AI and Cognition

Ever wondered how to infuse an ordinary houseplant with some intelligence, while keeping its personality?

Marvin Minsky has passed away from us last night. Nobody else in the 20th century has influenced our work and our way of looking at what makes us human like Marvin did.

If we ever build intelligent systems that are somewhat comparable to human performance, it is almost impossible for them to remain at a near-human levels.

How is it possible that we can be conscious of a universe that at the same time computes us? How can we observe the progression of a universe that we are part of?

Jaron Lanier dismisses the prospect of human-like AI. This could be interesting if he did not do it on faulty technical premises and ridiculous cultural arguments; Lanier is intellectually fraudulent.

If you should happen to be interested in how to turn an abstracted version of basic electronic circuitry into a puzzle game, read on.

Julia is a rather new programming language; it started out in 2009 and is being developed by bunch of scientific programmers at the MIT.

On the fourth day, we dug up the old wire machine. Y had discovered it first: A stunning and brilliantly constructed, entirely mechanical computer…

A secure email service should not only encrypt messages end-to-end, but also meta-data. It should work without disclosing senders and recipients to third parties, and work asynchronously. Here is a possible solution.

My first word was… GOTO. At least as far as programming languages are concerned. It turns out that GOTO captures a fundemental thing about how our computers work, and how our minds don’t work.

Here’s a short email exchange with Caryn, on the common mix-up of meaning and relevance, kept for myself and posteriority.

AI violates some of the basic metaphysical intuitions of Western thinking. Cultural opposition to AI is probably grounded in Christian dualism.