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Category: Singularity Signposts

  • Chain of Consciousness

    George Rebane The recent burst of large language models (LLMs) from AI research has reinvigorated the Singularity related topics of machine sentience, sapience, super-intelligence, agency, ethics, morals, …, along with prognoses of what they may have in store for humans when/if they become ascendant.  Most commentators, including yours truly, see a high likelihood of a…

  • The Singularity is (almost?) here

    George Rebane Led by technical, industrial, and political luminaries like Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio, Steve Wozniak, et al have published “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” as a warning to civilization about the potential harmful impact that recently released AI developments portend. (more here)  Specifically, the authors “call on all AI labs to immediately…

  • Today’s ChatGPTs are robustly left-leaning

    George Rebane  In ‘The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation’ three German academicians – Jochen Hartmann, Jasper Schwenzow, and Maximilian Witte – publish the result of an early milestone study that confirms what many ChatGPT users have already experienced.  To give you more than an idea of its contents,…

  • ‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’

    George Rebane RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here).  The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles.  Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere…

  • ‘A Thousand Brains’

    George Rebane Jeff Hawkins, cofounder of Numenta, is the author of A Thousand Brains – A new theory of intelligence (2021).  To many, me included, Hawkins has been a national treasure since his first book On Intelligence (2004).  After inventing the Palm Pilot and becoming wealthy, Hawkins has devoted his life to brain research as…

  • Turing Test – Alexa ‘head scientist’ unclear on the concept (updated 2jan21)

    George Rebane ‘The Turing Test is obsolete. It’s time to build a new barometer for AI’.  On the FastCompany website we read, “The head scientist for (Amazon's) Alexa thinks the old benchmark for computing is no longer relevant for today’s AI era.”  And why does that head scientist Rohit Prasad have such a thought?  Well,…

  • Protein Folding – Solved!

    George Rebane Rejoice!  We have all lived to see the practical solution to one of the most complex and important processes that defines and determines how all critters live and die.  It’s called protein folding, and it describes how a very long string of bio-molecules called amino acids first hook up with each other, and…

  • SETI’s Copernican Que (updated 22feb20)

    “Where are they?”, Enrico Fermi George Rebane Since my previous foray into Fermi’s famous query, I have had occasion to reconsider the numbers that I generated when first applying copernican arguments to the sound of silence experienced by the various Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence efforts that started about the middle of the last century.  My…

  • Consciousness and uploading your mind

    George Rebane [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 December 2019.] OK, let’s try something different this week.  This being the Christmas season and all, it’s time to think about our souls and eternal life.  Well, on second thought, maybe we should back off on all that divisive spiritual…

  • Toward the Singularity via super-intelligence

    George Rebane Knowing my relationship with Dr Judea Pearl, fellow blogger Russ Steele sent me a link to a recent interview (here) on AI with Judea.  Longtime RR readers recall pieces citing my friend, colleague, and mentor Judea Pearl as the inventor of Bayes and causal nets, and one of the true pioneers of AI…

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