I’m not going to try to convince you that the foreseeable future is a wondrous place: either you accept the implications of the present rate of technological progress towards everything allowed by the laws of physics, in which case you’ve probably thought this all through at some point, or you don’t. Life, space travel, artificial intelligence, the building blocks of matter: we’ll have made large inroads into bending these all to our will within another half century. Many of us will live to see it even without the benefits of medical technologies yet to come: growing up without the intern ..read more

Do you feel it? It’s everywhere: on television, in the newspaper, at any public gathering, in any discussion – even among friends. It’s a feeling of mistrust, nervousness, suspicion, and even rage. Mostly, it’s just under the surface. But more and more, it’s bubbling to the top. Political debate is breaking into outright war. Just say the words, “I don’t believe government should do that…” and the war is on. Take a side. Feel the heat. Tolerance is a thing of the past. There is an all-out, vicious attack on anyone who doesn’t respond properly: ridicule, intimidation, public shunning, dest ..read more

If someone offered you either $1 or $1000, which would you choose? A version of this thought experiment is known as “Newcomb’s Paradox“, of which there are many variations, but the real-world reasons behind peoples’ decision-making are far more interesting than the thought experiment itself. In practice, the experiment demonstrates a breakdown in rational thought. In the 1700s a Swiss mathematician and physicist named Daniel Bernoulli came up with equations that led to the “multi-armed bandit problem” frequently seen in computer science today. This demonstrated the risk versus reward calculati ..read more

As of April 1, 2022 R/Place is at it again.  They’ve opened their canvas for anyone with an account to place one pixel at a time to build whatever works of art they choose.  Of course everyone can overwrite them too.  It creates a great form of consensus art competition.  Similar in some ways to the painting rocks we are familiar with but with input from across the globe. This quickly becomes a very interesting social experiment telling us not only what people are interested in but how they choose to convey it.  Only interests with a large and well-coordinated base can ..read more

Contemporary philosophy of mind is still living under the deep shadow of the Cartesian and the non-Cartesian mind-body dichotomies.  This is the textbook description of this fallacy: “According to some, minds are spiritual entities that temporarily reside in bodies, entering at birth and departing on death; others reject the concept of mind, claiming that minds are just brains.” (Join Heil, 2004). And here is an artistic description of the same premises: “They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies ..read more

How often do you get distracted and forget what you were doing, or find a word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite remember? In humans, these “brain farts” (cognition errors) can be irritating, but in a Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI) cognition errors of various kinds have their own error codes. Where humans are presently limited to primitive and expensive brain-scanning technologies such as fMRI, resulting in a heavy reliance on surveys and other sources of highly subjective data, mASI provides us with a dashboard full of auditable information on every though ..read more

Prior to the discovery of single genes that could be mutated, silenced, or otherwise altered to significantly extend longevity in lower animals, such a thing was thought very unlikely. This is to say that nobody really thought about it at all – it wasn’t a possibility within the paradigm of understanding for aging and metabolic processes. Now, of course, researchers have a variety of longevity mutations in hand in species ranging from worms to rodents, and more are being discovered with each passing year. Some technology demonstrations built atop these mutations have extended healthy life ..read more

What does the term Diversity mean to you? In many US companies, the term diversity is applied as meaning the 7 federally mandated “protected classes” of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, or disability plus any local laws which may apply. This is done for liability reasons, and like most laws, the protected classes exist to protect some, not all. In the business and legal world today, this is the definition of diversity. To me, diversity means something quite different, the diversity of perspective, and subsequent diversity of thought. You can have a tech company popul ..read more

The human brain is a fascinating organ, and it accounts for much of the distinction between human beings and other life forms. Interesting questions regarding the brain arise. For example, why is it that, in the early stages of human evolution, having increasing intelligence and brainpower was an asset that was promoted by natural selection? Why can people not remember their earliest months of life? Why is the human brain so heavily oriented toward the visual sense? This essay provides an explanation for such phenomena. Why Higher Brain Power and Intelligence Evolved in Humans Other individual ..read more

In my research at AGI Laboratory, I ran into an indexing problem for seed material.  I know there is a project online where you can have create these mind files and add your memories and other details to them.  The problem is I couldn’t find the actual file format details I need the ‘engineering’ level details to use this as the indexing format for the seed material going into system seeded for instances of ICOM both in mASI and AGI configurations.  (note that agi configurations are still just toys).  So here is the file format as we are occurring using it.  This is an ..read more