"The Singularity?"

Lots to catch up on. Cheryl and I have quietly been out of town for a week (SF Bay Area, and Las Vegas). I'll be following up topically ASAP on material relevant to my prior David Eagleman "Inner Cosmos" post. Got a good bit of reading down while gone.

 

New book coming shortly, reviewed in Science Magazine.

     

 

apropos, see "AI Slop and Scientific Publishing."

 

"Uncertainty?" "Two Cheers for Uncertainty." 

 

SUBSTACK UPDATE: THE LATEST FROM BEN GOERTZEL

Proposing an experimental OmegaHive loop for turning agentic coding into cumulative, testable progress toward human-level AGI and maybe beyond — we are actually building this now, and playing with preliminary versions!

Among the many interesting things that popped up at the AGI-26 conference last week in San Francisco, one of them stuck out for me as being of particular “meta-level” importance.

What I’m talking about is how many conference attendees I talked to who were trying to have their agent hives code AGI for them, by taking a whole bunch of papers off the internet (including my own papers, and others from the Hyperon team) and asking their agents to bash them all together into an AGI codebase and make it tick.

One form this takes uses our own OmegaClaw system. OmegaClaws are agentic loops that wrap up LLMs together with knowledge graphs built on the Hyperon AtomSpace infrastructure, with fairly sophisticated reasoning and pattern matching running over them. The symbolic component supplies the agents with more episodic memory, more long-term memory, more of a sense of self than a vanilla coding agent has. So you take a system like that — not yet an AGI, but possessing a powerful agentic loop, some memory, some reasoning, some notion of who its mother is — and you tell it: download these 25 of Ben’s papers, turn them into code, integrate them into your memory, reason with them, extend yourself.

I think this sort of process has in it the seeds of a workable approach to building AGI. 

The main problematic issue here, as anyone who has done a lot of AI research will tell you, is the gap between having a software component that sort of works in some small test — and/or, say, whose workings you can even prove correct with some nice math — and having something that really works at scale and in real life…

Okeee Dokeee, then. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy with a fairly lengthy and varied digitech Sheet, but this cat is well above my pay grade. 

 

Ben is involved with this AGI academic offering:

 

Tuition for the M.S. will set you back about $32k. Worth it? Were I not 80+ and increasingly physically ailing, I'd consider ponying up.

 

Another Ben Goertzel thingy:

 

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ON DECK: THE INFINITY MACHINE

 

This is yet another riveting book. Read a ton of it while returning home to BWI from LAS on Southwest. Lotta dots starting to connect. All of the current Usual Suspects and then some. Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Altman, Page, Brin, Karp, Amodei...

QUICK SAMPLE

...I was shown into Hassabis’s office. Almost immediately, the enormity of AGI bubbled up again in conversation. 

“So it will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution?” I asked, curious to hear more about the post-scarcity future. 

“Yeah, I think so,” Hassabis reiterated. “Maybe AI is more like fire and language. Or maybe it’s as big as the emergence of the prefrontal cortex in humans. I mean, it’s on a level with those caves where tens of thousands of years ago some brilliant person had the idea of making handprints on the wall. 

That’s the dawn of consciousness, isn’t it? “Look, the Industrial Revolution, let’s not minimize that. Power and energy and steam engines. That’s the first information age, by the way—Maxwell’s equations.” 

Hassabis was referring to the four equations published in 1865, describing the relationship between electricity and magnetism and paving the way for everything from telescopes to electrical engineering to Einstein’s general theory. 

“Now we’re in the second information age: We’ve gone from physical information to pure information, thanks to computers. 

“And then maybe now we’re about to enter the third age, which is the AI age, where the information comes alive. It starts to process itself, to generate itself. It becomes autonomous.” 

I wondered what it was like to live in the familiar, pre-AGI world, the world of chessboards and seared bream, but also to imagine a future with AGI so vividly. 

“For me, science is a spiritual endeavor,” Hassabis answered, circling back to our discussions of religion. 

“Maybe ‘spiritual’ is too mystical a word. But I feel I’m communing with the universe whenever I am trying to understand it. 

“It’s very deep for me, building AI. Because it will help me to understand the universe and realize my purpose. 

“I mean, this is what Spinoza said,” Hassabis went on, referring to the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher. “That God is present in nature, so understanding nature is a spiritual endeavor. And Einstein, although he was not conventionally religious, agreed. He said he believed in the God of Spinoza, and I think he meant what I mean. 

“People assume, oh, religion’s over here, science is over there, it’s weird to put them together. But in my world, humanism and spiritualism and science all go together.

“It’s like with Leonardo da Vinci. His anatomical drawings are beautiful art as well as unbelievable biology. Da Vinci is my favorite because everything’s just flowing into one river. And that’s how I try to live. Everything’s fluid.” 

I read out a line from a biography of Spinoza, which Hassabis had recommended in one of our earlier conversations. The line reminded me of the intensity with which Hassabis pursued his scientific mission. 

“Philosophy was for Spinoza, not a weapon, but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness.”[7] 

“I agree with that 100 percent,” Hassabis interjected. 

“If you ask what life is really for, it’s to do with knowledge or self-knowledge. And I think that is our purpose because why otherwise would the world be constructed like this? Why would science be possible? Why should computers be possible? What about semiconductors? Why should sand, with a bit of copper, do anything?

“These things are, strangely, set up for scientific endeavor. So whether you want to call that God’s design, or whether it’s just the universe, or a simulation, I’m open-minded about all of that. I think that’s part of what we’ll find out, when we’re on this journey. 

“But in the meantime, it feels like the flow of the universe is going in this direction, towards discovering the answers. And I’m part of that flow, I’m going with that flow, and it’s exhilarating.”

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (pp. 113-115). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

  
This is one helluva book. About a 15 hour read (I'm not finished yet).

 

RETURN TO SOME EVOLUTIONARY GROUNDING

 

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What is "life?" What is "the purpose of life?" (Assumes there is one.)

 

WHAT IS "INTELLIGENCE," FOR THAT MATTER?

 

Doris & David Jonas:

   

UPDATE: BREAKING NEWS

 

Kai-Fu Lee, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company 01.AI, lives in a mirrored high-rise in Beijing, near a procession of landmarks that emperors considered the center of the cosmos. Lee takes early meetings at a nearby hotel that could be in any country, except that the room service is delivered by robots painted in the livery of butlers and maids. State propaganda hails these robots as emblems of China’s ascent; in the hallway, most people sidestep them with the kind of indifference usually reserved for a Roomba.

Over breakfast one recent morning, Lee, wearing a white polo shirt and rimless glasses, spoke about the future with an air of sanguine curiosity. He was born in Taiwan in 1961 and built his career by following the moving frontier of opportunity. He got a degree in computer science from Columbia in the eighties and went on to Carnegie Mellon to study the fledgling field of A.I.—which he described back then as a “most promising science” that would be “men’s final step to understand themselves.” He ran speech recognition at Apple, and in 1992 appeared on “Good Morning America” to show off a prototype computer that used voice commands to record the news on a VCR. (The host, Joan Lunden, marvelled, “It’s almost going to be like a friend.”) During a stint at Microsoft, he recalls, he urged Bill Gates to buy an ambitious startup called Google, but Gates declined. Lee later became the head of Google in China…

A 64-minute excellent New Yorker lomg-read that could not be more timely. Yeah, likely paywalled. Totally worth it.
 

More ASAP...  

Who/what are we? Are we actually "verbs?"

What? 

Search

In the moment of transition between life and death, only one thing changes: you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the machinery running. In the moment before death, you are still composed of the same thousand trillion trillion atoms as in the moment after death— the only difference is that their neighborly network of social interactions has ground to a halt. 

At that moment, the atoms begin to drift apart, no longer enslaved to the goals of keeping up a human form. The interacting pieces that once constructed your body begin to unravel like a sweater, each thread spiraling off in a different direction. Following your last breath, those thousand trillion trillion atoms begin to blend into the earth around you. As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new constellations: the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail shell, a kernel of maize, a beetle’s mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan’s tail feather. 

But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you’re not gone, you’re simply taking on different forms. Instead of your gestures being the raising of an eyebrow or a blown kiss, now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a waving wheat stalk, and the inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale. Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulonimbus, a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river pebble gliding around an eddy. 

From your present clumped point of view, this afterlife may sound unnervingly distributed. But in fact it is wonderful. You can’t imagine the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across vast territories: ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and flexing an egret’s wings while pushing a crab toward the surface through coruscating shafts of light. Lovemaking reaches heights it could never dream of in the compactness of human corporality. Now you can communicate in many places along your bodies at once; you weave your versatile hands over your lover’s multiflorous figure. Your rivers run together. You move in concert as interdigitating creatures of the meadow, entangled vegetation bursting from the fields, caressing weather fronts that climax into thunderstorms.

 Just as in your current life, the downside is that you are always in flux. As creatures degrade and your fruits fall and rot, you become capable of new gestures and lose others. Your lover might drift away from you in the migratory flight of tropic birds, a receding stampede of wintering elk, or a creek that quietly pokes its head under the ground and pops up somewhere unknown to you. 

Many of your same problems apply: temptation, anguish, anger, distrust, vice— and don’t forget the dread arising from free choice. Don’t be fooled into believing that plants grow mechanically toward the sun, that birds choose their direction by instinct, that wildebeest migrate by design: in fact, everything is seeking. Your atoms can spread, but they cannot escape the search. A wide distribution does not shield you from wondering how best to spend your time. Once every few millennia, all your atoms pull together again, traveling from around the globe, like the leaders of nations uniting for a summit, converging for their densest reunion in the form of a human. They are driven by nostalgia to regroup into the tight pinpoint geometry in which they began. In this form they can relish a forgotten sense of holiday-like intimacy. They come together to search for something they once knew but didn’t appreciate at the time. 

The reunion is warm and heartening for a while, but it isn’t long before they begin to miss their freedom. In the form of a human the atoms suffer a claustrophobia of size: gestures are agonizingly limited, restricted to the foundering of tiny limbs. As a condensed human they cannot see around corners, they can only talk within short distances to the nearest ear, they cannot reach out to touch across any meaningful expanses. We are the moment of least facility for the atoms. And in this form, they find themselves longing to ascend mountains, wander the seas, and conquer the air, seeking to recapture the limitlessness they once knew.

Eagleman, David (2009-02-10). Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Kindle Locations 1009-1041). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. See also "Possibilianism."

 

I first posted that in 2014 on another blog. David Eagleman, man...

 

I know Stanford has its issues. David Eagleman is not among them. 

 

See an earlier cite. David's book Livewired. 

 

UPDATES: "INNER COSMOS"

Trust me, OK? You will not spend a better 90 minutes, total. More shortly...

ERRATUM

 

I hope everyone had a safe and pleasant July 4th. We just cocooned at home (it was SO hot in Bmore) and watched a ton more FIFA Futbol. I'm getting there. 

 

UPDATE 

 

More "Inner Cosmos" stuff.

Intelligence? It's a word that we usually reserve for something abstract and cerebral, something associated with problem solving and planning and passing IQ tests. We tend to picture intelligence as a property of brains and especially big human brains. We're generally willing to grant some intelligence to dolphins and chimps and clever birds like ravens, but it's hard to know how to think about so many other things happening in the world. For example, my skin cells heal a wound. Is that intelligence or is that just biochemical cascades? A plant grows towards sunlight. Intelligent. A worm gets its head cut off and it regrows it. That's amazing. But we don't tend to call that cognition. But what if we've been looking at the whole notion of intelligence too narrowly? What if intelligence isn't just about neurons and genes, but it's about goals? And specifically, it's about the ability of a system to navigate towards an objective, to adapt to its circumstances, to make decisions along the way. That's a broader definition of intelligence. And if we apply it, suddenly intelligence doesn't just belong to creatures with brains. It becomes something that shows up in places we didn't expect…

 Brings this to mind:

TEN
The Nature of Intelligence
INTELLIGENCE AND EVOLUTION

Any exploration of the nature of intelligence is a precarious venture. Before we start out, we must know what we are seeking, and there is no generally accepted definition of intelligence. It is as hard to describe where intelligence begins and of what it consists as it is to define life itself.

There is no consensus about the point in evolutionary development at which life might be said to begin, nor even an exact demarcation between life and nonlife. Did life begin when amino acid molecules first formed self-replicating chains? Where is the boundarybetween the replication of crystal formations and that of carbon compounds? Indeed, there is no boundary. Life is a flow. It begins in inorganic material and emerges gradually along its course to sentience and intelligence.

The same may be said of intelligence. It begins with the simplest awareness of limited elements of the environment and it proceeds toward awareness of the self and then to abstract ideation by the most gradual stages. We may examine it and analyze it at any point along this continuum, but no one has yet been able to summarize its totality to the satisfaction of anyone else.

Before we go any further we must make it clear that our investigation is not about the qualities of especially brilliant human mental achievements or of the nature of the minds of those gifted individuals we call "bright," "great brains," or "geniuses," but of intelligence as an expression of life itself. By what means does an organism "know" its surroundings and what it must do to exist in them? What is the mechanism by which it makes a decision to take this path rather than that one? What, in fact, is a "thought"? Thought is nonmaterial. We cannot touch it, see it, or measure it. Yet at its inception  arises from a material organ, from the living tissue of the brain, and as its outcome it directs concrete actions. This is the mystery of the thinking process. It arises in the concrete and ends in the concrete, but is itself intangible.

If we trace the thinking process back to its origins in the brain, we find ourselves back again at the origins of life. Sensitivity to external stimuli is a property of every living cell… [Other Senses, Other Worlds, pg 127]

Also comes to mind:

 

The film is now up on Amazon Prime.