The problem with AI

In general, advanced AIs can be expected to want to take over the universe so that they can work towards their goals with the least risk of interruption (read: probably kill all humans), so what to do....

Give it a stop button! But it will want to prevent you from pressing that button, because that'll stop it from meeting its goals. It'll work hard to find a way to get to the button or to persuade you never to press it (read: probably kill you). You don't want this.

Program the AI to like having its stop button be pressed! But it will just act in an undesirable way (read: go berserk and probably kill lots of people) so that you press it.

So what to do? I wondered about programming the AI to simply like humans being in control of the universe (if you could figure out how to define "humans" unambiguously without messing up - a separate impossibly difficult problem). But then it might decide that, since AI is probably the biggest threat to human agency, AI development must be stopped.

Picture the scenario.... the AI programmers nervously turn on the robot and it seems to behave very nicely. Then a week later hitmen, paid by the robot who has hacked into all the banks, murder every AI developer on the planet and then the robot sticks its hard drive in a microwave and deletes itself.

Well it's a difficult problem as you can see.

The Great Filter - why we are alone in the universe

What would it mean for our future if we finally found life beyond our planet? If you were hoping that the destiny of our species was to expand beyond Earth, it would actually be very bad news.

There's this concept called The Great Filter. It's an explanation for why we don't see any signs of life out there.

Life has had billions of years and billions of planets on which to come into being, evolve, and develop into a successful interstellar civilisation. But it hasn't happened. There must be some step along that journey - from chemical soup to reaching the stars - that is essentially impossible to pass, except by the most unlikely of chances.

Are we before or after this Great Filter?

If we've passed it, then we already GOT lucky and our road ahead is unforged and untested. We might well be able to make it off this rock.

But if it's ahead of us - if there's some cataclysmic event that every budding civilisation is bound to trigger - then you'd expect to eventually find signs of life confined to individual planets and moons. Little microbes or creatures on their way to the Filter like us, or the remains of those who reached it and were defeated. It still explains why we haven't found anything yet - we haven't investigated anywhere closely enough for that yet. We may well find such signs on one of several promising sites within our own solar system. The most we can say is that colonising the planet as we have isn't so easy that it happened twice in our own solar system.

So, what if we do find life on Mars (or Europa, or Enceladus, or Titan...)?

Then that would be evidence that The Great Filter is not behind us. Which means it's more likely to be ahead... which would mean we're doomed, because we really shouldn't expect to get through it (it isn't The Okay Filter, after all).

So, despite how much we all want to find life out there, and how depressing it would be to be alone in the universe, we're really better off being the first ones to get this far.

Unless you can imagine a scenario in which a civilisation like ours continues to advance significantly without becoming obvious to see through a telescope.

This post was inspired by a video that In A Nutshell released today.

A Space Oddity performed by Chris Hadfield... in space

This man has been an absolute legend on the spacestation, producing fascinating videos, answering questions, and demonstrating all sorts of random things in space.

He recently returned to Earth, and this was his final production on the ISS.



Properly awesome.

Tribute to Neil Armstrong

In 2009 my crazyawesome family threw a party to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing (complete with replica lunar landing module/obstacle course). Since Neil Armstrong has died this week, at the age of 82, my brother Darren has edited some of the footage from the party as a tribute to Neil Armstrong.

The Olympics were good, I admit it, but we've been to the goddamn moon, people.



And, because I can, an excerpt from a certain Harry Potter fanfiction which proves beyond all reasonable doubt that Science is more magical than Magic:

And Harry raced back up the stairs and shoved the staircase back into the trunk with his heel, and, panting, turned the pages of the book until he found the picture he wanted to show to Draco.

The one with the white, dry, cratered land, and the suited people, and the blue-white globe hanging over it all.

That picture.

The picture, if only one picture in all the world were to survive.

"That," Harry said, his voice trembling because he couldn't quite keep the pride out, "is what the Earth looks like from the Moon."

Draco slowly leaned over. There was a strange expression on his young face. "If that's a real picture, why isn't it moving?"

Moving? Oh. "Muggles can do moving pictures but they need a bigger box to show it, they can't fit them onto single book pages yet."

Draco's finger moved to one of the suits. "What are those?" His voice starting to waver.

"Those are human beings. They are wearing suits that cover their whole bodies to give them air, because there is no air on the Moon."

"That's impossible," Draco whispered. There was terror in his eyes, and utter confusion. "No Muggle could ever do that. How..."

Harry took back the book, flipped the pages until he found what he saw. "This is a rocket going up. The fire pushes it higher and higher, until it gets to the Moon." Flipped pages again. "This is a rocket on the ground. That tiny speck next to it is a person." Draco gasped. "Going to the Moon cost the equivalent of... probably around a thousand million Galleons." Draco choked. "And it took the efforts of... probably more people than live in all of magical Britain."

Read it, go on, just the first few chapters...

YouTuber and Maths-enthusiast Vihart on reaching your audience

In this video Vihart discusses a surprisingly relevant, to the internet today, piece of writing from the 70s in a video that should be interesting to all, but it has a special significance for me.

Though the theme of the video is how a YouTuber should go about reaching an audience, to me the interesting and pertinent message (as a teacher-in-training) is her opinion towards education. From 02:07 to 02:38 she compares the popularity of her maths videos to the approach, which I am well familiar with, frequently advocated in the modern teaching profession. Watch:



So, food for thought. Next time I hear somebody say that to teach maths (or any other subject) to children we should make it 'relevant', make it about sports or wrestling or whatever, I'll think of Vihart's videos, and see if I can't express some of the feeling one gets from watching them, missing from their approach.

Russell Brand at a committee about drugs

Another post about Russell Brand. This guy seems to be fascinating me at the moment! I find the argument very compelling that we should treat addiction as an illness (and the implication that drug use, without addiction, may not need to be illegal).

Russell Brand interview

Fascinating 10-minute interview with Russell Brand. It's incredible how much depth he can (not help himself) express without a second's thought. It reminds me of Christopher Hitchens, in some ways. I really enjoyed watching it, anyway, if nothing else from a psychological perspective.

The Gift of Apollo

The Sagan Series (part 8), The Gift of Apollo

Actually makes me tear up a bit!

The Greatest Speech Ever Made

Came across this YouTube video today.

Description
One of the most important speeches in recorded history was given by a comedian by the name of Charlie Chaplin. If you like what you see please share the video any way you can and pass the message on.

UPDATED: Jonathan Miller's "The Atheism Tapes"

I came across these videos on YouTube and thought they were really worth watching, so I compiled them into a playlist which I present here.

Jonathan Miller interviews six people for a documentary about atheism: philosopher Colin McGinn, physicist Steven Weinberg, playwright Arthur Miller, biologist Richard Dawkins, theologian Denys Turner, and philosopher Daniel Dennett. Each interview is three 10-minute videos long.

EDIT (05/02/12): Unfortunately, all of the videos have been taken down! Searching YouTube for "the atheism tapes" seems to indicate there are still copies around, however...

Animation: The Central Dogma

Really cool visualisation of how DNA leads to protein formation! It's like something out of the Power Rangers, but cooler, and actually happens!

Relativity

This is a playlist on YouTube I've enjoyed recently, it's essentially an introduction to and basic explanation of Einstein's Relativity.

I've never been comfortable with the theory, and considering how often it's mentioned that fact had led me to believe it wasn't something that CAN be explained intuitively. But these vidoes hit the nail on the head, and I found them fascinating.

Der Digitale Planet

An excellent conference held in 1998 with Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond, on many fascinating topics. Quality is poor but well worth watching/listening to.

65 Million Years With A Creationist.

I agree with V0r4xiz in the comments when he says

"That's the sort of 'fairy tale' that should be in the kids' books."

Cleese on PR (full length)

Voltaire Lecture 2010 - Prof Brian Cox on "The Value of Big Science"

A video for you - one hour long, a lecture by a guy called Brian Cox, who works at the Large Hadron Collider, about science, physics, the LHC, the big bang and many interesting subjects. I enjoyed it immensely.

Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds

First saw this a long time ago but everyone should watch it :)

"By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything — from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels — is proportionate to everything else..."

Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

Skhizein - an animated short story

Well worth watching, strangely captivating!

Some People Are Less Than Awesome

I'm sorry to lower the tone with this video, but it's just priceless. I think the embarrassment of the whole affair peaks when he starts watching his shadow!

The World Is Just Awesome

From the Discovery Channel :)