Robin Hanson comments on David Brin’s response to a New Scientist editorial. As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has been that aliens are peaceful zero-population-growth no-nuke greens, since we all know that any other sort quickly destroy themselves.ย This seems to me an instructive… Continue reading Alien Invasion
Let’s try to pull all the threads together, as futurists — which is the whole point here — and get some idea about when it might be reasonable to expect AI to show up.ย When I say AI I want to look at the entire diahuman range, so the answer would still be a range… Continue reading AI: Summing up
Rob Freitas has a new paper up: Robert A. Freitas Jr., โDiamond Trees (Tropostats):ย A Molecular Manufacturing Based System for Compositional Atmospheric Homeostasis,โ IMM Report 43, 10 February 2010 Abstract. The future technology of molecular manufacturing will enable long-term sequestration of atmospheric carbon in solid diamond products, along with sequestration of lesser masses of numerous… Continue reading New Freitas paper: Diamond Trees
Why we should suspect that the brain has a limited ability to recurse, but prefers to daisy-chain instead: The house the malt the rat the cat the dog the cow with the crumpled horn the maiden all forlorn the man all tattered and torn the priest all shaven and shorn the cock that crowed in… Continue reading Stackless brain
… to boldly go where no man has gone before! This final phrase of the classic Star Trek opening spiel had two problems with it, one as seen by people after the fact, and the other as seen by those who had gone before. As seen by earlier generations, the phrase “to boldly go” is… Continue reading Ethics for machines
Foresight Institute Feynman Prize winner Dr. Ralph Merkle, perhaps better known to Nanodot readers for his nanotech work, has just won the IEEE’s Hamming Medal along with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie: Thirty-five years ago, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle developed an easy method for sending secure messages over insecure channels. With the… Continue reading Merkle wins Hamming Medal with Diffie, Hellman
Over the past ten to ๏ฌfteen years, research in computational linguistics has undergone a dramatic โparadigm shift.โ Statistical learning methods that automatically acquire knowledge for language processing from empirical data have largely supplanted systems based on human knowledge engineering. The original success of statistical methods in speech recognition has been particularly in๏ฌuential in motivating the… Continue reading NLP: State of the Art
It’s pure palladium, 8 nm wide, made at the University of Birmingham’s Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory. h/t Nanowerk
In E.E. Smith’s famous Lensman series, the galaxy is the battleground between two races of superintelligent beings, the (good) Arisians and the (evil) Eddorians.ย When I listen to people who worry that we are about to create a superintelligence which will take over the world, I get the impression they’ve come from reading “Galactic Patrol”… Continue reading Visualizing the Cosmic All
The debate held at Foresight 2010 between Robin Hanson and Mencius Moldbug on the subject of futarchy is now online at Vimeo. Watch it online or download it: 1. Get a vimeo account by registering. 2. Option-click on the download link close to the bottom right on the video’s page 3. Wait an hour ๐… Continue reading Hanson / Moldbug debate video available
