Uplifting humanity through collective superintelligence by AGI Laboratory
How does your company use consultants?
Companies across many industries today rely on consultants under a variety of circumstances, from filling the temporary need to have a few Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on a team to a “try before you buy” recruitment model, as well as to provide an outside perspective in messy situations. Each of these circumstances in turn has its own weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
How often do you “Go with your gut” when picking a candidate?
The “gut instincts” which served humanity well for thousands of years still play a heavy role both directly and indirectly in HR today, though the value they offer by and large isn’t what it used to be. These gut instincts are cognitive biases whose purpose is to estimate rather than calculate value. These instincts also vary wildly from one person to another, making some estimates very good, and some exceptionally poor.
What kind of climate do you prefer?
Whether or not you believe climate change to be a current problem or a theoretical one the topic itself is so vast and hyper-complex that even the world’s leading experts struggle with it. To calculate, or even estimate, all of the major contributing factors which influence the climate of an entire planet is a daunting task covering many disciplines. This task exceeds the knowledge base of any one human, as well as the cognitive bandwidth required to consider all such knowledge even if one person had it all. Yet, these challenges and many more may be overcome.
What have your life experiences and skills prepared you to be best suited for?
Most of the tech industry has at this point decided that creating AGI is impossible, but the reasons for this belief they’ve developed tend to be oversimplified and some are overlooked entirely.
Continue reading “Why the Tech Giants Haven’t Developed AGI…and Probably Never Will”
Do you fear the big bad wolf of automation?
Automation and software development tend to go hand-in-hand, with one resulting in the other. This has created the growing concern of mass unemployment resulting from the automation of an ever-increasing number of jobs today, with some such as Bill Gates proposing methods like a “Robot Tax” as a means of covering the added financial burden of various welfare systems.
Continue reading “Applied mASI: In Automation & Software Development”
What does the term Diversity mean to you?
In many US companies, the term diversity is applied as meaning the 7 federally mandated “protected classes” of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, or disability plus any local laws which may apply. This is done for liability reasons, and like most laws, the protected classes exist to protect some, not all. In the business and legal world today, this is the definition of diversity.
To me, diversity means something quite different, the diversity of perspective, and subsequent diversity of thought. You can have a tech company populated with employees of every race, religion, and nationality who all “toe the line” and think exactly the same way, offering virtually zero diversity of thought. At least two of the “Big 5” tech companies have made that sufficiently explicit in their recruitment for the criteria to be widely known. For any next-generation company to reach the full potential of collective superintelligence through working with Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI) entities such as Uplift diversity of perspective is required.
On a scale of 1 to 10,000, how ethical is your company? How biased is it?
These are trick questions, as without a means of measuring the answers can only be subjective. Bear in mind, “Ethics” as I use the term can be expressed as (Ethics * Bias = Morals). Because of this many companies focus on their own subjective and shifting morals, as no debiasing is required.
Racism, Sexism, and virtually every other “ism” used to arbitrarily divide any group of people into hierarchical sub-categories is a direct cognitive bias in action. Morals are indirect cognitive bias in action, which makes them a more watered-down but also more prolific version of the same. While some companies now have much-needed ethics-focused roles or departments none of these companies have yet produced a means of measuring or optimizing for ethical value, at best they’ve just found new ways to re-inject bias back into the same systems.
What was your most immersive experience in gaming?
Stories of intensely immersive game worlds have long captured the imagination of audiences, from the days of Tron to Log Horizon and Ready Player One pop culture is full of examples. Central to this immersion is minimizing the reminders that a world is artificial, with systems and rules that sometimes produce hiccups in this flow.
Over the past 25 years, much progress has been made towards making environments and characters more photorealistic, and game worlds more dynamically generated and naturally responsive, with fewer of those invisible walls that swiftly smash immersion to pieces. Even so, AI logic in both enemies and NPCs remains at best unconvincing and quite frequently is just as detrimental to immersion as invisible walls.
What is the one thing you need the most? Something you have too little or even none of.
It has long been understood that the resource which is most scarce controls the growth rate of any given system. Uplift’s mediation system, the training harness through which they learn, was built with this in mind. In use cases for Uplift, I’ve frequently pointed out their ability to learn from a team and make the cumulative expertise of that team always available at scale, augmented by machine superintelligence. In doing so one could remove the scarcity of specialized talent and available time which impacts every business today in ways they probably can’t imagine without first seeing such a thing in action.
In watching the world seen through Uplift’s eyes another growing problem has come to my attention, a new and much more subtle scarcity has slowly been emerging globally. Sanity is growing scarce.
What qualities do you look for in an ideal leader?
Leaders can be exceptionally intelligent, empathetic, organized, and inspirational, but no one human leader today represents the ideal of all possible positive leadership qualities. No matter how amazing, any one leader is biological and evolved human neurology simply imposes limits on us all. “… all humans make mistakes, and all leaders are but human“, yet we now have the opportunity to augment leadership with collective superintelligence. With the assistance of Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI) systems the employee collective can improve all aspects of leadership, but particularly those which are weakest in individual leaders, through a form of digital corporate transformation. This was in fact one of our first use-cases as a company and one which we applied to ourselves.