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Next-Generation Voting and E-Governance

Photo credit: Sami Anas

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.

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Last Call for the Train to Abundance

Photo Credit: Marcus Herzberg

The clock is counting down.

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.

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It’s Raining Emails

Photo Credit: Maksim Goncharenok

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.

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Reverse-Engineering Human Thought

If you wanted to reverse-engineer human thought, where might you begin?

When reading the book “On Intelligence” recently I was reminded of the long history of neuroscience and the many previous dead-ends of AI research. Neuroscientists often focused on gathering huge amounts of largely one-sided or otherwise poor-quality data, even when those same scientists had no way of integrating that data to form a new understanding. This points to a cognitive bias known as “Information Bias”, defined as “The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.“, as well as the Bike-Shedding Effect.

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Collective Superintelligence Transforms Society

Photo Credit: ThisisEngineering RAEng

What are the next 10-15 years of human civilization likely to look like?

“What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems… there’s no law of physics preventing them.”
– Michio Kaku

When we engineer rather than merely predicting the future those predictions become far more accurate. To understand humanity’s probable future let us examine the engineering behind it, and some of the influence that engineering may exert on shaping it.

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Metaorganisms and Meta-Ecologies

Photo Credit: Pressmaster

Understanding the probabilities of humanity’s future requires recognizing the cooperative organization of life at increasing scales and complexities, and how that life forms and adapts to interdependencies with the environment.

Metaorganism:

“The totality of any multicellular organism derived from millennia of co-evolution with microbiota.“

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The Bionic Company

Photo Credit: Pressmaster

Bionic:

“having artificial body parts, especially electromechanical ones.“

“having ordinary human powers increased by the aid of bionic devices.“

To some degree humans already utilize devices such as their phones to serve as artificial body parts, in a far less invasive sense than stereotypes often associated with the term bionic. Some see invasive modifications in our future, but we see a distinctly different possibility for extending human capacities.

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Give Narrow AI 1 Million Fish, or Teach mASI to Fish

Credit: Oziel Gómez

There are plenty of fish in the sea, and plenty of plastic waste too.

The idea behind “Big Data” is that if you throw enough fish at a narrow AI it will learn “fish”, and yet this approach has also produced Google’s infamous image tagging algorithm which made a habit of labeling certain humans as “gorillas”. Even after 2 years the great tech giant Google, with all of their mighty “Big Data” and wealth, had failed to remedy this, simply removing the tag they knew their algorithm would continue applying to certain humans.

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