As Princeton thaws from under last week’s snow hurricane, I’m taking a moment to reflect on my first four months in the place I now call home. This roundup post shares highlights from my first semester as a post-doc in Psychology, CITP, and Sociology. So far, I have had an amazing experience: The Paluck Lab […]
Singularity Skepticism 4: The Value of Avoiding Errors
January 10, 2018 by
[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 […]
Singularity Skepticism 3: How to Measure AI Performance
January 8, 2018 by
[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 […]
Singularity Skepticism 2: Why Self-Improvement Isn’t Enough
January 4, 2018 by
[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 […]
Why the Singularity is Not a Singularity
January 3, 2018 by
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 […]
