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AI reading material

A quick follow-up on the previous post, here are a few links to satisfy your thirst for more input about AI and related topics.

MIRI's blog seems to do a good job at collecting updates.

This recent conference has put up PDFs of several presentations.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is on Facebook and Twitter, so is Demis Hassabis from DeepMind.

I also got Kurzweil's famous book The Singularity Is Near and will read it soon. Other's have convinced me that his thinking probably is way too optimistic, in the sense that while his predictions may be possible, they are not the default outcome. But it is certainly a worthwhile read anyway.

The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee made it onto my reading list as well.

The Foom debate is often referred to. I however cannot understand how some claim that Hanson "won" with his arguments against a fast take-off.

Nick Bostrom's latest paper is here (PDF) and his recent talk Safety Issues in Advanced AI is basically an updated version of his "classic" talk at Google.

Also very much worth to watch is Demis Hassabis - The Future of Artificial Intelligence.

Oh, and if you don't know Yudkowsky's short Three Worlds Collide yet, go and read it - it's deep and funny!

What strikes me in of all this is how young the whole field is. Even five or ten years ago, the main concepts and jargon that seem to make quite a bit of sense once you get them explained to you, were not in place at all.

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The future is near

I've recently been reading Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence and must admit it stuck with me. It may well seem a tad abstract to us who are new to thinking about such matters, but highly stimulating and thought-provoking.

The main point is driven home thoroughly: We should be talking more about artificial intelligence! Because its arrival might be just around the corner and it has the potential to mark a crossroads for our future, the choices being really really bad or really really fantastically good.

If you havn't read them yet, these two blog posts by Wait But Why are probably the best introdution: Part 1, Part 2.

I am currently half-way through Olle Häggström's Here Be Dragons which covers related but broader toptics of near-future technologies.

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