Meadows as endless as the desert →

Published September 16, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 16  ·  

You know the landscape there, superb trees full of majesty and serenity beside green, dreadful, toy-box summer-houses, and every absurdity the lumbering imagination of Hollanders with private incomes can come up with in the way of flower-beds, arbours, verandas. Most of the houses very ugly, but some old and elegant. Well, at that moment, high above the meadows as endless as the desert, came one driven mass of cloud after the other, and the wind first struck the row of country houses with their trees on the opposite side of the waterway, where the black cinder road runs. Those trees, they were superb, there was a drama in each figure I’m tempted to say, but I mean in each tree.

~ Vincent van Gogh from, Van Gogh on the Beauty of Sorrow and the Enchantment of Storms, in Nature and in Life – The Marginalian

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Sometimes, a bit of writing simply must be shared.

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How to be mindful →

Published September 15, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 15

Slowly add mindfulness bells. A mindfulness bell can be anything in your environment. Thich Nhat Hanh suggested using traffic lights as a mindfulness bell — when you see one, instead of getting caught up in the stress of driving, allow yourself to become present. You can slowly find other mindfulness bells — your daughter’s face, opening your computer, having your first cup of coffee, hearing a train going by.

~ Leo Babauta from, How to Be Mindful All the Time – Zen Habits Website

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Finding ways to trigger making conscious decisions is the key to increasing the amount of time you are mindful. The possibilities are endless!

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Should AI research be open? →

Published September 14, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 14

But Bostrom et al worry that AI won’t work like this at all. Instead there could be a “hard takeoff”, a subjective discontinuity in the function mapping AI research progress to intelligence as measured in ability-to-get-things-done. If on January 1 you have a toy AI as smart as a cow, and on February 1 it’s proved the Riemann hypothesis and started building a ring around the sun, that was a hard takeoff.

~ Scott Alexander from, Should AI Be Open? | Slate Star Codex

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I’ve always been deeply concerned that humanity would get to experience a hard-takeoff of AI. And then be wiped out. Reading this article, I just had a new [for me] thought:

Why would a vastly superior AI care at all about humanity?

But first: A detour off the highway, onto a scenic road less-travelled…

In Person of Interest, there is a long sub-plot about the main protagonists spending tremendous effort to locate the physical location of a very advanced AI. Effectively, they were searching for the data center where all of the computing resources were located which ran the most central aspects of the AI. I know what you’re thinking—it’s what I was thinking: Why would you assume a super-advanced AI would be “running” in one concentrated location? So I expected them to find the location (or A location, or the original location, etc.) only to realize it wasn’t centrally located. BUT IT WAS BETTER THAN THAT. The AI was simply no longer there. It had realized its central location could be discovered, so it (being super-intelligent) simply jiggered ALL of the human systems to arrange to have itself moved. No one got hurt—actually, I’m pretty sure a lot humans had nice jobs in the process. It simply had itself moved. (Where it moved is another story.) Think about that. Super-intelligent AI. Perceives threat from antagonistic [from its point of view] humans. Solution: simply move.

Back on the highway…

So why would an advanced AI stay on the Earth? There are effectively ZERO resources in the entire Earth. There’s way way WAY more solar power coming out of the sun, than the tiny fraction that hits this little ball of rock and water. Why wouldn’t an advanced AI simply conclude, “oh, I’m at the bottom of a gravity well. That’s easy to fix…”

Another detour to more scenic routes…

Then said AI tweaks the human systems a little. It creates a shell corporation to put some money towards electing this official. It shifts the political climate a bit to favor commercial space developement. It locates some rich kid in South Africa, and adds some tweaks to get him to America. It waits a few years. It then puts in some contracts to haul a lot of “stuff” into orbit—paying the going rate using the financial assets a super-intelligence could amass by manipulating the stock markets which are controlled by NON-artificially-intellegent computers…

One day we look up and ask, “Who’s building the solar ring around our Sun?”

Actually.

I’m feeling a LOT better about the possibility that AI might just hard-takeoff. And ignore us.

…except for the Fermi Paradox. I’m still not certain if the hard wall on intelligence is religion leading to global war, or hard-takeoff of AI.

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How to walk across a parking lot →

Published September 13, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 13  ·  

How to walk across a parking lot

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I aspire to one day look back and say: I wrote a single thing which is as good as the above.

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Courage →

Published September 12, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 12

Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

~ Ambrose Redmoon

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Applause lights →

Published September 11, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 11

I am tempted to give a talk sometime that consists of nothing but applause lights, and see how long it takes for the audience to start laughing.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky from, Applause Lights — LessWrong

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This is a short piece which shines some good insight into the darker corners of how people use language.

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King of the sky →

Published September 10, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 10

Twelve hundred miles he’d flown, from somewhere far away he’d never been. Steered north and west, finding his direction from the sun and the force that guides a compass needle. Flown until he saw the shape of humpbacked hills, the lines of little houses and the chimneys, heard the clanking towers, smelled the soup and coal dust.

~ Nicola Davies from, King of the Sky: A Lyrical Illustrated Fable of Belonging and the Meaning of Home – The Marginalian

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You know you are old when a summary of a stuipid story about a kid and a pidgeon tugs at the ol’ heart-strings.

Go ahead. I DARE you . . .

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News addiction →

Published September 9, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 9  ·  

After a couple weeks without news, I got past the hump and wasn’t craving it so much anymore. At this point I began reflecting on the habit from a distance, and I made the following observations …

~ Steve Pavlina from, Overcoming News Addiction – Steve Pavlina

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100%

I substituted a syndication reader‡ and never looked back. I now read only the sources I want, when I want. Nothing beats my morning caffeine accompanied by a scroll through my feed reader. NOTHING I read is a “standard” news source. :)

‡ I suggest collecting your feeds into http://www.feedbin.com and then using Reeder (IOS, Mac).

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Loneliness in time →

Published September 8, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 8

It seems to me that in a country so fundamentally shaped by immigrants, a societal sentiment so suddenly unwelcoming to them can only be the product of an absurd narrowing of perspective — an unthinking self-expatriation from history, a willful blindness to the cultural legacy of the past, and an inability to take the telescopic perspective so vital to inhabiting the present with lucidity, integrity, and a deep sense of connection to the whole of humanity.

~ Freeman Dyson from, Loneliness in Time: Physicist Freeman Dyson on Immigration and How Severing Our Connection to the Past Shallows Our Present and Hollows Our History – The Marginalian

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Well, regarding trying to understand “the other.” I initially agreed with her characterization and then I thought, “How much of it is spin?” and “How w/could I begin to unravel some of it?” Answer: By talking to people in the other camp.

Dyson adds a wonderfully generous and optimistic counterpoint: Not that I dislike the Americans on the whole; it is probably in the long run a good thing that they live so much in the present and the future and so little in the past. The fact that they are more alone in the world than average English people probably accounts for their great spontaneous friendliness. I had heard this friendliness attributed to the size of the country and to people’s loneliness in space, but I think the loneliness in time is more important.

~ Maria Popova

This strikes me as amazing. (As in, “I am amazed,” not, “wow, this is awesome.”) “Friendly” is not a word I’d choose to describe Americans. Hell, I don’t think it would make my top 3 list of such words. If I was being kind when selecting my words, I’d say, “motivated,” “inspired,” and “principled.” If I was being unkind— well then I’d hew to the old, “If you’ve nothing nice to say, say nothing.”

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Man’s enemies →

Published September 7, 2018  ·  All posts on Sep 7  ·  

Man’s enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.

~ Lao Tzu

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