Gary Marcus: AGI by 2027? Apparently OpenAI’s internal roadmap alleged that AGI would be achieved by 2027, according to the suddenly ubiquitous Leopold Aschenbrenner (recently fired by OpenAI, previous employed by SBF), who yesterday published the math to allegedly justify it. ((2024-06-01) Leopold Aschenbrenner's AGI Situational Awareness Paper) (more)

The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, by Gary Marcus; ISBN: 9780262632683 (more)

Gary Fred Marcus (born 8 February 1970) is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI). Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.[3][4] His books include Guitar Zero[5] and Kluge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Marcus

Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction (more)

The word "mid-witted" was popularized by far-right activist and writer Vox Day. On February 17th, 2012, Vox Day[1] published the blog post "The tragedy of the mid-witted" in which he commented on a life story article "Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume" by Jennifer Wright... The term "midwit," meaning a person of average intelligence, saw use on 4chan starting in late 2013... On January 1st, 2017, an anonymous 4chan[6] user made the earliest found post which used the IQ bell curve diagram to argue about the similarity of political views of groups with low and high intelligence... On June 24th, 2019, an anonymous /pol/[11] user posted a Manlet meme referencing the horseshoe theory interpretation of the IQ bell curve... The viral popularity of the format began on March 10th, 2010, when an anonymous 4chan[15] user posted a meme about Ted Kaczynski and the anarcho-primitivistic ideology. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit (cf Middle Mind) (more)

see Personal Data Server

component of BlueSky architecture (more)

Portable Identity for ActivityPub. I want to focus on: portable digital identity. The idea that I should be able to take all of my data, everything that my identity consists of, and move wholesale to a new instance/server/PDS/whatever you call it. Bluesky permits this. Mastodon and most (all?) other ActivityPub implementations do not. But that doesn’t have to be the case, nothing about ActivityPub—architecturally speaking—is incompatible with this vision. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #73: Openly Evil AI. What do you call a clause explicitly saying that you waive the right to whistleblower compensation, and that you need to get permission before sharing information with government regulators like the SEC? (more)

artificial super-intelligence - AGI but way smarter/faster than humans

Leopold Aschenbrenner's AGI Situational Awareness Paper. https://situational-awareness.ai/ The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence (ASI), in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.

Neuro-symbolic AI is a type of artificial intelligence that integrates neural and symbolic AI architectures to address the weaknesses of each, providing a robust AI capable of reasoning, learning, and cognitive modeling. As argued by Leslie Valiant[1] and others,[2][3] the effective construction of rich computational cognitive models demands the combination of symbolic reasoning and efficient machine learning. Gary Marcus argued, "We cannot construct rich cognitive models in an adequate, automated way without the triumvirate of hybrid architecture, rich prior knowledge, and sophisticated techniques for reasoning."[4] Further, "To build a robust, knowledge-driven approach to AI we must have the machinery of symbol manipulation in our toolkit. Too much useful knowledge is abstract to proceed without tools that represent and manipulate abstraction, and to date, the only known machinery that can manipulate such abstract knowledge reliably is the apparatus of symbol manipulation.".. Henry Kautz,[6] Francesca Rossi,[7] and Bart Selman[8] also argued for a synthesis. Their arguments attempt to address the two kinds of thinking, as discussed in Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. It describes cognition as encompassing two components: System 1 is fast, reflexive, intuitive, and unconscious. System 2 is slower, step-by-step, and explicit. System 1 is used for pattern recognition. System 2 handles planning, deduction, and deliberative thinking. In this view, deep learning best handles the first kind of cognition while symbolic reasoning best handles the second kind. Both are needed for a robust, reliable AI that can learn, reason, and interact with humans to accept advice and answer questions.... Implementations of neuro-symbolic approaches include: AllegroGraph: an integrated Knowledge Graph based platform for neuro-symbolic application development.[25][26][27]; Scallop: a language based on Datalog that supports differentiable logical and relational reasoning. Scallop can be integrated in Python and with a PyTorch learning module; .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-symbolic_AI

Micah Sifry: Inside the Fall of Obama’s Grassroots Army. Christopher Edley had invited them to join a “Movement 2.0 Brainstorming Group.” Together, they would ponder a crucial question: how to “sustain the movement” should Barack Obama, who was still a month away from accepting the Democratic nomination, go on to win the White House. (more)

Barack Obama election-to-inauguration transition site. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: On Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast with Leopold Aschenbrenner. The central discussion was the theses of his paper, Situational Awareness, which I offered quotes from earlier, with a focus on the consequences of AGI rather than whether AGI will happen soon. There are also a variety of other topics. (2024-06-01) Leopold Aschenbrenner's AGI Situational Awareness Paper (more)

Why Barack Obama Failed to Build an Enduring Movement. How did this happen? In 2010, the meme that began to arise via articles in Rolling Stone and elsewhere is that Democratic political operative David Plouffe was to blame. From RS: After the 2008 election, Plouffe had taken OFA, previously known as Obama for America, and moved its entire operation into the Democratic National Committee. 2009-09-03-NoWeCant (more)

No We Can't. *As the polls were closing in Massachusetts on the evening of January 19th, turning Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat over to the Republicans for the first time in half a century, David Plouffe was busy reminiscing about the glory days. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Quotes from Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Paper. This post is different. Usually I offer commentary and analysis. I share what others think, then respond. This is the second time I am importantly not doing that. The work speaks for itself. It offers a different perspective, a window and a worldview. It is self-consistent. This is what a highly intelligent, highly knowledgeable person actually believes after much thought. (2024-06-01) Leopold Aschenbrenner's AGI Situational Awareness Paper (more)

Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity.[1] It can be a form of utility computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing (more)

Simon Wardley: Why the fuss about conversational programming? *It’s not widely talked about yet, but it will be. To understand why, I’m going to build on my previous HackerNoon post on "Why the fuss about serverless?" (more)