You must be joking, right? I'm as much of a Carmack fan as anyone here, but overstating the skills of one personal hero does no good to anyone.
History books (for as long as those continue to exist) would cite AGI as his major contribution to society, and his name would be more renowned than Edison or Tesla. An Einstein. None of his other contributions will matter, as the machines will replace it all.
Just daydreaming, though.
It's hard to think of many famous scientists that weren't already well known in their field. Some stand out. Einstein, for example, had a fairly lackluster career until his Annus Mirabilis papers. Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves) bounced to and from various jobs. But largely, the idea of the brilliant outsider is like the 10x engineer. It exists, but is rare.
This little known fact is so embarrassing to some institutions [2], that they made up a new word "chymistry" in order to further obscure the issue and not outright admit the obvious.
[1] http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/newtons-works/alchem...
[2] https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/project/about.do
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Newton-Alchemist-Science-Enigma-Natur...
Is there a reason to expect that someone who wanted to investigate the laws of the composition and reactivity of matter, in the late 1600s/early 1700s, would end up studying chemistry rather than alchemy? Sure, Boyle had introduced “chemistry” as an idea in 1661 (before Newton was born), but I imagine that alchemy would still be quite active in the late 1600s as an academic “field”, with many contributors already late in their careers studying it; whereas chemistry would have been just getting off the ground, without many potential collaborators.
Your point has been brought up before -usually as an attempt by established institutions to whitewash and explain away Newton's idiosyncrasies- but there is no evidence whatsoever to back it. On the contrary, what we know (and there is a lot we do know thanks to his writings) about Newton and alchemy absolutely indicates him being immersed in the Hermetic worldview and alchemical paradigm. Clearly, Newton was practicing alchemy not as a way to look for novel techniques or as a way to bridge the old and new worlds together, but primarily because he was a devout believer.
Newton -a profound genius- stood at the threshold of two worlds colliding. He was also a groundbreaking scientist in optics/mechanics/mathematics. He was aware of Boyle's chemical research. Knowing all of that, he _absolutely_ chose to dedicate his life to alchemy. That is immensely interesting.
"Much of Newton's writing on alchemy may have been lost in a fire in his laboratory, so the true extent of his work in this area may have been larger than is currently known. Newton also suffered a nervous breakdown during his period of alchemical work, possibly due to some form of chemical poisoning (perhaps from mercury, lead, or some other substance)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studie...
"Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he has done is much the better part." - Gottfried Leibniz
For years, English scientist Isaac Newton and German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz both claimed credit for inventing the mathematical system sometime around the end of the seventeenth century.
Now, a team from the universities of Manchester and Exeter says it knows where the true credit lies — and it's with someone else completely.
The "Kerala school," a little-known group of scholars and mathematicians in fourteenth century India, identified the "infinite series" — one of the basic components of calculus — around 1350."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/calculus-created-in-india...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_School_of_Astronomy_and...
However, calculus proper (derivatives and integrals of general functions, and the connections between them) did not exist until Newton and Leibniz. Other mathematicians made important steps towards it earlier in the 1600s, and if Newton and Leibniz had not existed, others would have figured it out around the same time.
I'm not a historian, but a few months ago I spent some time analysing one of Fibonacci's trigonometric tables (chords, not sine or sine-differences). Aryabhata's sine-differences were much earlier.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I think a big reason there are few in AGI is due to PR success from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and friends. They make a good case that things are unlikely to end well for us humans if there's actually a serious attempt at AGI now that proves successful without having solved or mitigated the alignment problem first.
The problem of ensuring that the AI's values are aligned with ours. One big fear is that an AI will very effectively pursue the goals we give it, but unless we define those goals (and/or the method by which it modifies and creates its own goals) perfectly -- including all sorts of constraints that a human would take for granted, and others that are just really hard to define precisely -- we might get something very different from what we actually wanted.
Trying to make the AGI's sensors wirehead-proof is the exact same problem as trying to make the AGI's objective function align properly with human desires. In both cases, it's a matter of either limiting or outsmarting an intelligence that's (presumably) going to become much more intelligent than humans.
Hutter wrote some papers on avoiding the wireheading problem, and other people have written papers on making the AGI learn values itself so that it won't be tempted to wirehead. I wouldn't be surprised if both also mitigate the alignment problem, due to the equivalence between the two.
>A 2017 survey of AGI categorized forty-five known "active R&D projects" that explicitly or implicitly (through published research) research AGI, with the largest three being DeepMind, the Human Brain Project, and OpenAI.
Hassabis and DeepMind have a fairly organised approach of looking at how real brains work and trying to model different problems like Atari games then Go and recently Starcraft. Not quite sure what's next up.
Or hated as the name of the man who's opened the Pandora box and doomed us all.
Just daydreaming and having a nightmare.
You never know. Fresh eyes can sometimes see what others may not.
But it's still a fascinating endeavor.
I understand that it's a big assumption to make -- that a benevolent AI could be constructed. But under that assumption, why not have a benevolent dictator in the form of an AI?
If the benevolent AI ruler(s) restrained themselves to allow for humans to flourish, then okay. Assuming it could be constructed benevolently.
With AI, it would try its best to preserve/enhance/spread itself forever. And its best might be much better than our best...
We already live in that world, with large institutional bureaucracies playing the role of paperclip-maximizing AGIs.
It's pretty wretched when you are in their path.
How much worse could it be?
If Skynet determines we're the problem (wars, famine, global warming, inequality, non-cooperation etc), I'm losing counter-arguments by the day.
Just think about that name for a second. He might really be onto something.
I must admit that I often watch his interviews because he invites interesting people, but I can't help but cringe when Rogan gives his opinions.
EDIT: Ok, I suppose I should back my claim up.
Joe Rogan has pushed the “DMT is produced in our pineal gland” narrative, but there is no evidence to back this up. I’ll report a comment I made elsewhere and also link a separate reddit discussion which cites various sources. I will note that, in fairness to Joe, he said this a while ago, so perhaps he’s not so quick to jump the gun now, I don’t know, I don’t listen to his podcasts, but perhaps he’s better now.
“We all have it in our bodies” — This is an often repeated myth that has never been proven. The myth originates from Rick Strassman’s work, who himself has said that he only detected a precursor, not DMT itself and that everything else he wrote about it was hypothetical speculation. There have, apparently, been recent studies that found DMT synthesised in rat brains, but it has not yet been proven whether this translates to humans or not. Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Indre Viskontas stated that while DMT shares a similar molecular structure to seritonin and melatonin, there is no evidence that it is made inside the brain. Similarly, Dr. Bryan Yamamoto of the neurosciencedepartment at the University of Toledo said: “I know of no evidence that DMT is produced anywhere in the body. It’s chemical structure us similar to serotonin and melatonin, but their endogenous actions are very different from DMT.”
This reddit discussion also links various sources, although I didn’t check them all myself: https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/mwz2h/dmt_has_nev...
Anyone who speaks on the record about their hobbies for thousands of hours will say some things that are incorrect. He might not understand something, and he is usually pretty humble about his knowledge level.
But "spreading misinformation" is something that people do because they are intentionally misleading others, or have something to gain.
I don't think he is benefiting much from the pineal gland narrative. And it sounds like from the information you cited, it may even be correct, even if its premature to state it as fact.
Regarding the pineal gland, it might be true, but it hasn’t been proven and multiple neuroscientists have stated that while DMT is similar to compounds found in the brain, it still functions quite differently and they have never seen any evidence to suggest that DMT exists in our bodies. There was a study finding it in mice brains, so it may still turn out that we have it in ours, but it’s definitely premature to make any such assumptions and definitely premature to repeat the trope.
These things are all true even if the guest or their ideas are extremely controversial. Maybe Joe Rogan is just smart in a way that's different to the way that you are smart.
Figuring out the basics of the math and how to use whatever tools they use at FB is doable in a week.
Do I deserve to be paid for 5 years for something that may not work? "Deserving" something doesn't have much meaning: we, the humans, merely transform solar energy into some fluff like stadiums and cruise ships. Getting paid just means getting a portion of that stream of solar energy. There is no reason I need to "deserve it" as it's unlimited and doesn't belong to anyone. A better question to ask is how can we change our society so that all, especially young, people would get a sufficient portion of resources to not think about paying bills.
Chances to make a breakthru are small, but that doesn't matter. It's a big numbers game: if chances are 1 to million, we let 1 billion people try and see 1000 successes. The problem currently is that we have these billions of people, but they are forces by silly constraints of our society to non stop solve fictional problems like paying rent.
Take Albert Einstein as an example, who arguably made one of the largest leap in physics with his theory of general relativity. He never stopped publishing during that time.
Not quite. When you are a professor, you essentially become a manager for a group of researchers. You don't really do research yourself. Therefore, your main obligation becomes finding money to pay these researchers. So in reality you can only support the research someone is willing to pay for (via grants, scholarships, etc).
So I definitely wouldn’t dismiss all papers as pointless, but there certainly is a large percentage that are, enough that you can’t simply accept a published papers results without reproducing it yourself.
Source: Commenter name is DBZ character
wasn't the first time John did what he did. and it's not the usual kind of learning either. he was learning by first principles. i truly love this idea of replaying in your own mind what went on when something was discovered (or at least come close to it).
contrast that with how ML & AI are taught nowadays: thrown into a Jupyter notebook with all FAANG libraries loaded for you...
edit: to be clear, all I'm saying is he can catch up to the body of research already out there quicker than the average bear, and he's shown a real knack for designing solutions and being crazy productive. I'm not pretending he's gunna be publishing insane novel research anytime soon, just that I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up being a real voice in the field.
What are not basically the same thing are "he started seriously contributing to this kind of problem after a week in the woods" and "he spent a week in the woods a year ago and is ready to start contributing now. A year after that week in the woods."