darkmighty

Have you ever experienced or met someone with schizophrenia?

It is hell.

Not only for them but often for those who care about them. It's not about a rosy, whacky persons that the society whimsically outcasts. It's often legitimately tortured people that almost always need serious treatment and constant care, otherwise they risk falling into a very dark abyss.

They often wind up hobos or sometimes in prisons/asylums because they don't have treatment and a very supportive family available, falling in disrepair, not because an evil plot of society.

If this condition were the price to pay for breakthroughs, I'd consider the price too high. But indeed it isn't -- there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out meaningful work. It's a massive hindrance, fogging your view of the world and yourself. Often cited cases like John Nash actually stopped being able to conduct any good work once the disease got hold of them. There are countless examples of extremely brilliant people productive through their lives that never showed signs of delusion, and almost no cases of delusional persons doing good work.

This disease largely embodies the obscurantism, mysticism, fear, distrust, that scientific enlightenment was idealized to fight against. I can't wait for its root causes to be found and it completely eradicated (along with MS, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia, please).

Well in this case they have the ground truth as comparison, so the error can be evaluated.

> The resulting images look nice but there's no guarantee that all the extra detail visible in those images is genuine detail and not just "believable" data filled in by the net

It depends on the error metric specified as the objective. If the network is minimizing squared error to ground truth, then it won't generate believable but untrue data, since its objective wouldn't reward this behavior. If the network is trained against adversarial distinguishability however (with the noisy prior), then this becomes a more or less inevitable issue.

So both can be chosen depending on what you want: certainty that the content is semantically equivalent, or just good looking images.

I mean they're doing pretty well by Turing's original definition. I agree chatbots using traditional techniques (not sure about newer LSTM chatbots) are not too impressive, just illustrating that we've had to adjust the definition. That's by definition moving the target.

In fact I'm quite sure Turing would be quite impressed by good recent chatbots.

Try this one: https://www.pandorabots.com/mitsuku/

From the point of view of the 1940s, this would seem really close to a veritable "Thinking machine"! Although I'm sure he'd recognize a few things are still missing to fully replicating human behavior (or going beyond).

First of all you can't brute force the chess. Algorithms that beat high level chess players are non-trivial, even with todays computers. In fact top engines today all use carefully designed heuristics hand-crafted by experts -- this notion that Big Blue, Deep fritz, etc were dumb "brute force search engines" is a misleading tale.

Second, in the 70s there was no computer power even for quite clever algorithms (that probably didn't exist yet) to beat top chess players. Chess was seen as a grand goal requiring utmost intelligence -- while it is obvious in hindsight, at the time the intuition was probably that extremely "intelligent" humans were required to play chess, and in fact the best chess players were among the most "intelligent" persons -- it was a clear exclusively intellectual task that few people were competent at. So many believed that chess would be one of the greatest challenges to AI (the clarity of the rules added convenience of research and implementation). Things like walking didn't seem intellectually demanding, so the common sense was that it is probably "easy". In fact today we know that navigating a bipedal robot in a simple environment through visual recognition is vastly more difficult computationally than playing chess well, it is only easier for us because we have highly specialized circuitry in our brain hat is well matched to those tasks. Our brain wetware is not very well matched to playing chess.

Also chatbots have been doing pretty well on Turing's original definition of a Turing test, ever since about 10 years ago. But now it is being argued that Turing didn't really see the "loopholes" they believe the bots are exploiting, and are coming up with more strict requirements for a Turing test.

That's totally in line with Tao's argument that every time we approach a major AI goal, suddenly it is not AI anymore, because there's nothing magical about it, just boring old technology. And human brains are magical, right?

Until every obscure niche capability of humans has been dominated in every possible way by AIs many won't want to concede that it really is AI. And even when it does become better than us in every possible way, I suspect a few will still find arbitrary reasons why it really isn't AI/AGI, e.g. because it is not organic, because the computer lacks a body, because it lacks a "soul", etc.

By understanding he means translating speech to text, I guess. We have speech-to-text systems that are better than the median human in the native language now. Quite amazing, given how central auditory language processing is in our cognition. And most people don't think it's "AI" (and certainly not anywhere near AGI). That's a good example of how AI is a moving target IMO.

In this case there is no contract. The websites are really giving their things away for free, only with the expectation , but no guarantee, that some users will see ads. The societally agreed upon principles, that constitute the law, place no responsibility on the receiver of free content (an easily justifiable principle in fact).

They have all the right and power to refuse to give their content away for free. You have all the right and power not to look at their ads, to preemptively strip them from your view, or to modify the page you yourself will visualize in any way you see fit.

Think of newspapers given away for free on the streets. I can make whatever collage I want into what I received for free, it's absurd to insinuate my reading habit could constitute a crime.

Of course, since you're being given something for free, there might be cases where you're ethically compelled to retribute (in particular when you enjoy the content, believe it is useful, etc). But here you should be able to chose how to contribute -- if you're restricted to contribute only by viewing obnoxious ads I would say it's perfectly ethical to refuse to do so.

What I do is support the Patreon account of several content creators I enjoy. I know my little donation has an impact on them, enabling them to keep producing great content. Most websites that I find useful don't offer particularly compelling media of retribution, and I feel my cost to them isn't significant at all. The marginal cost of my usage of Google search engine to Google is quite small, I would guess thousands or millionths of a cent per query. I don't need to worry about donating to Google. They have other ways of generating revenue from me, like the query information itself, and other services like the Android App store.

"The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it."

While I'm sure most profits/margin come from first/business class, I think that's only viable because the large number of economic class passengers help marginalize the cost per passenger. To give a concrete example, suppose the airline is flying 20 business seats per flight. The cost of those seats to the airline if it had no economy class, and it were forced to allocate an entire plane for them would be immense -- marginal the cost per seat would be (illustration) ~Airplane_Cost/20+Accomodation_Cost. Now suppose a current airline will carry perhaps 200 economy class passengers where it makes 0 profit. The marginal cost of the business class seats to the airline now will be much lower, something like ~Airplane Cost/(200+20)+Accomodation_Cost.

So the airline don't need economy class to make profit, they need them to create economies of scale that bring down their cost for the high margin customers.

Your claim is also largely true for drug trials. There is also huge variability due to genetics, cultural placebo response, variations in diet among cultures, cultural or individual symptom expression, and so on. Every science faces an enormous amount of confounding variables.

Doesn't mean we should stop doing drug trials, or economic trials in this case. Well designed experiments can be informative, even though care must be taken to generalize them.

The theory is that space-time is infinitely large, and there is an infinite amount of energy within it (afaik).

Actually the theory (General Relativity)is that a closed universe should have measurable positive curvature, unless it has some weird topology that isn't "naturally" expected (although everything consistent is possible of course). We measure a curvature approximately 0, so that would imply the universe is in fact infinite. Since it is also expected to be isotropic (have approx. the same distribution properties everywhere and in any direction), then it also would have infinite energy. There's no proof of this infiniteness of course, it is only the most natural expectation (most natural of course is always controversial since some physicists probably don't like infinite universes). What we observe, and what can affect us in any way, is of course the 'Observable Universe', and up to its edge it appears boringly uniform (except for a minor anomaly[1]), arranging in a web of huge filaments[2] that extend across its entirety.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament

But our universe is believed to be isotropic, and it has positive energy density everywhere, so it seems that should imply infinite total energy.

I also find Tegmark's (and to an extent Schmidhuber's) multiverse theories attractive, I'm quite leaning towards believing they must be true.

But, if I'm not mistaken, the multiverse hypothesized by Hawkin, and the usual multiverse from String theory is not this mathematical multiverse. In String theory multiverses, not every possible universe is allowed to exist, only universes satisfying string theory conditions. That's not to say those hypothesis are inconsistent -- the String thoery multiverse may exist within the "Mathematical multiverse". Once we accept that falsifiability isn't the only motivation to create theories (say by subscribing to MUH), then we need to accept that maybe our universe is also part of a larger non-observable universe, if and only if this provides a particularly "simple" explanation to our existence.

Those questions are irrelevant to multiverse hypothesis because they apply to any theory. That is, if there is no multiverse, you can still ask "Who/what created the universe? Do matter and energy simply exist without creation?", etc.

Do matter and energy simply exist without creation?

It depends on your definition of "creator" but indeed it is almost a logical necessity for something to exist without a creator. Since if you assume a creator is necessary, you'd still need someone to create the creator, and so on going infinitely. And then there's the question of creation of this infinite chain itself, etc -- the recursion never ends. It seems much more simple to assume some system must simply exist without necessity of creation.

Multiverse theories aside, as far as we know our current universe could, or should (depending on who you ask), be infinite. There is no evidence that its topology is closed (from estimates of curvature), so infinitely large is indeed the default assumption.

I will, thank you vm :)

I have a position that the one of the most important technologies needed for interstellar travel (and basically colonizing the entire galaxy) is simply a compact semiconductor fab at a pretty good node -- and it's a technology that almost no one is giving any thought or attention to.

Why do I say so? Because imo the most feasible form of interstellar travel is extremely slow (think a few times Voyager probe speed). Most of the technology (energy, propulsion, etc) to achieve this already exists (unlike proposals like Project Starshot), and you can take huge amounts of mass with you.

The problem is, things break down on your way. Going slow permits bringing large radiation shields (made simply of water), but the time between Star systems would still be of the order 10,000-100,000 years. Not much needs to be done on the way -- hence most circuits and mechanisms can be kept inactive -- but still you're going to have circuits and all sorts of equipment break down. There's a minimum energy expenditure needed for course correction and an associated simple but constant information processing required. So I believe you essentially need to have a way to keep fabricating chips on your way (unless you could store some reserves in a very well shielded compartment?), probably every few hundreds of years. Some elements may need recycling too. Some mechanical components e.g. propulsion systems might need periodic reconstruction/recycling also, but the technology for compact mechanical manufacturing is pretty well established -- a good machine shop with a few CNC mills, maybe some 3D printers and the like can be made to manufacture a complete propulsion system, while also having total self-fabrication capability.

There's also necessity of chips for when arriving at the destination -- again simply bringing the chips with you probably isn't viable, since it would be a while once you could establish a large modern semiconductor manufacturing plant. Again a compact fab is needed (the Starship plant itself could be used in the beginning).

Once you have those kind of capable Starships (which require some difficult but not unthinkable technology), colonizing the galaxy isn't really out of question, provided there are enough Earth-like planets (or other kinds of technologically-feasible planets) out there. You would colonize a planet and use it to build a new Starship once it were well established. Probably needing a few millenia to take over the planet and mine the needed minerals and nuclear fission fuel -- not really a big deal on our colonization time scale of 100,000s of years.

I'm also assuming this is some kind of Generation Ship, because otherwise compact self-fabrication of state of the art semiconductors may be too difficult (one of the amazing things about organic life is its amazing compact self replication). The psychological realities associated with generation ships aren't too rosy, but I think the end goal makes it acceptable (and some engineering can make them not too infernal for their occupants). Plus I find the idea of humans themselves colonizing the Stars more pleasing, but it may well turn out that AI probes will be the ones accomplishing it (if compact state of the art semiconductor fabrication becomes feasible).

Unums are a bit of a technically questionable idealism. Posits on the other hand seem simply seem technically superior to floats in almost every way (including many measures of simplicity and efficiency).

But technical inertia is such that not always the best newcomer can beat the established ways.

edit: Somewhat relevant xkcd :)

https://xkcd.com/567/

I'm slightly disappointed this book doesn't cover quantum computing -- which nowadays seems like a central part of quantum information. Any comprehensive resources to learn fundamentals of quantum computing? (without delving too deeply into particular applications)

> So we might be interested in low-precision arithmetic to save energy in a battery powered mobile device, or to save clock cycles in a server application manipulating a lot of data. This means that the numerical tricks that most people have forgotten about are relevant again

The more I experience engineering advances the more I see how cyclical techniques and technologies are. Almost everything old that was useful will eventually be needed again. Early computers were severely memory and cpu restricted. Then we got giant computers. Then we're putting microcontrollers everywhere and need those frugal techniques again. And so on the cycle will continue.

A possible conclusion is that the danger of obsolescence from a really profound knowledge in a field is far lower than one would expect, specially if you can weather the cycles of technology and find new markets to apply your expertise.

I'm an engineering student an I can say with property that, although I don't know much about Sage, a good symbolic math project (in particular Open Source) is sorely needed. It would be far from a curiosity. Most students use Matlab/Octave where I study, and all it does is allow for numeric computation. We've had huge advances in computing and it's been long since numerical integration was our best aid! More math heavy engineering subjects will often encounter large symbolic manipulations needed to arrive at some result, and common sense is that there's no good tool to help with that. Common sense is there is some limited symbolic manipulation in some HP calculators, and Wolfram Alpha, although it often refuses to work once you start playing with larger expressions.

I also know that some fields like ANNs (AI) research rely heavily on automatic symbolic differentiation, although I'm not sure the tools they use.

Yea I get what you mean. I'd say you're a humanist, as I believe am I. But I have some counterpoints to offer.

I'd say the big part of your disillusionment is part of being american (in general living in cutthroat capitalism). The entire system is made for you to equate money with happiness; and tech/luxury is often put as the things you actually buy with said money to achieve said happiness.

That's of course complete bullshit. A convenient illusion carefully orchestrated by almost every institution and company directed at you -- every company wants you to consume from them (so they want you to equate their products and your money with happiness), and practically every institution wants you to make more money or give them more money.

In reality, happiness is more or less environmentally unconditional. You could be happy in practically every situations -- I find it likely that past generations which were less wealthy, had less stuff, etc. were not less happy in general, and in particular you can see there are some relatively poor countries near the top of world happiness index list[1], and there are much better explanatory variables than per capita GDP, like wealth inequality (explaining why the US isn't on top) and probably general quality of life like public healthcare and natural parks. And this index probably includes variables biased towards comfort and luxury (part of its definition of "well being"), which I believe don't necessarily make you happier. Happiness is mostly a "good" internal condition, an internal satisfaction. Endearing social relationships, not being stresses about a million things, a positive outlook on life, those sort of things are likely much more powerful than anything you could buy to guarantee happiness (and in general enabling those is very cheap). But the "system" doesn't want you to achieve this, otherwise your economic hyper-productivity is in jeopardy. You're not supposed to reach the carrot, it has to be permanently just outside your reach.

While that may seem like an attack on technology, this argument isn't related to technology at all. Technology is just being exploited as a carrot to make you believe it is the be-all, end-all of happiness, while usually all it can do is alter you external conditions, make you a little more comfortable, make you spend less energy. Nothing causally dictative on happiness. But technology still has value outside cutthroat economic competition.

Technology empowers you to change your internal state of mind. For the economy, this is a spurious, undesired, byproduct: they don't want to risk you steering away from the productivity paradigm. But nonetheless, technology is a tool (or the tool) to enable reasoning, good basic living conditions, and an environment for meaningful social interactions -- basis of a good definition of happiness.

Why is reasoning so important? Reasoning is what, in turn, enables you to change your state of mind reliably, to achieve, or strive to achieve, what is actually "good", to understand what happiness even is, to experience the world and its beauty. Beauty resides inside the observant mind, not in nature, the characteristics of nature (and various human constructs) are merely the subject of observation.

Here I make an assumption that knowing more can indeed show you how to be happy, and not actually just torment you. Since it seems you've face existential questions before, this assumption does seem shaky. But I firmly believe that the solution cannot be simply putting a blind and refusing the truth -- I believe that in the end those ailments are temporary and can be relieved by digging deeper. In the worst case, if in the end after ultimate contemplation, you've absolutely convinced yourself that some things are better not being known and not reasoned about, you can always find ways of passing this to others and attempt to forget. But I don't think this will ever be truly necessary. You can uncover the truths about what makes you really happy, what are the forms of happiness, what are the forms of pleasure, what is a truly "good" form of happiness (e.g. I wouldn't accept happiness from seeing the ruin of others even if instinctive), and how to achieve it.

Another point is that while our life is quite short, modern society enabled by technology enables is to uncover the basic truths about life, the universe and everything. That is inherently valuable in my opinion, it has a particular beauty. We're this puny form of life living in a tiny rock in a massive, possibly infinite, universe, and yet we've discovered the basic tenets of reality. We are not completely blind and oblivious. If life was even shorter, I might agree that one should not preoccupy with those considerations and just bask in hedonism, but I'm glad we have some time to dig deeper and really See.

I have more to say (and my points aren't perfectly articulated here), but I want to keep this reasonably short. I'll gladly continue the discussion later if you're interested.

In conclusion I plead you to see, and take action, that technology can be used contrary to the nihilistic nature of the "system" to really enable our humanity to shine. Let us not over glorify nature because although we are natural, so is this path (it is a form of evolution after all). In this sense we must fight nature to maintain humanity, because I truly believe we have something special going, even though we're not perfect. Care for other human beings, be cared back, and we can prolong this goodness for a long time.

My contribution to this is particion in an art and technology group: http://amudi.com.br/ But ultimately I think the only reliable way to assure this path is through particular forms of government, legislation and regulation (more akin to Swiss or Scandinavian democracies than the US).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

[2] You mentioned videogames, one of my fondest memories is playing an internet game, an mmorpg called Tibia. It enabled lots of interaction of all sorts between players, and many beautiful aspects like exploring mysteries, creating stories and adventuring -- and it is very much a product of 21st century technology.

Well seeing all things are finite, including the universe itself, I'm not really bummed by the fact that eventually consciousness extremely more powerful than humans will exist.

But I feel that like you I think humanity has a really enormous value and beauty -- beauty that hasn't run its course yet and is perhaps partially independent of "raw intelligence".

I have a few human beings in particular that I admire and love so much that I'd be immeasurably bummed out if we were replaced by some kind of hyperintelligent simpleton.

It's still quite far though, I believe. I think humans are not too far from the practical physical limits of complex cognition. But almost surely the day will come that we'll be replaced with something else...

---

On a side note, I've been exploring different branches of philosophy to quench existential dread. Lately I've been more and more intrigued by Tegmark's 'Mathematical Universe Hypothesis'. My argument is, it is too absurd for this universe to be everything that will ever be or has been. Why this particular thing and why do we exist at all? The only plausible answers to me are two:

1) Brute fact, just accept and shut up. (Sean Carrol et al's view)

2) Everything that is mathematically possible exists (Max Tegmark et al).

I'm leaning toward believing (2) is more convincing atm. The unresolved problem is if you can define something of a probability distribution on the same of all possible universes that would explain ourselves as "roughly typical". Doesn't look like an insurmountable problem.

How does this relate to existential dread? Basically, we're just this one universe. Others exist (with greater or lower likelihood/numbers ?) with all sorts of things happening, all sorts of beings and variations of humans. It soothes me in a strange way.

Anyway, I guess I think way too much about existential questions, although by now I have some personal resolutions (some more some less satisfying) for most questions I've faced. The cosmological question aforementioned is a quite satisfying answer I've found, but there are even worse ones that still keep me up at night... (please don't ask me what they are unless you are a rationalism masochist like me!)

Thanks for the reply! I'm quite interested in this.

> FWIW, your "Hundreds of Milliwatts" are routinely used by hams to communicate world wide.

Read again, I've written "hundreds of microwatts" :)

And that's for a reasonably wideband signal! A narrowband signal with high power has a lot more potential to interfere with a specific application. I seriously doubt anything of that order specially with a rough bandpass (passive) filter around the frequency of interest can cause significant interference. Passive filters have <1 gain, so they shouldn't risk narrowband amplification of the weak signal. The background noise should be within this order of magnitude, no?

(I don't quite have the time to give numbers right now, but here's a source from quick googling: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7833115 -- the ambient noise should be on the other of .1 uW / GHz; at a few hundred meters away this competes with our wideband microwatt-scale transmitter?) I'll see if I can do some actual calculations later

Those are intentional jamming devices, I hope unintentional sideband interference wouldn't be treated remotely as harshly? The kind of power to achieve this kind of jamming would be pretty large too -- I'd judge at least 50W (depending on the jamming bandwidth I guess). A few miliwatts from an SDR transmitter isn't going to do much disruption. Not to mention there are pretty significant interference sources from defective devices mentioned elsewhere -- cheap usb power supplies, defective lightning, and more.

That said, anyone should indeed be filtering their output unless transmitting more than extremely low amounts of power (perhaps someone with radio experience could give a hand of thumb? Up to hundreds of microwatts sounds quite safe) as a matter of civility. Besides, you get to learn basic electronics by building a simple passive filter!

You only cannot get sharp internal corners. External corners can be square/arbitrarily sharp. I don't think it's too big of a problem, usually you want things rounded to relieve stresses anyway, but indeed I can see situations such as aesthetics or piece compatibility this could be an issue.

But you're not talking about forgiveness, you're talking about forgetting. Forgiveness is when we acknowledge mistakes and give them another chance, forgetting is when we erase mistakes. Perhaps instead of artificially limiting our own memory we should be looking to learn to better forgive people in the age of perfect recall.

Nope. Johnson noise is quantum mechanical (at least in significant part). If you use a good algorithm, you can sample a partial TRNG into an epsilon-perfect TRNG (as close as you'd like). Not to mention all of this is pointless since even if the noise were classical a few applications of strong hash functions (which is the normal procedure -- they're entirely practical) require would require computers using more energy than the entire universe has available you want.

> We know the brain can take some damage and still function quite well, but are there single neurons or tiny groups of them that will basically bring down the system if damaged?

I like this question. I'm not a neuroscientist though, but I think most neurons come in fibers that contain several of them. So even if a certain connection was critical, a single one dying will still leave a functional fiber. Because neurons are plastic (to a limited but significant extent), any effect from that single neuron can be partially or completely compensated.

It is not physicalism I am arguing against, it is behaviorism/functionalism.

But if by behavior we don't mean movements by the body, and instead the whole state of the brain (the entire thinking process), then the theory is again trivial and useless (because it doesn't explain anything).

Indeed I don't claim to have read too much about it, but I think the main stream of behaviorism is literally that the functional response (i.e. black box response) is essentially all that matters. I'd be happy to know if there's more nuance than what appears.

I have a number of qualms about functional explanation of consciousness (which goes back to the Turing Test, probably earlier). I've seen outright denials that a representation of what is currently on your mind (the "mental theater"), often associated with consciousness, and indeed all similar abstractions we often use referring to our own minds, as "illusions" -- the brain is seen (by I believe at least a few currents) as a single monolithic black box function without a usefully interpretable internal state.

Anyone that has in fact experience programming computers will know there usually distinct caches, and clearly distinct subsystems that process information alternatively or in parallel, and algorithms operate recursively or iteratively over the memory until reaching a solution. I don't see why those insights shouldn't hold value for explaining consciousness, and perhaps explaining that even if an algorithm (e.g. a simple machine learning system) is indistinguishable from a [median] human in one or all tasks, then it is still not necessarily conscious, because the details of its inner workings lack certain features of a truly conscious being. For example, its internal representation of emotions may not be equivalent that of a human, such that it does not actually "experience" emotions, but because our own capabilities of verbally communicating emotions are quite limited, it may well beat the median human at this ability after utilizing gargantuan training sets.

So you can see themes of data efficiency, internal representation, etc emerge that are completely left out of behaviorism and related theories.

I intend to write a little about this (in an article), but there is probably at least a few academics exploring this more complicated, and complete, understanding.