Recent interview with Ben Goertzel on GPT-3/transformer networks, understanding and meaning generation — and what’s missing in AI atm.

This version is audio only — I will post the video version shortly smile

On GPT-3, achieving AGI, machine understanding and lots more… Will GPT-3 or an equivalent be used to deepfake human understanding?

Joscha Bach on GPT-3, achieving AGI, machine understanding and lots more
02:40 What’s missing in AI atm? Unified coherent model of reality
04:14 AI systems like GPT-3 behave as if they understand — what’s missing?
08:35 Symbol grounding — does GPT-3 have it?
09:35 GPT-3 for music generation, GPT-3 for image generation, GPT-3 for video generation
11:13 GPT-3 temperature parameter. Strange output?
13:09 GPT-3 a powerful tool for idea generation
14:05 GPT-3 as a tool for writing code. Will GPT-3 spawn a singularity?
16:32 Increasing GPT-3 input context may have a high impact
16:59 Identifying grammatical structure & language
19:46 What is the GPT-3 transformer network doing?
21:26 GPT-3 uses brute force, not zero-shot learning, humans do ZSL
22:15 Extending the GPT-3 token context space. Current Context = Working Memory. Humans with smaller current contexts integrate concepts over long time-spans
24:07 GPT-3 can’t write a good novel
25:09 GPT-3 needs to become sensitive to multi-modal sense data — video, audio, text etc
26:00 GPT-3 a universal chat-bot — conversations with God & Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
30:14 What does understanding mean? Does it have gradients (i.e. from primitive to high level)?
32:19 (correlation vs causation) What is causation? Does GPT-3 understand causation? Does GPT-3 do causation?
38:06 Deep-faking understanding
40:06 The metaphor of the Golem applied to civ
42:33 GPT-3 fine with a person in the loop. Big danger in a system which fakes understanding. Deep-faking intelligible explanations.
44:32 GPT-3 babbling at the level of non-experts
45:14 Our civilization lacks sentience — it can’t plan ahead
46:20 Would GTP-3 (a hopfield network) improve dramatically if it could consume 1 to 5 trillion parameters?
47:24 GPT3: scaling up a simple idea. Clever hacks to formulate the inputs
47:41 Google GShard with 600 billion input parameters — Amazon may be doing something similar — future experiments
49:12 Ideal grounding in machines
51:13 We live inside a story we generate about the world — no reason why GPT-3 can’t be extended to do this
52:56 Tracking the real world
54:51 MicroPsi
57:25 What is computationalism? What is it’s relationship to mathematics?
59:30 Stateless systems vs step by step Computation — Godel, Turing, the halting problem & the notion of truth
1:00:30 Truth independent from the process used to determine truth. Constraining truth that which can be computed on finite state machines
1:03:54 Infinities can’t describe a consistent reality without contradictions
1:06:04 Stevan Harnad’s understanding of computation
1:08:32 Causation / answering ‘why’ questions
1:11:12 Causation through brute forcing correlation
1:13:22 Deep learning vs shallow learning
1:14:56 Brute forcing current deep learning algorithms on a Matrioshka brain — would it wake up?
1:15:38 What is sentience? Could a plant be sentient? Are eco-systems sentient?
1:19:56 Software/OS as spirit — spiritualism vs superstition. Empirically informed spiritualism
1:23:53 Can we build AI that shares our purposes?
1:26:31 Is the cell the ultimate computronium? The purpose of control is to harness complexity
1:31:29 Intelligent design
1:33:09 Category learning & categorical perception: Models — parameters constrain each other
1:35:06 Surprise minimization & hidden states; abstraction & continuous features — predicting dynamics of parts that can be both controlled & not controlled, by changing the parts that can be controlled. Categories are a way of talking about hidden states.
1:37:29 ‘Category’ is a useful concept — gradients are often hard to compute — so compressing away gradients to focus on signals (categories) when needed
1:38:19 Scientific / decision tree thinking vs grounded common sense reasoning
1:40:00 Wisdom/common sense vs understanding. Common sense, tribal biases & group insanity. Self preservation, dunbar numbers
1:44:10 Is g factor & understanding two sides of the same coin? What is intelligence?
1:47:07 General intelligence as the result of control problems so general they require agents to become sentient
1:47:47 Solving the Turing test: asking the AI to explain intelligence. If response is an intelligible & testable implementation plan then it passes?
1:49:18 The term ‘general intelligence’ inherits it’s essence from behavioral psychology; a behaviorist black box approach to measuring capability
1:52:15 How we perceive color — natural synesthesia & induced synesthesia
1:56:37 The g factor vs understanding
1:59:24 Understanding as a mechanism to achieve goals
2:01:42 The end of science?
2:03:54 Exciting currently untestable theories/ideas (that may be testable by science once we develop the precise enough instruments). Can fundamental physics be solved by computational physics?
2:07:14 Quantum computing. Deeper substrates of the universe that runs more efficiently than the particle level of the universe?
2:10:05 The Fermi paradox
2:12:19 Existence, death and identity construction.

The audio of the fascinating talks & panel at the Future Day Melbourne 2020 / Machine Understanding event:

Kevin Korb — https://archive.org/searchresults.php Wilkins — https://archive.org/details/john-wilkins-humans-as-machines (John, sorry about the audio — also do you have the slides for this?) Hugo de Garis — https://archive.org/details/hugo-de-garis-future-day-2020 Panel — https://archive.org/…/future-day-panel-kevin-korb-hugo-de-g…

The video will be uploaded at a later date.

There is much public concern nowadays about when an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) might appear and what it might go and do. The expert community is less concerned, because they know we’re a long ways off yet. More fundamentally though: we’re a long ways off of API (Artificial Primitive Intelligence). In fact, we have no idea what an API might even look like. AI took off without ever reflecting seriously on what I, either NI or AI, really is. So, it’s been streaking along in myriad directions without any goal in sight.

Fascinating talk on a fun topic.

How does quantum logic differ from classical logic? How do we live in a universe that accommodates both?
Is it possible to observe quantum logic at work in our macroscopic world?
Surprisingly a little bit of quantum logic can disentangle some of our clumsy everyday conceptualisations of biology, language and culture.

Slides / Prezi: https://prezi.com/sellcdridu0v/quantum-logic-the-rise-of-the-memes-2019

Speaker: Chris Guest — President of Vic Skeptics

Meetup Link: https://www.meetup.com/Science-Technology-and-the-Future/events/263849500

Many thanks for watching!

Consider supporting SciFuture by:
a) Subscribing to the SciFuture YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=TheRationalFuture b) Donating
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Kind regards.
Adam Ford
- Science, Technology & the Future.

Panelists: andy gelme, jon oxer, greg adamson, jeremy negal at humanity+ melbourne.

Panelists and audience members weigh in on a variety of topics: technology adoption across demographics, technology used to harvest your data / the rights to your data, technology changing the world — what used to be value choices with regard to technology use and adoption now just seem to be matters of fact, and social implications of technology in general.

While the video is newly produced, the conference was held in 2011.

Panelists and audience members weigh in on technology adoption across demographics, technology used to harvest your data / the rights to your data, technology changing the world — what used to be value choices with regard to technology use and adoption now just seem to be matters of fact… and social implications of technology in general.

Panelists include: Andy Gelme, Jon Oxer, Greg Adamson & Jeremy Nagel.

Audience members who asked questions include Lorin Ford, Cobina Crawford, Colin Kline, Hugo de Garis, Rosemary Watson, Adam Ford, Avatar Polymorph, Tony Smith, John Donovan, Sean McMullen…

While the video is newly produced, the conference was held in 2011.
This was filmed at the Humanity+ @Melbourne 2011 Conference — website (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20131106021014/http://au.humanit…onference/

Also see Jon Oxer’s related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EOPKBbW9Hs

#HumanityPlus #SciFuture #TechnologyAtHome

@geekscape @jonoxer @GregAEngineer @jeznag @HumanityPlus

Many of you know the sad news that theoretical physicist & mathematician Freeman Dyson has passed away, so in celebration of his life and achievements, Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute) discusses Freeman Dyson’s influence on himself and others — How might advanced alien civilizations develop (and indeed perhaps our own)?
We discuss strategies for harvesting energy — star engulfing Dyson Spheres or Swarms, black hole swallowing tungsten dyson super-swarms and other galactic megastructures, we also discuss Kardashev scale civilizations (Kardashev was another great mind who we lost recently), reversible computing, birthing ideal universes to live in, Meinong’s jungle, ‘eschatological engineering’, the aestivation hypothesis, and how all this may inform strategies for thinking about the Fermi Paradox and what this might suggest about the likelihood of our civilization avoiding oblivion. though Anders is more optimistic than some about our chances of survival…

Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford) is a seminal transhumanist thinker from way back who has contributed a vast amount of mind blowing material to futurology & philosophy in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Sandberg

Happy Future Day (march 1st) : http://future-day.org

Freeman Dyson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
Dyson Sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Aestivation Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation_hypothesis
Reversible Computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
Kardashev Scales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Nikolai Kardashev: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kardashev

Many thanks for watching!

Consider supporting SciFuture by:
a) Subscribing to the SciFuture YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=TheRationalFuture b) Donating
- Bitcoin: 1BxusYmpynJsH4i8681aBuw9ZTxbKoUi22
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- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scifuture c) Sharing the media SciFuture creates: http://scifuture.org

Kind regards.
Adam Ford
- Science, Technology & the Future.

We are at the dawn of the 2020s, what will the rest of the decade be like?

Future Day is a way of focusing and celebrating the energy that more and more people around the world are directing toward creating a radically better future.

How should Future Day be celebrated? That is for us to decide as the future unfolds!

Which disease will you die of first? If you survive that one, which disease is next in line? If we are kept alive but unwell and continue to practice medicine the way we do today, we will all get a long list of diseases — we are just going to be stacking up more and more layers of treatment, becoming more and more unhappy and spending more and more time at the doctors.

Many thanks for watching!

Consider supporting SciFuture by:
a) Subscribing to the SciFuture YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=TheRationalFuture b) Donating
- Bitcoin: 1BxusYmpynJsH4i8681aBuw9ZTxbKoUi22
- Etherium: 0xd46a6e88c4fe179d04464caf42626d0c9cab1c6b
- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scifuture c) Sharing the media SciFuture creates: http://scifuture.org

Kind regards.
Adam Ford
- Science, Technology & the Future.

New interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog Aging Matters.

Interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog ‘Aging Matters’.

Dr. Josh Mitteldorf is an evolutionary biologist and a long-time contributor to the growing field of aging science. His work in this field has focused on theories of aging. He asks the basic question: why do we age and die?

Josh is the co-author of ‘Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old — And What It Means for Staying Young’ : “A revolutionary examination of why we age, what it means for our health, and how we just might be able to fight it.

In Cracking the Aging Code, theoretical biologist Josh Mitteldorf and award-winning writer and ecological philosopher Dorion Sagan reveal that evolution and aging are even more complex and breathtaking than we originally thought. Using meticulous multidisciplinary science, as well as reviewing the history of our understanding about evolution, this book makes the case that aging is not something that “just happens,” nor is it the result of wear and tear or a genetic inevitability. Rather, aging has a fascinating evolutionary purpose: to stabilize populations and ecosystems, which are ever-threatened by cyclic swings that can lead to extinction.

When a population grows too fast it can put itself at risk of a wholesale wipeout. Aging has evolved to help us adjust our growth in a sustainable fashion as well as prevent an ecological crisis from starvation, predation, pollution, or infection.

This dynamic new understanding of aging is provocative, entertaining, and pioneering, and will challenge the way we understand aging, death, and just what makes us human.“

Many thanks for watching!

Hangout with Aubrey de Grey live on 6pm Feb 20th AU time / 11pm Feb 19th PST time: Bring your curiosity, an open mind!