- Blog
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The Mutual Enhancement Society: Superintelligence in Machines…*and* Humans?
Reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, and having read James Barrat’s Our Final Invention, as well as consuming a lot of other writings on the dangers of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, I was beginning to feel fairly confident that unless civilization collapsed relatively soon, more or less upending most technological progress, humanity was indeed doomed to become…
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Let’s Get Small
I’m a small guy, at 5’5″ I think some people almost find it alarming how tiny I am, at least compared to how tall they expect me (or any adult male) to be. It’s me in the context of other people, the relative scale can be surprising. On my Galaxy Note 5, it has a…
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Lawrence Lessig’s Noble and Dispiriting Pledge
UPDATE 9/6/2016: Lessig’s campaign successfully passed the $1,000,000 pledge threshold (I pledged a token amount), and formally announced his candidacy on ABC this morning. I heartily support Lawrence Lessig’s campaign for president, and there’s almost no public figure I can think of that I would prefer to be president. And that’s just the problem.…
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How Mars One is Like a Björn Borg Clothing Line
[This post has been updated with some really brilliant insight from the author.] Mars One, the pseudo-pyramid scheme that pretends to be sending astronauts to Mars in the next decade, has inspired a fashion show. Björn Borg, who I assume is very important in the fashion world, showed off a collection of what is said…
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Consider a superintelligent agent with actuators connected to a nanotech assembler.
I’m reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, about the possible capabilities and potential threats posed by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. It’s a little dry at times, to be honest, but then he’ll go and say something (in the nonfiction-science-book equivalent of a deadpan) that makes your mind explode. Because you’re probably thinking, hey, a superintelligent…
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Can Alphabet Ever Mean as Much as Google Does?
Google surprised pretty much everyone today when they announced that, well, they weren’t going to be Google anymore. Google CEO Larry Page (well, former CEO) said in a statement today that he and Google co-founder Sergey Brin would form a new holding company, Alphabet (with the best domain name on Earth: abc.xyz), of which Google…
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Consciousness as Middle-Management
Your conscious mind may not be doing anything all that interesting. No, not just you, but like, for everyone. From San Francisco State University: Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella’s “Passive Frame Theory” suggests that the conscious mind is like an interpreter helping speakers of different languages communicate. “The interpreter presents the information but is…
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The Trump-Loving GOP McCain Helped Create
I keep starting and then deleting tweets that convey my overall feeling about the whole Trump-v-McCain slap fight going on right now. I know that if I’m not careful, I’ll trip a wire. But this morning, via @VideoSawyer, I find an essay by Jim Wright that, while not a tweet, gets the point across very well.…
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Neal Stephenson’s “Seveneves”: Thoughts on an Impact Event
I’ve been deeply affected by Neal Stephenson’s latest novel Seveneves. While I am often a slow and somewhat lazy reader, I found myself taking every opportunity I could to dive back into it. While my favorite novel, Anathem, also by Stephenson, presented a world I wanted to explore more deeply and spend more time in, I…
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Let’s Pick a Decent Pair of Cheap Earbuds
The bargain I made with myself after my tortuous search for the perfect over-ear headphones, for the purposes of meditational escape and overall awesomeness, was that I could also have a pair of decent earbuds as long as they were cheap. (Such things do exist!) Sometimes the Sony MDR–7506s are too big to take somewhere,…
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I’m Special to CNN
Last week, a contact of mine at CNN asked me to write an op-ed for the website on the recent Gallup poll showing an uptick in the number of Americans who would be okay with voting for an atheist for president (now at 58%). I was delighted to be asked, and not a little bit…
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Permission to be Unproductive
A thing a sack of problems like me is supposed to do to mitigate crippling anxiety and PTSD is to allow oneself to escape, to decompress. I am notoriously terrible at this. And it’s not just because of the overt crazy from which I suffer, but all manner of tangential hangups. Let me begin with…
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Threat
What I think people don’t understand about those of us who suffer from intense anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, and the like, is that having an intense response to something is not a mere intellectual construction that one can be argued out of. We don’t put a few bits of data together and make a…
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I Thync This Might Be Bullshyt
There’s been a little bit of curious excitement over a new product called Thync, a wearable module that is intended to reduce stress, induce relaxation, or energize through stimulation of the brain. Here’s how they put it: Thync uses neurosignaling to activate specific cranial and peripheral nerves to influence this balance and shift you to a…
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