Science and Technology

What is Thought?

Posted by Peter on December 15, 2004
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book Review: What is Thought? by Eric Baum

The first half of this book is an overview of the field of artificial intelligence that might be one of the best available introductions for people who are new to the subject, but which seemed fairly slow and only mildly interesting to me.

The parts of the book that are excellent for both amateurs and experts are chapters 11 through 13, dealing with how human intelligence evolved.

He presents strong, although not conclusive, arguments that the evolution of language did not involve dramatic new modes of thought except to the extent that improved communication improved learning, and that small catalysts created by humans might well be enough to spark the evolution of human-like language in other apes.

His recasting of the nature versus nurture debate in terms of biases that guide learning is likely to prove more valuable at resisting the distortions of ideologues than more conventional versions (e.g. Pinker’s).

His arguments have important implications for how AI will progress. He convinced me that it will be less sudden than I previously thought, by convincing me that truly general-purpose learning machines won’t work, and that much of intelligence involves using large quantities of data about the real world to choose good biases with which to guide our learning.

Report from the Foresight Conference, part 2

Posted by Peter on November 29, 2004
Posted in: Molecular Assemblers (Advanced Nanotech).

(Catching up on month-old news…)

The most important technical news from the Foresight Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology was the presentation by Christian Schafmeister, who is working on building molecules with a wide variety of shapes out of bis-amino acids. He is able to build protein-like molecules that are rigid, and whose shape is easy to predict from the sequence. If there are no hidden catches, this may be an innovation as valuable (for the purposes of creating new objects to atomic precision) as solving the protein folding problem. The biggest drawback that he mentioned was the time it takes to synthesize a medium-sized molecule (up to a week), but he says that could be automated.

I’m unsure whether there was anything important in the other talks about nanotech research. Ned Seeman mentioned something about a ribosome-like device – I suppose that might be something important and new that he has done, but he didn’t say enough about it for me to tell.

Rob Freitas made some vaguely impressive claims about the feasibility of building a diamondoid assembler using the tools available today, but he went through some critical issues such as error rates in placing individual atoms where we want them to quickly for me to evaluate the plausibility of his answers. I’ll try to read the papers he has on his web site real soon now to see if he presents those arguments more convincingly there.

Accelerating Change Conference

Posted by Peter on November 11, 2004
Posted in: Freedom, Investing, Virtual Worlds. Tagged: , .

The 2004 Accelerating Change Conference focused much more on current changes than last year’s attempts at providing long-term visions led me to expect.

The one topic that excited me was a virtual world called Second Life. While it might sound superficially like just a virtual Burning Man, the designers are serious enough about their nationbuilding to encourage commerce, both within the system and via currency exchanges such as The Gaming Open Market with other worlds. Their VP of Product Development Cory Ondrejka described Hernando de Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital as "must reading". They have been careful to insure that people have few incentives to take disputes arising in the virtual world to meatspace courts. For instance, they once banned a vandal from the game who owned a fair amount of land; they auctioned off the land and sent him a check for most of the proceeds – $1600.

Some of their customers are doing well enough in the virtual world that the company that runs Second Life has trouble offering them a salary good enough to compete with what they’re making in virtual life.

They don’t seem as concerned about the highly deflationary effects of their monetary policy as I expect they ought to be. Why will people buy their land (the sale of which seems to be their main source of income) if they can earn a safe and sure return by just holding the local currency?

The responsiveness of the company to citizen complaints (e.g. simplifying and later abolishing taxes in response to tax revolts) is fairly strong evidence that a non-monopolistic dictator is better than a democracy with monopoly power.

Report from the Foresight Conference, part 1

Posted by Peter on October 26, 2004
Posted in: Molecular Assemblers (Advanced Nanotech).

The best sound bite from the Foresight Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology was Chris Phoenix’s description of how mature versions of nanotechnology will deal with most forms of pollution:

No Atom Left Behind

He was responsible enough to point out one form of pollution that can’t be solved that way: a scarcity of heat pollution credits is likely to be an important feature of the nanotech economy.