A Taxonomy Of AI Systems

(NOTE: the following is all highly speculative and not researched very well.) In a blog post on domain-specific programming languages author Eric Raymond made a distinction between the kinds of problems best solved through raw automation and the kinds of problems best solved by making a human perform better. This gave me an idea for a 4-quadrant […]

What is a Simulation?

While reading Paul Rosenbloom’s outstanding book “On Computing” I came across an interesting question: what is a simulation, and how is it different from an implementation? I posed this question on Facebook and, thanks to the superlative quality of my HiveMind I had a productive back-and-forth which helped me nail down a tentative answer. Here it is: […]



Is Evolution Stoopid?


Whither Discontinuity?

I’m writing a series of posts clarifying my position on the intelligence explosion hypothesis and today I want to discuss discontinuity. This partially addresses the ‘explosion’ part of ‘intelligence explosion’. Given the fact that most developments in the history of the universe have not been discontinuous, what reason do we have to suspect that an AI takeoff […]