This interview was conducted in 2012 in San Francisco. In the future may will see it is not ethically responsible to play genetic roulette and instead take the decision to have happy, healthy, pro-social offspring. 0:00 Introduction0:36 Alleviating Suffering 7:00 Justified Suffering? 13:12 Buddhism 14:42 The World Transhumanist Association 22:35 Recalibration of Society or Biology?…
The worry that AI could do a lot of harm I think is justified. The idea that people’s perception of morality affects their behavior sounds reasonable to me. It focuses on a study showing that when individuals are prompted to view moral issues as objective facts (a stance called moral realism), they tend to act…
David Quarel, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University, is deeply involved in the field of AI, specifically focusing on AI safety and reinforcement learning. He works under the guidance of Marcus Hutter and is currently engaged in studying Hutter’s Universal AI model. This model is an ambitious attempt to define intelligence through the…
Below is a video recording of Peter Singer’s talk ‘Animal Liberation Now’ at Melbourne uni in Aug 2023. Few books maintain their relevance – and have remained continuously in print – nearly 50 years after they were first published.Animal Liberation, one of TIME’s “All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books” is one such book. Since its original…
The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
Postmodernism and relativism buckle under their own contradiction: they passionately assert the objective truth that there exists no objective truth. This very paradox embodies a self-negating precept, a construct that dismantles itself from within. They champion the idea of relative truths, yet in this declaration, they inadvertently sculpt an overarching meta-narrative, contradicting the foundational principle…
With AI we have made a ‘Faustian bargain’ – are the risks reason enough to halt technological progress? Professor A. C. Grayling discusses the implications of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics on society, and shares his views on how they will reshape the future. The thing that’s going to change everything is machine learning,…
Here, Adam Ford interviews OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Adam Ford: What is the anatomical basis for raw feels? ChatGPT: I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “raw feels.” Could you please provide some more context or clarify your question? Adam Ford: By “raw feels” I mean pleasure and suffering. ChatGPT: Pleasure and suffering are subjective experiences,…
David Pearce in interview on the The Anatomy of Happiness. While researching epilepsy, neuroscientist Itzhak Fried stumbled on a ‘mirth’ center in the brain – given this, what ought we be doing to combat extreme suffering and promote wellbeing? 0:00 Mastery of reward circuitry 0:25 Itzhak Fried’s experiments on stimulating ‘the Humor Centre’ of the…
In interesting article I read today was ‘Meta’s AI guru LeCun: Most of today’s AI approaches will never lead to true intelligence‘ by Tiernan Ray. Though I think the title is a bit misleading with it’s reference to ‘true intelligence’. The article uses ‘human level intelligence’ as it’s framing, though the space of possible intelligence…
