Related papers: Can Intelligence Explode?
AI risks are typically framed around physical threats to humanity, a loss of control or an accidental error causing humanity's extinction. However, I argue in line with the gradual disempowerment thesis, that there is an underappreciated…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
Imagine an oracle that correctly predicts the outcome of every particle physics experiment, the products of every chemical reaction, or the function of every protein. Such an oracle would revolutionize science and technology as we know…
In this paper we address the cosmic frequency of technological species. Recent advances in exoplanet studies provide strong constraints on all astrophysical terms in the Drake Equation. Using these and modifying the form and intent of the…
We explore definite theoretical assertions about consciousness, starting from a non-reductive psycho-informational solution of David Chalmers's 'hard problem', based on the hypothesis that a fundamental property of 'information' is its…
We review the theory of information cascades and social learning. Our goal is to describe in a relatively integrated and accessible way the more important themes, insights and applications of the literature as it has developed over the last…
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
The artificial intelligence industry is not an isolated economic phenomenon; it is the current physical substrate for a broader, multi-billion-year process: the evolution of an abstract intelligence on Earth. As the scale of computation…
We conjecture that space-like singularities are simply regions in which all available degrees of freedom are excited, and the system cycles randomly through generic quantum states in its Hilbert space. There is no simple geometric…
More than hundred years ago the 'classic physics' was it in its full power, with just a few unexplained phenomena; which however led to a revolution and the development of the 'modern physics'. Today the computing is in a similar position:…
The belief that AI technology is on the cusp of causing a generalized social crisis became a popular one in 2023. While there was no doubt an element of hype and exaggeration to some of these accounts, they do reflect the fact that there…
This is a brief review of the experimental and theoretical quantum computing. The hopes for eventually building a useful quantum computer rely entirely on the so-called "threshold theorem". In turn, this theorem is based on a number of…
We stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues on its fast-paced digital transformation, so does humankind's collective scientific knowledge and discourse. We now read and…
In view of the sobering findings of science, theology and to a lesser degree metaphysics is confronted with a humiliating loss, and a need for reinterpretation, of allegories and narratives which have served as guidance to the perplexed for…
I shall present three arguments for the proposition that intelligent life is very rare in the universe. First, I shall summarize the consensus opinion of the founders of the Modern Synthesis (Simpson, Dobzhanski, and Mayr) that the…
This paper addresses the central question of what a coherent concept of probability might look like that would do justice to both classical probability theory, axiomatized by Kolmogorov, and quantum theory. At a time when quanta are…
Using an extremely large number of processing elements in computing systems leads to unexpected phenomena, such as different efficiencies of the same system for different tasks, that cannot be explained in the frame of classical computing…
There is considerable and growing interest in the emergence of novel technologies, especially from the policy-making perspective. Yet as an area of study, emerging technologies lacks key foundational elements, namely a consensus on what…
The term serendipity describes a creative process that develops, in context, with the active participation of a creative agent, but not entirely within that agent's control. While a system cannot be made to perform serendipitously on…
In the scientific literature, the term emergent phenomena is invoked in the context of a collective behavior observed in a complex adaptive system that exhibits no correspondence with the behavior of the system constituents. Although this…