cogito ex machina

Investigations into Artificial General Intelligence and related topics, especially philosophical questions about the limits of machine intelligence and the consequences of a possible intelligence explosion.

cogito ex machina has two main sections:

For more information see About cogito ex machina.

Coherent arguments about the existential risk of Artificial Intelligence

1st January 2019

I wanted to call this "Steven Pinker was sent by Skynet to fool us!" but the joke might have backfired

In an October 2018 interview the Harvard academic and author Steven Pinker said that:

When asked about a tweet by Elon Musk about the difference between narrow AI and AGI, Steven Pinker waved it away, implied that Elon Musk is a hot-head and said that this was not the last time that "Elon Musk has fired off an intemperate tweet".

Although that may be true, it doesn't prove Pinker's point about AI not being worth spending too much time worrying about, so this short animated video examines Pinker's assertions, coolly.

TODO: video review

TODO: slides contra Pinker

TODO: commentary contra Pinker

Welcome to cogito ex machina

30th December 2018

The Opinion section is a blog of sorts, sharing provisional conclusions arising from my study and putting forward some of my own opinions. There is nothing much here yet because I wanted to get the piece about Steven Pinker's mistaken argument out quickly, but there is much more being worked on and that will follow later.