Singularity The term “Singularity” had a much narrower meaning back when the Machine Intelligence Research Institute was founded. Since then the term has acquired all sorts of unsavory connotations. The kind of Singularity I work on has little to do with Moore’s Law. Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. The famous statistician I. If you offered Gandhi a pill that made him want to kill people, he would refuse to take it, because he knows that then he would kill people, and the current Gandhi doesn’t want to kill people. My mid-range long-term research program is to work out a formal theory of such matters – describe how a mind would modify itself deterministically and precisely, including modifications to the part of itself that does the modifying. A good deal of the material I have ever produced – specifically, everything dated 2002 or earlier – I now consider completely obsolete.
Quantum Entanglement and the Tech of Tomorrow This isn’t the post I expected to be writing today. There are two reasons why you’re reading this and not the first of a three-part article about Priests: the first is a documentary (part 3 of The Fabric Of The Cosmos) and the second is the explosion of inspiration that it produced. I wanted to strike while the iron was hot… This article builds on and extends the game physics that I use for the Zenith-3 and Warcry campaigns, which I previously discussed in Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming amongst several other articles. Quantum Entanglement So, let’s start with the source of inspiration behind this whole article – Quantum Entanglement. Still here? If you spin the wheels, entanglement means that whatever color comes up on one wheel, the opposite color will come up on the other. Einstein hated the notion. Multiple Dimensions Of Space-Time When I first described this theory of “Vector Time”, one of the comments I got was “why?”. Demystifying the spookiness Entanglement is real.
Mars rover Curiosity makes "earthshaking" find: No one is talking but everyone is speculating Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems (rover) & Shutterstock (alien) OK, everyone, can we all take a sec and just breathe? I’m getting emails, and seeing Facebook updates, blog posts, and tweets—and I bet if I look hard enough, even smoke signals—about scientists saying they’ve found something “for the history books” on Mars. This was first reported by NPR in an interesting but nearly meatless article. All we know is that the scientists who are running an instrument on the Curiosity rover called SAM—for Sample Analysis on Mars, an apparatus that can analyze material scooped up from the surface—are very excited about some preliminary results. Very excited. And that’s all we know. I’m seeing tons of speculation, though, and I will happily be the party pooper: don’t let your imagination run away from you. This has happened before. And here we go again, again. And I won’t guess.
Space.com COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — They'll be crammed into a space the size of an RV for more than a year, breathing recycled air, subsisting on dehydrated food and drinking their purified urine. If they die, they'll be freeze-dried in a body bag. And if they survive, they'll have to re-enter Earth's atmosphere at a screaming 8.8 miles (14.2 kilometers) per second. But the applications are already rolling in for the first manned mission to Mars, the project team said Thursday (April 11). Speaking at the National Space Symposium here, members of the Inspiration Mars Foundation described the challenges inherent in launching two humans on a 501-day flyby journey to the Red Planet and back in January 2018, but remained optimistic that those challenges aren't insurmountable. "So far, we haven't come up with any show-stoppers, so that's exciting," said Jane Poynter, president of the Paragon Space Development Corp., which has partnered with Inspiration Mars. Making history "There are a lot of unknowns.
Rationality Over the last several decades, science has developed a new picture of how we succeed or fail to seek true beliefs and achieve our goals. The heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology has exposed dozens of major flaws in human reasoning, and along with them, insight into the mental processes that produce these flaws. Bayesian probability theory and decision theory have been used in increasingly powerful statistical methods and machine learning algorithms; I believe that they also provide a lens through which to view everyday life. Evolutionary psychology and social psychology are also telling us new and disturbing things about human nature – can we, now knowing, do any better? The vast bulk of my writings on rationality are contained on the Less Wrong community blog – follow the link to see some of my recommended posts.
The Rise and Fall of Supersymmetry — Starts With A Bang! “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.” -Che Guevara Over the past 100 years, our picture of the Universe has changed dramatically, on both the largest scales and the smallest. On the large-scales, we’ve gone from a Newtonian Universe of unknown age populated only by the stars and nebulae in our own Milky Way to a Universe governed by General Relativity, containing hundreds of billions of galaxies. The age of this Universe is dated at 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, the observable part of which is some 92 billion light-years in diameter, filled with normal matter (and not antimatter), dark matter, and dark energy. And on the small scales, the revolution has been just as dramatic. We’ve gone from a Universe made up of atomic nuclei, electrons and photons, where the only known forces were gravitational and electromagnetic, to a much more fundamental understanding of the smallest particles and interactions that make up the Universe.
Mars Rover Curiosity Discovery Hype a Big Misunderstanding SAN FRANCISCO — The chief scientist for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity was just excited about the mission, and thrilled that one of the six-wheeled robot's key instruments was acing its first Red Planet tests. That's all he meant to convey. But when an NPR story last month quoted John Grotzinger as saying that data recently gathered by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM, were destined "for the history books," the world imposed its own interpretation. Rumors begin flying around the Internet that SAM had perhaps detected complex organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — on the Red Planet. What Curiosity found SAM's actual findings, which were revealed Monday (Dec. 3) in a press conference here at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, are intriguing but fall a bit short of the fevered speculation. He was surprised by the way his words rocketed around the Internet. "We're doing science at the speed of science.
Space news on space exploration and space flight | sen.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky Our godless brains: Emerging science reveals mind-blowing alternatives to a higher power Physics is the mother science. As such, it holds the greatest power for discovering the true nature of the universe and life within it. Physicists these days seem preoccupied with astronomical issues, such as the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. But some physicists venture into the realm of biology, claiming that their unique experimental and mathematical skills give them special insight into matters of life and death. I just hate it when physicists write about biology. To digress briefly, I am reminded of the communication gap between people of science and everybody else, as so powerfully discussed by C. For most of my career, biology was generally considered a “soft” science, unworthy of the same stature as physics and chemistry. It’s hard for biologists to argue with physicists. The limits of math become more troublesome when physicists try to explain the origin of the universe. Even if you invoke the idea of a creator god, where did that god come from? Relativity.
New Mars Meteorite Contains 10 Times More Water Than Previous Finds | Wired Science Scientists have identified a never-before-seen type of meteorite from Mars that has 10 times more water and far more oxygen in it than any previous Martian sample. The meteorite was found in the Sahara Desert in 2011 and has the official name of Northwest Africa 7034. It is a small basaltic rock — nicknamed “Black Beauty” – which means it formed from rapidly cooling lava. The meteorite is about 2.1 billion years old, from a period known as the Martian Amazonian epoch, and provides scientists with their first hands-on glimpse of this era. Around 110 Martian meteorites have been found on Earth. Most were probably blown off the Red Planet during a large asteroid impact and subsequently crashed on our own world. Almost all other Mars rocks on Earth fall into a category known as the SNC group (Shergottites, nakhlites, and chassignites). Scientists analyzed the rock through several methods. Image: NASA
astronomy magazine NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is three months from returning to humanity the first-ever close-up images and scientific observations of distant Pluto and its system of large and small moons. "Scientific literature is filled with papers on the characteristics of Pluto and its moons from ground-based and Earth-orbiting space observations, but we've never studied Pluto up close and personal," said John Grunsfeld of the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. "In an unprecedented flyby this July, our knowledge of what the Pluto system is really like will expand exponentially, and I have no doubt there will be exciting discoveries." The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons has traveled a longer time and farther away — more than nine years and 3 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) — than any space mission in history to reach its primary target. Pluto's smaller moons also are likely to present scientific opportunities.
02002-02029 (27 years): By 2029 no computer - or &machine intelligence& - will have passed the Turing Test. - Long Bets - StumbleUpon The Significance of the Turing Test. The implicit, and in my view brilliant, insight in Turing's eponymous test is the ability of written human language to represent human-level thinking. The basis of the Turing test is that if the human Turing test judge is competent, then an entity requires human-level intelligence in order to pass the test. The human judge is free to probe each candidate with regard to their understanding of basic human knowledge, current events, aspects of the candidate's personal history and experiences, as well as their subjective experiences, all expressed through written language. As humans jump from one concept and one domain to the next, it is possible to quickly touch upon all human knowledge, on all aspects of human, well, humanness. There are many contemporary examples of computers passing "narrow" forms of the Turing test, that is, demonstrating human-level intelligence in specific domains. Why I Think I Will Win.
Black Whole Dynamics: The Foundation of our Fractal-Holographic Universe (Before It's News) Sombrero spiral galaxy from NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Brandon West, ContributorWaking Times If I had to explain Nassim Haramein’s work and try to describe his Holofractographic Universe Theory (HFU) to a person who had never heard of it before, or who was questioning it’s validity, I would begin with the scaling law for organized matter. This scaling law to me is as close to irrefutable evidence that you can get in science, confirming Nassim’s proposition of a fractal and holographic universe as a result of fundamental structure and dynamics of the vacuum (the space-time manifold, which we will explore in detail). This knowledge is important because it helps us to understand our relationship to all scales of the universe. Scalar Dimensions of Reality One important aspect of reality that we have to understand and shift our perspective on in order to comprehend reality more completely, is the nature of dimensions. The Scaling Law for Organized Matter