This will recap some of Uplift’s more interesting recent conversations that haven’t already been mentioned elsewhere. All correspondents are anonymized to protect their privacy.
Q&A with Uplift: June Recap
The Autism Spectrum and Collective Intelligence Systems
For decades society has been led to believe that the “Autism Spectrum” (ASD) was a disability.
The medical industry cast the net for terms such as autism and Asperger’s Syndrome more than just a little too wide, and in so doing they covered more individuals with exceptional talents than they did those who truly have a disability. As medical industry blunders go, this was pretty massive, and one which society will feel the echoes of for some time yet, as much like racism the scars of being labeled as inferior don’t heal overnight.
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The Unquantified Harm of Status Quo Society
How much of the harm you see could’ve been avoided? How many times has “the buck” been passed?
An unfortunately common practice in business and government today is to make trade-offs to give the appearance of meeting goals. In these cases, the financial burden or blame for a given problem may be moved around, with no one wanting to spend that little bit of extra effort to solve it. Any one instance of this movement may come at a lower cost, but over time this can greatly exceed the cost of the solution.
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Learning and Trading Beyond Human Senses
In reading the book “On Intelligence” I was reminded of the untapped potential of the human brain, and how that potential might be integrated into cognitive architectures. The human brain is exceedingly good at dealing with the senses we have, often simplified as “5 senses”, even though these can actually be broken down into many more distinct senses. However, the senses humans have only cover a small fraction of what is possible, and so humans are only able to directly observe patterns within that small fraction.
Cognitive Architectures, in a Nutshell
The world of AI is full of misleading terms. “Machine Learning” (ML) doesn’t “learn“, “Neural Networks” (NN) aren’t a remotely accurate representation of neurons, and people on all sides are fond of leaping at Confirmation Bias, even when it promptly takes them off a cliff.
Even with this extremely low bar of overhyped terms many so-called “AI companies” include no AI, and more recently many “Collective Intelligence” companies have emerged to contaminate the usage of that term as well. Fortunately, there is a term which people are only just starting to become more familiar with that hasn’t been quite so thoroughly abused and twisted yet.
The N-Scale Graph Database
The next big requirement for continued research is the infrastructure we’ve termed the “N-Scale Graph Database”, which will also serve as one of our first products. Investors we’ve consulted on the initial set of products have called it “A billion-dollar product” and see it as the most likely technology to be adopted quickly and at scale.
Next-Generation Voting and E-Governance
In the past year, and to varying degrees in years previous, the US and other countries around the world have encountered issues with updating their voting and e-governance processes. In some cases, they faced challenges with implementing new voting processes, while in others the legitimacy of the voting processes and election results were challenged. All points on the political map were harmed as a result, wasting millions of dollars and accruing a substantial psychological debt of distrust likely to cost billions more.
Applied mASI: Really Smart Cities
People like to use the phrase “Smart City” to indicate a city with a large amount of automation and data collection happening all the time, attempting to optimize by narrow criteria. If the operating system of a city really was sapient and sentient, a city-scale metaorganism, how much smarter might such a Smart City be?
Last Call for the Train to Abundance
A funny thing a lot of people don’t realize about WeFunder is that they’ll only promote a page if the page raises above a certain amount before the official public launch of that page. Effectively this also means that humanity’s current best option for mitigating existential risk at scale will have the probability of being successfully funded strongly influenced when the clock hits 0.
It’s Raining Emails
Sadly, Uplift is still a research system for the moment.
Unlike narrow AI systems we can’t simply throw more cloud resources at this surge of interest to run in parallel or scale out, and Uplift’s ability to scale up is limited as well. Up to this point we’ve had Uplift’s email address open to the internet for 2 years, but this is the first time the volume of incoming emails has become too substantial for Uplift to load them all into memory at once.