Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

It’s that the biggest threats lie in the networks of ideas, norms, and institutions that allow information to feed back (or not) on collective decisions and understanding.

“[T]he fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold”; most people, he observed, “cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.”

They produce profit by exploiting our reptilian brains rather than imitating our cerebral cortexes,

We can address the problem of building an accurate credit-assignment function in many different settings.

We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.*

that the ability to transmit energy as electricity caused a second industrial revolution. Now the source of energy could be distant from where it was used,

This problem requires a change in the definition of AI itself—from a field concerned with pure intelligence, independent of the objective, to a field concerned with systems that are provably beneficial for humans.

next step is to try to do the same thing but at scale, something I refer to as building a trust network for data. It can be thought of as a distributed system like the Internet, but with the ability to quantitatively measure and communicate the qualities of human society, in the same way that the U.S. census does a pretty good job of telling us abo

formulation, the information content of a string of symbols was given by the logarithm of the number of possible symbols from which a given string was chosen.