Reply to Hawkins on AI risk
Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot, has since turned his attention to neuro-inspired AI. In response to Elon Musk’s and Stephen Hawking’s recent comments on long-term AI risk, Hawkins argued that...
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GSS Tutorial #1: Basic trends over time
Part of the series: How to research stuff. Today I join Razib Khan’s quest to get bloggers to use the General Social Survey (GSS) more often. The GSS is a huge collection of data on the demographics...
View ArticleKrauss on long-term AI impacts
Physicist Lawrence Krauss says he’s not worried about long-term AI impacts, but he doesn’t respond to any of the standard arguments for concern, so it’s unclear whether he knows much about the topic....
View ArticleF.A.Q. about my transition to GiveWell
Lots of people are asking for more details about my decision to take a job at GiveWell, so I figured I should publish answers to the most common questions I’ve gotten, though I’m happy to also talk...
View ArticleVideogames as art
I still basically agree with this 4-minute video essay I produced way back in 2008: Transcript When the motion picture was invented, critics considered it an amusing toy. They didn’t see its potential...
View ArticleReply to Buchanan on AI risk
Back in February, The Washington Post posted an opinion article by David Buchanan of the IBM Watson team: “No, the robots are not going to rise up and kill you.” From the title, you might assume “Okay,...
View ArticleReply to Tabarrok on AI risk
At Marginal Revolution, economist Alex Tabarrok writes: Stephen Hawking fears that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk and Bill Gates...
View ArticleReply to Etzioni on AI risk
Back in December 2014, AI scientist Oren Etzioni wrote an article called “AI Won’t Exterminate Us — it Will Empower Us.” He opens by quoting the fears of Musk and Hawking, and then says he’s not...
View ArticleReply to Ng on AI risk
On a recent episode of the excellent Talking Machines podcast, guest Andrew Ng — one of the big names in deep learning — discussed long-term AI risk (starting at 32:35): Ng: …There’s been this hype...
View ArticlePowerful musical contrasts
For a couple months I’d been listening almost exclusively to jazz music, while working on my jazz guide. Then on a whim I decided to listen to a song I hadn’t heard in a long time, Smashing Pumpkins’...
View Article“Fewer Data, Please”
The BMJ has some neat features, such as paper-specific “instant responses” and published peer-review correspondence. The latter feature allowed me to discover that in their initial “revise and...
View ArticleElon Musk on saving the world
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert asked Elon Musk if he was trying to save the world. The obvious, transparent answer is “yes.” But Elon’s reply was “Well, I’m trying to do useful things.” Perhaps...
View ArticleAnthony Braxton albums
I recently listened to 70 albums by Anthony Braxton, several of them very long, between 2 and 12 CDs. I thought a few of his albums were pretty great as works of art, but I enjoyed exactly one of them...
View ArticleArtistic greatness, according to my brain: a first pass
Why do some pieces of music, or film, or visual art strike me as “great works of art,” independent of how much I enjoy them? When I introspect on this, and when I test my brain’s mostly subconsious...
View ArticleUnabashedly emotional or catchy avant-garde music
Holden wrote me a fictional conversation to illustrate his experience of trying to find music that is (1) complex, (2) structurally interesting, and yet (3) listenable / emotional / catchy (at least in...
View ArticlePedro Domingos on AI risk
Pedro Domingos, an AI researcher at the University of Washington and the author of The Master Algorithm, on the podcast Talking Machines: There are these fears that computers are going to get very...
View ArticleDietterich and Horvitz on AI risk
Tom Dietterich and Eric Horvitz have a new opinion piece in Communications of the ACM: Rise of Concerns about AI. Below, I comment on a few passages from the article. Several of these speculations...
View ArticleThe critical importance of good headphones
If you’re exploring musical styles, e.g. via my guides to contemporary classical and modern art jazz, remember to get some good headphones. This is obvious in retrospect but often neglected. When I...
View ArticleSome practical obstacles to becoming a fan of modern classical music
I think there is a ton of modern classical music (MCM) that listeners would enjoy if they had a way to more cheaply discover it. Why can’t people cheaply discover MCM they like, and what can be done...
View ArticleA comparison of Mac and cloud programs for PDF rich text extraction
I like reading things via the Kindle app on my phone, because then I can read from anywhere. Unfortunately, most of what I want to read is in PDF format, so the text can’t “reflow” on my phone’s small...
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