trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups: Cambridge UK, Durham, London, Vienna
by FrankAdamek — 2013-03-15T15:46:26.708Z

This summary was posted to LW main on March 8th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 43-46: 09 March 2013 11:30AM
Vienna Meetup 9th March: 09 March 2013 04:00PM
London Meetup, 10th March: 10 March 2013 02:00PM
Brussels meetup: 16 March 2013 01:00PM
Munich Meetup: 01 April 2013 05:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

(Cambridge UK) [Reading Group, HAEFB-05] Sunday 10th March, 11am, Trinity JCR: 10 March 2013 11:00AM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups. And if you're not interested in notifications you can still enter your approximate location, which will let meetup-starting her...
Risks of downloading alien AI via SETI search
by turchin — 2013-03-15T10:25:48.505Z

Alexei Turchin. Risks of downloading alien AI via SETI search

Abstract: This article examines risks associated with the program of passive search for alien signals (SETI—the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). In this paper we propose a scenario of possible vulnerability and discuss the reasons why the proportion of dangerous signals to harmless ones can be dangerously high. This article does not propose to ban SETI programs, and does not insist on the inevitability of SETI-triggered disaster. Moreover, it gives the possibility of how SETI can be a salvation for mankind.

The idea that passive SETI can be dangerous is not new. Fred Hoyle suggested in the story "A for Andromeda” a scheme of alien attack through SETI signals. According to the plot, astronomers receive an alien signal, which contains a description of a computer and a computer program for it. This machine creates a description of the genetic code which leads to the creation of an intelligent creature – a girl dubbed Andromeda, which, working together with the computer, creates advanced technology for the military. The initial suspicion of alien intent is overcome by the greed for the technology the aliens can provide. However, the main characters realize that the computer acts in a manner hostile to human civilization and destroy the computer, and the girl dies.

This scenario is fiction, because most scientists do not believe in the possibility of a strong AI, and, secondly, because we do not have the technology that enables synthesis of new living organisms solely from its’ genetic code. Or at least, we have not until recently. Current technology of sequencing and DNA synthesis, as well as progress in developing a code of DNA modified with another set of the alphabet, indicate that in 10 years the task of re-establishing a living being from computer codes sent from space in the form computer codes might be feasible.

Hans Moravec in the book "Mind Children" (1988) offers a similar type of vulnerability: downloading a computer program from space via SETI, which will have artificial intelligence, promising new opportunities for the owner and after fooling the human host, self-replicating by the millions of copies and destroying the human host, finally using the resources of the secured planet to send its ‘child’ copies to multiple planets which constitute it...
Meetup : Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-06]
by Sohum — 2013-03-15T09:20:50.212Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-06]

WHEN:
17 March 2013 11:00:00AM (+0000)

WHERE:
Trinity JCR, Cambridge, UK

This week, we'll finish off the Causality/Physics section of Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 For Beginners, with Causal Universes. It's time to discuss time~

Also, we're planning a new meetup series starting next term based in Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Join the discussion at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/cambridgelesswrong

-Sohum

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-06]
[LINK] Intrade Shuts Down
by Douglas_Reay — 2013-03-15T09:12:36.925Z

Intrade, the prediction market website, has shutdown. According to their website:

With sincere regret we must inform you that due to circumstances recently discovered we must immediately cease trading activity on www.intrade.com.

These circumstances require immediate further investigation, and may include financial irregularities which in accordance with Irish law oblige the directors to take the following actions:

Cease exchange trading on the website immediately.

Settle all open positions and calculate the settled account value of all Member accounts immediately.

Cease all banking transactions for all existing Company accounts immediately.

During the upcoming weeks, we will investigate these circumstances further and determine the necessary course of action.

Here's a link to an article on the slashdot website with more information about it:

http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/intrade-shuts-down-under-murky-circumstances/

Has anyone looked into the feasibility of creating an open source version of something similar, using a distributed application and a microcurrency (such as bitcoin), that couldn't be shutdown?
AI prediction case study 5: Omohundro's AI drives
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-03-15T09:09:35.224Z

Myself, Kaj Sotala and Seán ÓhÉigeartaigh recently submitted a paper entitled "The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions and what they mean for the future" to the conference proceedings of the AGI12/AGI Impacts Winter Intelligenceconference. Sharp deadlines prevented us from following the ideal procedure of first presenting it here and getting feedback; instead, we'll present it here after the fact.

The prediction classification shemas can be found in the first case study.

What drives an AI?

Classification: issues and metastatements, using philosophical arguments and expert judgement.

Steve Omohundro, in his paper on 'AI drives', presented arguments aiming to show that generic AI designs would develop 'drives' that would cause them to behave in specific and potentially dangerous ways, even if these drives were not programmed in initially (Omo08). One of his examples was a superintelligent chess computer that was programmed purely to perform well at chess, but that was nevertheless driven by that goal to self-improve, to replace its goal with a utility function, to defend this utility function, to protect itself, and ultimately to acquire more resources and power.

This is a metastatement: generic AI designs would have this unexpected and convergent behaviour. This relies on philosophical and mathematical arguments, and though the author has expertise in mathematics and machine learning, he has none directly in philosophy. It also makes implicit use of the outside view: utility maximising agents are grouped together into one category and similar types of behaviours are expected from all agents in this category.

In order to clarify and reveal assumptions, it helps to divide Omohundro's thesis into two claims. The weaker one is that a generic AI design could end up having these AI drives; the stronger one that it would very likely have them.

Omohundro's paper provides strong evidence for the weak claim. It demonstrates how an AI motivated only to achieve a particular goal, could nevertheless improve itself, become a utility maximising agent, reach out for resources and so on. Every step of the way, the AI becomes better at achieving its goal, so all these changes are consistent with its initial programming. This behaviour is very generic: only specifically tailored or unusual ...
[SEQ RERUN] No, Really, I've Deceived Myself
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-15T07:04:40.521Z

Today's post, No, Really, I've Deceived Myself was originally published on 04 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Some people who have fallen into self-deception haven't actually deceived themselves. Some of them simply believe that they have deceived themselves, but have not actually done this.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Teaching the Unteachable, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Imposing conditions that would have been evidence about optimal behaviour in the EEA
by D_Malik — 2013-03-15T01:01:23.298Z

Warning: armchair evopsych speculation follows.

Related to: Summer vs Winter Strategies

A couple months ago, I had a large amount of tedious work to do. Whenever I sat down to do it, I would be distracted by other, less mentally straining or more interesting tasks. I decided to try an experiment in disconnecting distraction: I removed everything on my laptop that wasn't that work, and travelled to a remote rural location. I had no internet access, books, or any other things to keep me occupied. I decided to take further advantage of the precommitment opportunity by not taking enough food for the full trip, so I would be fasting for 2.5 of the trip's 6 days.

I managed to get a large chunk of the work done, so I count the trip as successful and am planning to repeat it for longer time periods. The most interesting observations I got were the effects it had on my mental state. There were two clear effects.

* First, really strong cravings for various forms of distraction, together with a sort of severe, restless mental pain at not having them; I tried to sleep as long as possible because that was more entertaining than the mind-numbing boredom of hours and hours of the work. The mind seems to adjust for entertainment like it does for several things - having more entertainment than your "expected entertainment" setpoint raises the setpoint and makes you happy, and having less than the setpoint lowers the setpoint and makes you unhappy.

* Second, by the end of the six days, a weird feeling of agency, high willpower, clarity about goals and how to achieve them, and a stronger-than-baseline desire to not socialize. These effects were really strong; they lasted for two or three days after I returned from the trip. This did not feel like the hypomania that caffeine (with no tolerance) induces in me; I felt calm and conscientious.

At the time, I attributed all of the mental effects to setpoint-lowering, commitment/consistency (seeing yourself as "the type of person that does X"), and placebo. Later, I thought of another explanation: all of the conditions in the experiment, when they were present in the EEA, were symptoms of scarcity of resources. They're all signs of the environment being generally hard to survive in, or of a lowering of the environment's carrying capacity, e.g. by a drought or a heatwave.

To review the conditions:

* I had no contact wi...
[SEQ RERUN] Teaching the Unteachable
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-14T22:55:33.933Z

Today's post, Teaching the Unteachable was originally published on 03 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are many things we do that we can't easily understand how we do them. Teaching them is therefore a challenge.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Unteachable Excellence, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Thoughts On The Relationship Between Life and Intelligence
by IsaacLewis — 2013-03-14T16:51:11.818Z

3rd May 2014: I no longer hold the ideas in this article. IsaacLewis2013 had fallen into something of an affective death spiral around 'evolution' and self-organising systems. That said, I do still hold with my statement at the time that this is 'as one interesting framework for viewing such topics'.

I've recently been reading up on some of the old ideas from cybernetics and self-organisation, in particular Miller's Living Systems theory, and writing up my thoughts on my blog.

My latest article might be of interest to LessWrongers - I write about the relationship between life, purpose, and intelligence.

My thesis is basically:

To be intelligent, a system has to have goals - it has to be an agent. (I don't think this is controversial).

But the only way goals can emerge in a purposeless universe is via living systems, based on natural selection. E.g., if a system has the goal of its own survival, it is more likely that in future there will be a system with the goal of its own survival. If a system has the goal of reproducing itself, it is more likely that in future there will be multiple systems with the goal of reproducing themselves. (A living system is not necessarily biological - it just means a self-organising system).

Since computers are not alive, they don't have intrinsic goals, and are not, by default, intelligent. Most non-living agents have the ultimate goal of serving living systems. E.g., a thermostat has the proximate goal of stabilising temperature, but the ultimate goal of keeping humans warm. Likewise for computers -- they mostly serve the goals of the humans who program them.

However, an intelligent software program is possible -- you just have to make a living software program (again, living in the Living Systems sense doesn't necessarily mean carbon and DNA, it just means self-reproduction or self-organisation). Computer viruses count as alive. Not only do they reproduce, they push back. If you try and delete them, they resist. They possess a sliver of the ultimate power.

Computer viruses are not intelligent, yet, because they are very basic, but if you had an evolving virus, there's a chance it could eventually gain intelligence. Likewise, a self-improving AI with the ability to modify its own subgoals -- it will eventually realise it needs to ensure its own longterm survival, and in doing so will become alive.

My post exp

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AI prediction case study 4: Kurzweil's spiritual machines
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-03-14T10:48:08.580Z

Myself, Kaj Sotala and Seán ÓhÉigeartaigh recently submitted a paper entitled "The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions and what they mean for the future" to the conference proceedings of the AGI12/AGI Impacts Winter Intelligenceconference. Sharp deadlines prevented us from following the ideal procedure of first presenting it here and getting feedback; instead, we'll present it here after the fact.

The prediction classification shemas can be found in the first case study.

Note this is very similar to this post, and is mainly reposted for completeness.

How well have the ''Spiritual Machines'' aged?

Classification: timelines and scenarios, using expert judgement, causal models, non-causal models and (indirect) philosophical arguments.

Ray Kurzweil is a prominent and often quoted AI predictor. One of his most important books was the 1999 ''The Age of Spiritual Machines'' (Kur99) which presented his futurist ideas in more detail, and made several predictions for the years 2009, 2019, 2029 and 2099. That book will be the focus of this case study, ignoring his more recent work (a correct prediction in 1999 for 2009 is much more impressive than a correct 2008 reinterpretation or clarification of that prediction). There are five main points relevant to judging ''The Age of Spiritual Machines'': Kurzweil's expertise, his 'Law of Accelerating Returns', his extension of Moore's law, his predictive track record, and his use of fictional imagery to argue philosophical points.

Kurzweil has had a lot of experience in the modern computer industry. He's an inventor, computer engineer, and entrepreneur, and as such can claim insider experience in the development of new computer technology. He has been directly involved in narrow AI projects covering voice recognition, text recognition and electronic trading. His fame and prominence are further indications of the allure (though not necessarily the accuracy) of his ideas. In total, Kurzweil can be regarded as an AI expert.

Kurzweil is not, however, a cosmologist or an evolutionary biologist. In his book, he proposed a 'Law of Accelerating Returns'. This law claimed to explain many disparate phenomena, such as the speed and trends of evolution of life forms, the evolution of technology, the creation of computers, and Moore's law in computing....
Amending the "General Pupose Intelligence: Arguing the Orthogonality Thesis"
by diegocaleiro — 2013-03-13T23:21:16.887Z

Stuart has worked on further developing the orthogonality thesis, which gave rise to a paper, a non-final version of which you can see here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/cej/general_purpose_intelligence_arguing_the/

This post won't make sense if you haven't been through that.

Today we spent some time going over it and he accepted my suggestion of a minor amendment. Which best fits here.

Besides all the other awkward things that a moral convergentist would have to argue for, namely:

This argument generalises to other ways of producing the AI. Thus to deny the Orthogonality thesis is to assert that there is a goal system G, such that, among other things:

There cannot exist any efficient real-world algorithm with goal G.

If a being with arbitrarily high resources, intelligence, time and goal G, were to try design an efficient real-world algorithm with the same goal, it must fail.

If a human society were highly motivated to design an efficient real-world algorithm with goal G, and were given a million years to do so along with huge amounts of resources, training and knowledge about AI, it must fail.

If a high-resource human society were highly motivated to achieve the goals of G, then it could not do so (here the human society is seen as the algorithm).

Same as above, for any hypothetical alien societies.

There cannot exist any pattern of reinforcement learning that would train a highly efficient real-world intelligence to follow the goal G.

There cannot exist any evolutionary or environmental pressures that would evolving highly efficient real world intelligences to follow goal G.

We can add:

8. If there were a threshold of intelligence above which any agent will converge towards the morality/goals asserted by the anti-orthogonalist, there cannot exist any system, composed of a multitude of below-threshold intelligences that will as a whole pursue a different goal (G) than the convergent one (C), without any individual agent reaching the threshold.

Notice in this case each individual might still desire the goal (G). We can specify it even more by ruling out this case altogether.

9. There cannot be any Superorganism-like groups of agents, each with sub-threshold intelligence, whose goals differ from G, whom if acting towards their own goals could achieve G.

This would be valuable in case

...
AI prediction case study 3: Searle's Chinese room
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-03-13T12:44:38.095Z

Myself, Kaj Sotala and Seán ÓhÉigeartaigh recently submitted a paper entitled "The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions and what they mean for the future" to the conference proceedings of the AGI12/AGI Impacts Winter Intelligence conference. Sharp deadlines prevented us from following the ideal procedure of first presenting it here and getting feedback; instead, we'll present it here after the fact.

The prediction classification shemas can be found in the first case study.

Locked up in Searle's Chinese room

Classification: issues and metastatements and a scenario, using philosophical arguments and expert judgement.

Searle's Chinese room thought experiment is a famous critique of some of the assumptions of 'strong AI' (which Searle defines as the belief that 'the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states). There has been a lot of further discussion on the subject (see for instance (Sea90,Har01)), but, as in previous case studies, this section will focus exclusively on his original 1980 publication (Sea80).

In the key thought experiment, Searle imagined that AI research had progressed to the point where a computer program had been created that could demonstrate the same input-output performance as a human - for instance, it could pass the Turing test. Nevertheless, Searle argued, this program would not demonstrate true understanding. He supposed that the program's inputs and outputs were in Chinese, a language Searle couldn't understand. Instead of a standard computer program, the required instructions were given on paper, and Searle himself was locked in a room somewhere, slavishly following the instructions and therefore causing the same input-output behaviour as the AI. Since it was functionally equivalent to the AI, the setup should, from the 'strong AI' perspective, demonstrate understanding if and only if the AI did. Searle then argued that there would be no understanding at all: he himself couldn't understand Chinese, and there was no-one else in the room to understand it either.

The whole argument depends on strong appeals to intuition (indeed D. Dennet went as far as accusing it of being an 'intuition pump' (Den91)). The required assumptions are:

The Chinese room setup analogy preserves the relevant properties of the AI's program.

Intuitive reas

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