The third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence will be taking place in Lugano, Switzerland from Friday the 5th to Monday the 8th of March (the picture on the front page of my website is of Lugano). The keynote speaker is the famous reinforcement learning researcher Rich Sutton, and it seems that the inventor of [...]
My Halloween lecture has been uploaded to youtube. The basic outline is:
* what is intelligence?
* Solomonoff induction
* Hutter’s AIXI
* Monte Carlo AIXI (here’s the missing video of it playing pac-man)
* universal intelligence measure
* what neuroscience can teach us about AGI design
* early 2020’s: the Halloween scenario
You can get the slides here. I [...]
With the summit still fresh in my mind I thought I’d put a bit of a summary together — or perhaps more a collection of random thoughts and observations. For a less personal overview, read the Reason magazine article.
What I will remember most clearly about this summit was Peter Thiel. Firstly, the [...]
While I was visiting Marcus Hutter at ANU a month or so ago, I got talking to one of his students, Joel Veness, who’s working on making computable approximations to AIXI. Joel has a background in writing Go algorithms so is perhaps perfect for the job. I saw recently that the Monte Carlo [...]
From time to time people contact me wanting to know what I think about whether they should donate money to SIAI. My usual answer is something like, “I am not involved with what happens inside the organisation so I don’t have any inside knowledge, just what I, and presumably you, have read online. Based on [...]
We recently had a visitor to the Gatsby Unit talk about his work in reinforcement learning, in particular the use of planning and forward models to speed up the learning of difficult tasks. The substance of his talk was good, but that’s not what I want to talk about: it was the motivation he gave [...]
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 cerebral cortex it would be able to allocate 50 bytes of RAM and 700 calculations [...]
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 own science fiction, but then taking it a step further by convincing yourself to actually [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]