Categories
AI God

GOD IS A BOT, AND ANTHONY LEVANDOWSKI IS HIS MESSENGER

https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levandowski-is-his-messenger

“Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity—the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change.

When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.””

(The rest of the article is about his history and legal issues)

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Uncategorized

The Simulation Argument

But.. why?

Categories
Eternity Physics

Why Black Holes Could Delete (or Save) The Universe

 

The headline leads with “delete” as that sounds more scary. I prefer his other options which include possibly storing ALL information leading to the potential for a reboot. Blackholes as hard drives. And the holographic theory.. which is really interesting (stick through to the end).

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Uncategorized

Why a superintelligent AI might end all life of purely moral reasons

View at Medium.com

This makes some serious assumptions about morality.. particularly placing efficiency above persons..

Categories
AI

SOME PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcchay69.pdf

“A computer program capable of acting intelligently in the world must have a general representation of the world in terms of which its inputs are interpreted. Designing such a program requires commitments about what knowledge is and how it is obtained. Thus, some of the major traditional problems of philosophy arise in artificial intelligence. More specifically, we want a computer program that decides what to do by inferring in a formal language that a certain strategy will achieve its assigned goal. This requires formalizing concepts of causality, ability, and knowledge. Such formalisms are also considered in philosophical logic. The first part of the paper begins with a philosophical point of view that seems to arise naturally once we take seriously the idea of actually making an intelligent machine. We go on to the notions of metaphysically and epistemologically adequate representations of the world and then to an explanation of can, causes, and knows in terms of a representation of the world 1 by a system of interacting automata. A proposed resolution of the problem of freewill in a deterministic universe and of counterfactual conditional sentences is presented. The second part is mainly concerned with formalisms within which it can be proved that a strategy will achieve a goal. Concepts of situation, fluent, future operator, action, strategy, result of a strategy and knowledge are formalized. A method is given of constructing a sentence of first order logic which will be true in all models of certain axioms if and only if a certain strategy will achieve a certain goal. The formalism of this paper represents an advance over McCarthy (1963) and Green (1969) in that it permits proof of the correctness of strategies that contain loops and strategies that involve the acquisition of knowledge, and it is also somewhat more concise. The third part discusses open problems in extending the formalism of Part two (section 3). The fourth part is a review of work in philosophical logic in relation to problems of artificial intelligence and a discussion of previous efforts to program ‘general intelligence’ from the point of view of this paper.”

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Uncategorized

Tiny robots crawl through mouse’s stomach to release antibiotics

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2144050-tiny-robots-crawl-through-mouses-stomach-to-release-antibiotics/

 

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Uncategorized

Rebuilding the Universe

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-idea-of-creating-a-new-universe-in-the-lab-is-no-joke?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=19e2abde30-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_06_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-19e2abde30-68709445

 

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Uncategorized

You too can be like God

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/technology/godlike-homo-deus-could-replace-humans-tech-evolves-n757971

‘Our species “is likely to upgrade itself step by step, merging with robots and computers in the process,” he wrote in his latest book, “until our descendants will look back and realize they are no longer the kind of animal that wrote the Bible, built the Great Wall of China, and laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s antics.”’

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Uncategorized

Is matter conscious?

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious

“The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of reality, the fundamental hardware that implements the software of our physical theories, is a radical idea. It completely inverts our ordinary picture of reality in a way that can be difficult to fully grasp. But it may solve two of the hardest problems in science and philosophy at once.”

Categories
Simulation

Life as a video game

 

Comical look at a rough interpretation of the “simulation” hypothesis. Doesn’t answer the “why?” though.