background preloader

Misc

Facebook Twitter

Feel Good

DID. Shimeji/Desktop Buddies. FLI - Future of Life Institute. Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention.

FLI - Future of Life Institute

They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. Paper - Are You Living in a Simulation? Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future.

Paper - Are You Living in a Simulation?

Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct).

Paper - Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation. Monoprice.com.

Ameba

Angry Alien Productions. Entropy. The Magic Button. Staggering Beauty. Text Character Codes.