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Louis Choquel

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Transhumanism Arguments

I am a transhumanist. Before you start making fun of me, read more of Michael Anissimov's blog Accelerating Future. Singularity, life extension, friendly artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, existential risk: he excels at introducing these concepts and arguing cultural or technological issues they raise. As a fund raiser for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he knows what he writes about and gives many pointers to the articles of the best futurologists out there.

And he is very smart and masters the art of providing calm thoughtful answers to low and mean attacks from anti-transhumanist journalists and bloggers. Read those answers and make up your mind: this future he discusses is not so far ahead, this is important stuff, what do you believe in?

Posted by Louis Choquel on April 13, 2008 in Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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One Thought on How to Face Rogue AIs

Just a comment I dropped on a recent post by Michael Anissimov's on his blog Accelerating Future:

Michael, you write smart articles and ask tough questions. And there are many smart people reading you and posting comments.

But you know as well as I do that no one has come up with a clear and definitive answer to these problems. How could we solve these mysteries? Maybe we're not smart enough to find the answers.
I was just thinking: maybe a little (early-stage) intelligence enhancement could help us grasp what's in store for us when the subsequent generations of huge intelligence enhancements arrive.

We believe that once humans build smarter-than-human intelligence, it will engage a positive feedback loop and enhance itself, probably at an accelerating or even explosive rhythm. But right before it happens it would be nice if that smarter-than-human intelligence could join us, participate at SIAI, LifeBoat Foundation & other places and help us get ready to face rogue AIs.

Posted by Louis Choquel on February 02, 2008 in Science, Singularity, Technology, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Thinking Meat is What We Are

I just read this after finding it via an old article by Michael Anissimov. It's a short (very short actually) story by Terry Bisson - a couple of minutes to read, very funny and thought provoking:

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

Posted by Louis Choquel on October 27, 2007 in Science, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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The Next 25 Years of Video Games

Why should you care about improving technologies?

If curing cancer and solving world hunger doesn't cut it for you, read this deep article by David Wong and Steve Woyach:

The Next 25 Years of Video Games

Posted by Louis Choquel on October 08, 2007 in Digital lifestyle, Robotics, Science, Singularity, Technology, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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Transhumanism, AI, Nanotechnology and Existential Risk

Here is a blog you must read if you want to understand the future of technology and why it matters:

Accelerating Future - by Michael Anissimov

I'm wondering why I haven't added it to my blog-roll earlier - the answer is that I was so captivated by this reading that I forgot I even had a blog-roll.

So I just added it now after reading this great article about Technological Transcension. Just be smart enough to understand that his ideas are backed by many great thinkers and he's right: people need to understand that this is coming and we should get ready for it, for the good and for the bad.

Posted by Louis Choquel on October 07, 2007 in Science, Singularity, Technology, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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Virtual Worlds are the Place to Grow Bodyless AIs

Scientists are working on many different kinds of AIs.

So imagine you had programmed an AI which is starting to take shape and it's meant to be the brain of a pet or potentially a baby robot. But in order for the robot body to move around in the real world, see and touch things, you would need a few more years or decades of R&D just to make it work mechanically.

Meanwhile you wish your pet-brain AI wants to learn from interacting with other things and beings. Kind of a chicken and egg situation. But now you can get around it pretty easily: just plug your AI into a virtual world such as Second Life. No need for a robotic body, the virtual body will be your AI's interface into the virtual world...

Researchers at US firm Novamente are working in this direction according to this BBC article.

Found via Blogging the Singularity.

Posted by Louis Choquel on September 23, 2007 in Digital lifestyle, Robotics, Science, Technology, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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The Singularity

The Second Singularity Summit is nearing, as it will take place on September 8-9 in San Francisco. So it's a good time to watch the speech by Ray Kurtzweil last year in Stanford. Watch his brilliant briefing on exponential growth and how it leads to strong Artificial Intelligence and a super-intelligent digital brain:

   

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Posted by Louis Choquel on September 06, 2007 in Robotics, Science, Singularity, Technology, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Humanity Might Disappear If We Don't Prevent It

Are you aware of the existential risks that loom and threaten humanity?

Do you realize that the time frame for these threats is between 3-30 years, a much shorter time frame than global warming (I believe media attention will probably tire of global warming long before that)?

Michael Anissimov is one of those young thinkers who are aware of the existential risks for humanity, just as much as they're aware of the great potential for greater-than-human intelligence to emerge if we don't blow it before then. I wonder how many there are.

Read on his series of recent posts on the subject:

Then realize that it is not only about the lives of our children but really about our lives. And I even include my baby-boomer parents in the lot.

What can we do about it? Michael explains it so I will stress the easiest part: be aware, be conscious. That's what I am doing, I spread the word.

Do you understand these risks? Do you believe in them? Tell me.

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Posted by Louis Choquel on September 04, 2007 in Science, Singularity, Technology, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Maybe We Live in a Computer Simulation - pfff! Geek is Sooo Cool

It makes perfect sense to imagine that the universe we live in is actually a computer simulation run by some superior intelligence in another universe. This hypothesis actually entails the only rational demonstration of the existence of God that ever convinced me.

Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, has a solid argument that sustains it. But it is still only hypothetical. As he puts it:

“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

Read John Thierny's article Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch on this subject in the New York Times. And read the follow-up discussions in his blog.

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Posted by Louis Choquel on August 21, 2007 in Science, Technology, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

SIAI: Humanity's Stand Against The Terminator & The Matrix

SIAI - The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

A non-profit organization working on the most important issues of Humanity: The Singularity. What does it mean? SIAI has opened a blog and is putting some energy in explaining the Singularity to us:

To be honest I am pretty curious about how you feel about that. Believer / non-believer? Go ahead and let me know in the comments.

If you ask me, these guys are forming the early stage of our most important line of defense. Will smarter-than-human AI be friendly? or will it decide to enslave us or exterminate us? Stop smiling for a second, and realize that this is the biggest challenge we have ever faced. The outcome could be spiritual elevation and the end of material limitations. But if we don't make it right, it could also spell Doom and all Terminator/Matrix Hell could break loose.



Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the world's foremost researchers on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow. In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence," a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2007), "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks" and "Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk."

Posted by Louis Choquel on June 17, 2007 in Robotics, Science, Singularity, Technology, Transhumanism | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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