Sam's Blog

We could totally go to Mars, we just need to demand our governments prioritize space travel over expenses like killing brown people. But, since that seems to be impossible, we can support  companies that are doing it on the chance they might get rich . The company in that article, SpaceX, makes rockets for NASA, the military, and other countries. It's owned by the same guy who owns Tesla, Elon Musk... Who recommends everyone read Nick Bostrom. He thought we needed to get off Earth to reduce the risk of extinction, so he made a company to do that; he was worried about climate change, so he made Tesla, with the plan of making the internal combustion engine irrelevant in a few decades; he also made Solar City, to get more people to use solar power. What I'm getting at is, he saw problems in the world, and they scared him, but he did something about it. His plans are working, too, because he is smart and hard-working. I think you all have the potential to impact the world like ...

That was too cool not to show you. Anyway, today I want to talk about any thoughts you have about any relationships between things we've talked about so far: Where are they "Why I hope the search for ET life finds nothing" existential threats to humanity What is AI? The effects of AI and other technological changes on the human condition Ontology and Epistemology (What is and what can be known) Ethical systems like Utilitarianism I'd like to go more in depth this week on rule-based ethical systems (deontological ethics), then talk about the ethics of human enhancement. MOST STILL TO COME(Answer to the 2010 Edge Question “How is the Internet changing the way you think?]Nick Bostrom The Ethics of Human Engineering PS This company tried to graph out what happens inside neural nets ... the results look a lot like life. It's pretty shocking(ly cool): "Many of the images created by Graphcore, which are technically graphs, are b...

What does Deep Learning actually look like? The Deep Learning Gallery - Lots of examples of deep learning in action The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks Deep Dream - Do androids dream of electric sheep? Apparently not - they dream of Admiral Dog! Wavenet - Generating Speech and piano sounds just from example sounds Image Question Answering: A Visual Semantic Embedding Model and a New Dataset Anti-Facial Recognition Masks Code Synaptic ConvNet  - Play with this! It's so cool to see inside a computer brain! The Deep Learning Book  - All of this code and instruction is available for free, online. You can become an expert in this and all you need is a laptop and a place to live and food. What will the future look like? Q&A What will be the coolest areas to apply deep learning and reinforcement learning in the next 5-10 years? What are the top 10 interesting areas for machine learning in the next 5 years? Fiction Accel...

Everything is in the deck, including the homework, a video:

[This is a note that was added after class] You should be able to see the HW forms now. Also, a few terms came up while we were talking after the presentation. None of these ideas are that hard to grasp, but they have fancy names and definitions. You don't have to read all these links; they are there in case you want to read more about the topic. Consequentialism - "Consequentialism, as its name suggests, is the view that normative properties depend only on consequences. This general approach can be applied at different levels to different normative properties of different kinds of things, but the most prominent example is consequentialism about the moral rightness of acts, which holds that whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act or of something related to that act, such as the motive behind the act or a general rule requiring acts of the same kind." Utilitarianism - "Utilitarianism is one of the most powerful and persuas...

Hi! I'm pretty stoked that we're doing this class. It's been a while since I taught philosophy, and whenever I run into former students, they have good things to say about it. Also, I really enjoy doing it. I can't help but focus on things I'm interested in, but I hope you internalize what we talk about, and find ways that it connects to what you care about. Class presentation (if you missed it / for review)   Homework - read "Where are they?" Here is a link , and it is included below. Be ready to discuss and answer questions. Also bring in any questions it makes you think of. To show you read it, fill out the following: Loading... and here is the reading, if you don't want to click the link: