Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

In my downtime before uni, between doing some hiking and coding , I figured I'd get into the Cognitive Systems vibe by reading up a bit, and this seems to end up often at some discussion of super-intelligent AI. I'll probably be writing up a bunch of these over the period of my course, but first up: one observation made at lesswrong  from a GiveWell director - in particular, distinguishing between 'agent' (active) and 'tool' (passive) AI, see objection #2. The basic idea is that it is much safer to design 'tool' AI, as it just gives you data and does take action itself, and I'd recommend reading that article first and thinking about it before returning. I think overall it's a good way to start thinking about the problem, but my take on this can be illustrated by the following tale (giving examples through stories seems popular in this area): * * * Investech was a company of researchers and quants, who had a small amount of success writin...

While reading my past blog posts due to its anniversary, I found in one of my posts from 10 years ago (mid-year 2005!) that International PatFute day is July 7th. For some context, about 11 or 12 years ago, when first learning programming, I was teaching myself by writing a game for windows (in Visual Basic, no less). Having way more maths skills than artistic ones, it ended up being a physics simulator thinly veiled as a soccer game - the edges of the pitch are fixed solid lines, and the ball plus all the players are circles, bouncing off everything else. Then, as you can see in my blog, I wrote it again when learning C++ and 3D graphics - this time the players were cylinders, and the ball gained height on kick, but everything else worked the same way. Little did I know, that this foreshadowed the real sport of Bubble ball many years later. When first learning web development, I then re-wrote a javascript version using web canvas, but sadly the code for that has been lost. ...