on agi and the alignment problem He is intelligent who reasons from truths; he is wise who lives according to them.—Emanuel Swedenborg, from Divine Love and Wisdom Today, of course, the Nazis are considered to be dunces, because they lost the war, but it has to be said that they managed to accomplish a great deal…
In 1942 Isaac Asimov wrote the three enduring rules of robotics: Asimov recognized philosophical and practical problems with the first law especially, and he put these problems at the center of many of his stories. He often explored the idea of allowing harm through inaction, and he sometimes created dilemmas where a robot could not…
On things we don’t talk about Cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person’s actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one…
Spotify has arrived in the US! Twitter was all abuzz when the announcement came, and lots of my friends jumped on board as soon as they could scrounge up invites. I was excited to sign up too, but then I procrastinated. And then procrastinated some more. For one thing, I have a pretty big collection…
There have been a couple of interesting developments in news media in recent weeks. The first development is the mostly symbolic vote by the House of Representatives to “defund” NPR. I’m a big fan of NPR, but I’m divided on this. I can’t say philosophically that I believe the government should be in the news…
In my last post I attempted to list the things I found especially resonant last year in media, entertainment, art and journalism. I say “attempted” because I didn’t keep track of this stuff very well during 2010. In lieu of keeping track, I retroactively scoured my bookmarks in places like delicious, Instapaper and Evernote, and…
The latest highly-publicized, hotly-ridiculed move by my adopted city of San Francisco was to ban the Happy Meal. And so once again we have lobbed a softball to conservatives and libertarians across the nation, who relish any opportunity to point west and say, “See? See the nanny state? See those people who are too dumb,…
The ongoing BP / Deepwater Horizon oil disaster is a sickening object lesson in the evils of oil. Of course it’s just the latest in an ugly line of spills that have occurred over the years. BP itself has a long track record of safety and environmental violations. I still have vivid tv memories of…
Things are ugly right now. After the healthcare bill passed, we all heard how a few so-called tea baggers hurled racial slurs and other insults at Democratic lawmakers, broke windows of party offices and engaged in other such foolery. Yesterday, I saw Mitt Romney’s new book on display in Borders. It’s called “No Apology: The…
I feel like the media constantly bombards us with two completely opposite visions of the future: In future #1 I can talk to my home appliances and have virtual sex with supermodels while my hydrogen-powered biodegradable car drives me to work. In future #2 I’m learning to make fire and trying to defend my survival…