Yesterday in Berlin, I attended a workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in governing communication online, hosted by the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Context In the United States and Europe, many platforms that host user content, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, have enjoyed safe harbor protections for the content they host, […]

[This is the fourth in a series of posts. The other posts in the series are here: 1 2 3.] In the previous post, we did a deep dive into chess ratings, as an example of a system to measure a certain type of intelligence. One of the takeaways was that the process of numerically […]

[This is the third post in a series. The other posts are here: 1 2 4] On Thursday I wrote about progress in computer chess, and how a graph of Elo rating (which I called the natural measure of playing skill) versus time showed remarkably consistent linear improvement over several decades. I used this to argue […]

[This is the second post in a series. The other posts are here: 1 3 4] Yesterday, I wrote about the AI Singularity, and why it won’t be a literal singularity, that is, why the growth rate won’t literally become infinite. So if the Singularity won’t be a literal singularity, what will it be? Recall that […]

This is the first in a series of posts about the Singularity, that notional future time when machine intelligence explodes in capability, changing human life forever. Like many computer scientists, I’m a Singularity skeptic. In this series I’ll be trying to express the reasons for my skepticism–and workshopping ideas for an essay on the topic […]