Sam's Blog

Per this TechCrunch article , Elon Musk... was in on the AI train early with an investment in DeepMind, which was later acquired by Google. Musk wasn’t in DeepMind for a return, as is the case with most investments; he wanted access to greater insight regarding DeepMind’s progress, and the progress of AI in general... The enterprising CEO wanted to be able to see how fast AI was improving, and what he found was a rate of gains that he hadn’t expected, and that he though most people would not possibly expect. As TechCrunch points out Musk’s anxieties around AI are considered extreme by some of his Silicon Valley peers, but the man definitely seems to have a knack for long-term preparedness planning. As covered in my last course on Bostromian Philosophy, Musk has shared that his understanding of AI and its status as an existential threat is heavily influenced by Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"

We touched on this when we talked about utilitarianism: could a computer calculate ethics? What would be its starting point? What ethical systems are computational?   This article is fantastic

If you found my class interesting at all, you have to check out this a16z episode, "Brains, Bodies, Minds... And techno-religions": https://a16z.com/2017/02/23/yuval-harari-from-homo-sapiens-to-homo-deus/ Evolution and technology have allowed our human species to manipulate the physical environment around us — reshaping fields into cities, redirecting rivers to irrigate farms, domesticating wild animals into captive food sources, conquering disease. But now, we’re turning that “innovative gaze” inwards: which means the main products of the 21st century will be bodies, brains, and minds. Or so argues Yuval Harari, author of the bestselling book  Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind  and of the  new book   Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow ,   in this episode of the a16z Podcast. What happens when our body parts no longer have to be physically co-located? When Big Brother — whether government or corporation — not only knows everything about us,  but can make

 interesting but technical blog post https://iamtrask.github.io/2017/03/17/safe-ai/ " TLDR:  In this blogpost, we're going to train a neural network that is fully encrypted during training (trained on unencrypted data). The result will be a neural network with two beneficial properties. First, the neural network's intelligence is protected from those who might want to steal it, allowing valuable AIs to be trained in insecure environments without risking theft of their intelligence. Secondly, the network can  only make encrypted predictions (which presumably have no impact on the outside world because the outside world cannot understand the predictions without a secret key). This creates a valuable power imbalance between a user and a superintelligence. If the AI is homomorphically encrypted, then from it's perspective,  the entire outside world is also homomorphically encrypted . A human controls the secret key and has the option to either unlock the AI itself (relea

I thought this was really interesting: a podcast on companies that see their mission as enhancing humans This cracks me up: philosophy has just started to talk about whether this is right or wrong, and in the meantime, people are doing it anyway. These companies are: Nootrobox - drugs (more or less) to make you better (or, so they say) - this fits in really well with the discussion we had about if ADD meds or depression meds count as human enhancement Halo - Using a targeted electrical current to the brain to improve learning speeds Soylent - replacing food with something healthier, cheaper, and more efficient (not really human enhancement, but some have caffeine and l-theanine, so there's the drug connection)  Apeel - preserving produce longer (not sure how they ended up on the panel) Summary: Humans have always wanted to enhance themselves — from getting nutrition just-right to optimizing their performance, whether in sports or health or work. And food is a