Category: ideas

What if the Enlightenment can be found in places and thinkers that we often overlook? Such questions have haunted me since I stumbled upon the work of the 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1692), also spelled Zära Yaqob.

How did AlphaZero teach itself? The rules of the games were programmed into the system. Then, AlphaZero started to play itself. The more it played itself, the better it became. Over a few hours, it learned to play the games better than the games had ever been played.

“Scientists have long accepted that our ability to abruptly stop or modify a planned behavior is controlled via a single region within the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area involved in planning and other higher mental functions.” Now it seems that this consensus among scientists was, if not wrong, greatly oversimplified.

As the complexity and capability of these algorithms grow, their users are beginning to cede more artistic control over their outputs to machines. In doing so, they may be ceding another type of control, too: ownership over the creative product. And the consequences could transform the way mainstream art is produced, how we consume it, and how we value the artists behind it.

“Forget about today’s modest incremental advances in artificial intelligence, such as the increasing abilities of cars to drive themselves. Waiting in the wings might be a groundbreaking development: a machine that is aware of itself and its surroundings, and that could take in and process massive amounts of data in real time. It could be sent on dangerous missions, into space or combat. In addition to driving people around, it might be able to cook, clean, do laundry – and even keep humans company when other people aren’t nearby.”

“As it turns out, genes contribute to intelligence, but only broadly, and with subtle effect. Genes interact in complex relationships to create neural systems that might be impossible to reverse-engineer. In fact, computational scientists who want to understand how genes interact to create optimal networks have come up against the kind of hard limits suggested by the so-called travelling salesperson problem.”

“More than 40 percent (43 percent) of today’s Fortune 500 had a first- or second-generation immigrant among their founders, even though just 14 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born. Nearly a fifth (18.4 percent) of these companies were founded by first-generation immigrants, and another quarter (24.8 percent) were founded by their children. All told, these 216 immigrant-founded companies accounted for $5.3 trillion in global revenue in 2016 and employ more than 12 million workers worldwide. Immigrant-founded companies make up more than half of the Fortune 25 (52 percent) and Fortune 35 (57 percent).”

The search is on for a technological solution – and it’s not just peddlers of big ideas who think this will happen. As we near 2018, “let’s take a moment to consider why this whole idea is not just futurist bushwah.”

We all need a way to de-stress and unwind from, let’s say, things in the outside world that are troubling or flat-out terrifying. But don’t try to take our phones away!

Across the board, the reality began to sink in that these proprietary services hold volumes of data that no public institution can process. And that’s just the data itself.