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Showing posts from July, 2020

The Year Of The Disaster-Plex

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America, we need to talk about how the multiple crises we're facing are interconnected. There are so many to choose from, and two that are probably foremost in the reader's thoughts recently, but I want to discuss five of them. (There are others. I’m not even including climate change.) Let's dub 2020 the Year of the Disaster-Plex, shall we? For many of us, the year the scales fell from our eyes. This lousy year hit us with the Covid-19 crisis first. Viruses happen, and the worst ones are the plagues: when viruses jump from other species into ours (1) . So long as we live in close proximity to animals and have less-than-perfect sanitary practices, this will keep happening from time to time. It's bound to be more common now that there are several billion of us, and we keep flying around the world in metal boxes. This one is unusually nasty because it's a stealth virus. When a plague can spread through multiple people who catch it and cough it along, without even knowi...

AI: Our Immortality Or Extinction

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Part 1: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence Part 2: The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction Written by Tim Urban, based in large part on the work of Nick Bostrom. Urban does a good job explaining the concepts in an engaging way that should be accessible to anyone. (Bostrom's work is amazing, but his book Superintelligence  adopts a dry style.) Note, these were written back in 2015. So we're five years closer to those estimates for when Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) might arrive. 2045? 2075? Nobody's really sure. More recently, we've seen specialized  AI (called Artificial Narrow intelligence, or ANI) defeat expert Go players, and devices using Natural Language Processing (like Alexa devices) have become common. These are all stepping stones along a path of an unknown length. The arrival time, though, doesn't matter nearly so much as what could happen afterward, an outcome which depends entirely on whether we've prepared. "Our i...