Continuations

A few week backs I wrote a series of blog posts about the risks from progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI). I specifically addressed that I believe that we are facing not just structural risks, such as algorithmic bias, but also existential ones. There are three dilemmas in pushing the existential risk point at this moment. First, there is the potential for a “boy who cried wolf” effect. The more we push right now, if (hopefully) nothing terrible happens, then the harder existential risk f...

We have had Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta on our Tesla Model Y for some time. I had written a previous post on how much the autodrive reduces the stress of driving and want to update it for the FSD experience. The short of it is that the car goes from competent driver to making beginner’s mistakes in a split second.Some examples of situations with which FSD really struggles are any non-standard intersection. Upstate New York is full of those with roads coming at odd angles (e.g. small local ro...

For a long time there was a narrative that computers would only be good at automating routine tasks, leaving creativity to us humans. I never believed this because creativity isn’t some kind of magic but rather much of it is based on exploring variations either based on known rules or based on precedents. For example, I titled a post in 2016 “Machine Creativity: Possibly Sooner than Anticipated.” Also in my book The World After Capital, I have a section on the universality of computation that...

I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology. The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill’s New York Times article about Clearview AI. It is extremely important to get this right. Here are a few more thoughts based on the article to add to my prior post. First, it should be clear by now that it has become almost trivial to build a system like this. A lot of open source frameworks and neural networks have been made ...

Here is a talk which I gave at the Rise of AI conference in Berlin earlier this year on the topic of Artificial Intelligence and the allocation of attention. It explicitly links what is happening online to the climate crisis.

I wrote a post nearly four years ago titled Brief Q&A on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which has held up pretty well. Despite a lot of progress in specific domains since then there is no obvious sign that AGI is around the corner, although as the post points out, the jump to AGI could be very nonlinear. The Turing test is of course a well known proposal establishing that a machine has reached a level of general intelligence (and fans of Blade Runner may think of the fictional Voight-...

In my prior post I wrote about structural risk from AI. Today I want to start delving into existential risk. This broadly comes in two not entirely distinct subtypes: first, that we lose any grip on reality which could result in a Matrix style scenario or global war of all against all and second, a superintelligence getting rid of humans directly in the pursuit of its own goals. The loss of reality scenario was the subject of an op-ed in the New York Time the other day. And right around the s...

Now we are getting to the biggest and weirdest risk of AI: a super intelligence emerging and wiping out humanity in pursuit of its own goals. To a lot of people this seems like a totally absurd idea, held only by a tiny fringe of people who appear weird and borderline culty. It seems so far out there and also so huge that most people wind up dismissing it and/or forgetting about shortly after hearing it. There is a big similarity here to the climate crisis, where the more extreme views are wi...

Yesterday I wrote a post on where we are with artificial intelligence by providing some history and foundational ideas around neural network size. Today I want to start in on risks from artificial intelligence. These fall broadly into two categories: existential and structural. Existential risk is about AI wiping out most or all of humanity. Structural risk is about AI aggravating existing problems, such as wealth and power inequality in the world. Today’s post is about structural risks. Stru...

I am writing this post to organize and share my thoughts about the extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence over the last years and especially the last few months (link to a lot of my prior writing). First, I want to come right out and say that anyone still dismissing what we are now seeing as a “parlor trick” or a “statistical parrot” is engaging in the most epic goal post moving ever. We are not talking a few extra yards here, the goal posts are not in the stadium anymore, they are...