imitation test for moral capacity

Posted on 9 August, 2008 by Shane

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 doesn’t derive from any single unifying principle.  Rather, this function is a mishmash of things and even we don’t really know what our own function is, in the sense that we are unable to write down an exact and complete formulation.  It’s just something that we intuitively use.

I’m not convinced that ethics can’t be derived from some deeper unifying principle.  I’m also not convinced that it can, lest you misunderstand me.  What I do accept is that if this is possible then finding such a principle and convincingly arguing for it is likely to be difficult in the extreme, and probably not something that is likely to happen before the singularity.  Nevertheless, I haven’t yet seen any argument so devastating to this possibility that I’m willing to move it from being extremely difficult to certainly impossible.  Any system of ethics that does derive from some unifying metaethical principle is almost certainly going to be different to our present (western?) ethical notions.  I think some degree of this is acceptable, given that our ethical ideas do change a bit over time.  Furthermore, no matter how human we try to make the ethical system of a powerful AGI, post-singularity we are still going to be faced with ethical challenges that our pre-singularity ethics were never set up to deal with.  Thus, our ethics are going to have to be modified and updated in order to remain somewhat consistent and viable, otherwise we’ll end up with this kind of nonsense.

Continue reading →

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2.4 Tera FLOPS per card

Posted on 14 July, 2008 by Shane

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 FLOPS.

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LaTeX and lulu.com

Posted on 10 July, 2008 by Shane

So you’ve finished writing your thesis, your magnum opus. Next step, get it printed as a book for the world to admire. Of course, being the misunderstood genius that you are, no professional publisher will want to touch your great achievement.  Never fear, the internet age is here! So you gather up your LaTeX  files and head off to lulu.com, only to find that lulu has no idea about LaTeX. A search of the lulu help system literal returns no results.  Google returns fragmented and in many cases possibly out of date suggestions. If this sounds like you, read on.

Continue reading →

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Machine Super Intelligence

Posted on 10 July, 2008 by Shane


Support independent publishing: buy this book on Lulu.

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, in case you plan on doing something similar.

Table of Contents

Continue reading →

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Kolmogorov, Solomonoff, AIXI etc. questions

Posted on 25 June, 2008 by Shane

Many people seem to have questions about Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction, algorithmic probability theory, AIXI, the universal intelligence measure and so on.  I don’t always have time to watch all the email lists where these things get discussed, but if you do have any questions, concerns, etc. that you’d like to put to me, feel free to post a question below and I’ll try to answer it.

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SIAI Canada Academic Prize for 2008

Posted on 23 June, 2008 by Shane

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 Unit in London.  So, thank you to SIAI Canada, and to all the Canadians whose donations made this money available!

Speaking of my research, after a long weekend of final edits, corrections, formatting, indexing, embedding fonts and other complexity (I’ll write a blog post about what I had to do at some point), I’ve finally uploaded my thesis “Machine Super Intelligence” to lulu.com and have ordered a test copy.  Once I’ve checked that everything is ok I’ll let you know where copies can be ordered.  Copies should be USD $18 plus shipping for a 200 page casewrap hardcover.  Probably about in a month…

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Dr. Legg and the Gatsby Unit

Posted on 17 June, 2008 by Shane

This morning I passed my PhD defence… making me now Dr. Legg.  Soon I’ll upload my thesis “Machine Super Intelligence” to lulu.com where you will be able to pick up a printed copy at cost if you’re interested.

And in other news, I’ve been awarded a grant to study machine learning and theoretical neuroscience at the Gatsby Unit, University College London.  I should start that in January and be there for two years.  For the meantime I’ll remain at the Swiss Finance Institute working on portfolio choice models.

Posted in Life | 8 Comments