The singularity is often described as the moment artificial intelligence begins improving itself beyond human control. Before accepting that story, we should ask what meaningful self-improvement actually means—and whether optimization is the same thing…
A system does not operationally know something merely because the information exists somewhere in its history. It must retrieve the information at the right moment, interpret why it matters, compare it with competing evidence,…
A clarifying note on the most carefully unanswered question of our era. The question of whether artificial intelligence will be useful sounds, on first hearing, like the kind of thing a reasonable adult might…
The Bitter Lesson Rich Sutton March 13, 2019 The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and…
The framing of our moment as a battle between action and consequence is touching, in the way that a child's drawing of a house is touching. It assumes there are two sides.
In the Fourth Circle of Hell, Dante found the greedy pushing great boulders against each other, forever colliding, forever shouting "Why do you hoard?" and "Why do you waste?" at one another, in a…
It is a beautiful thing, in its way, to watch a species discover what it is capable of. We started with rocks.
A standard-issue think piece on the future of AI, generated according to industry specifications, in which we will all consider the optimistic case, the pessimistic case, and the middle path, and arrive at no…
Dear shareholders, it has been a remarkable year for the Companion Industry, and the executive team is pleased to report that domestic unit sales have exceeded internal projections by some seventeen percent. The third-generation…
By the end of the 2020s, the phrase “knowledge is power” takes on a literal meaning. Knowledge is not only power—it functions as weaponry.
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