H+ Magazine

Maybe my understanding of neural networks is wrong... but I'm under the impression they work from weighted criteria. With enough weight an answer is selected as being the most likely. A well-trained neural network has enough data to weight options and pick with high accuracy. Then again, this is essentially black magic to me: http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/02/26/ai-masters-classic-video-games-wit…

Thanks, if it wasn't for your comment I wouldn't have subscribed. On Feedly [0] he only has 2k subscribers. If anyone knows similar blogs like this, I'll like to know where I can find them. There really needs to be a Discovr [1] Blogs. It would be just as great if they get pinged and they say they're working on it :-). Currently I'm subscribed to H+ [2] and Singularity Hub [3]. I made a Reddit post asking the same question recently. [4] [0] http://cloud.feedly.com/ [1] http://discovr.info/about/ [2] http://hplusmagazine.com/ [3] http://singularityhub.com/ [4] http://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/1iq9qx/

Uploading is an expensive way to reproduce; it doesn't solve the problem at hand. You'd want a slow ongoing replacement and integration process of switching out neurons for machinery to achieve the translation of the mind to a machine substrate without either creating a copy or engaging in suicide. e.g. see thoughts here: http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/08/19/the-million-year-life-span/ Rejuvenation biotechnology of the sort put forward in great detail by the SENS Foundation and others is a much better prospect than cryonics for those who can wait for its advent, but that will require much greater investments in research - i.e. hundreds of millions or billions in funding rather than the present paltry few millions a year. http://sens.org/sens-research/research-themes

There's definitely some movements out there for a genome collaboration project: http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/health-medicine/open-source-medicine…

For info on Humanity+ and H+ Magazine, visit http://humanityplus.org/ and http://hplusmagazine.com/

That link is worth expanding (Rudy Rucker interview, also quoted source of singularityhub piece): http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/wolframalpha-searching-truth And in that page, the tail 'Resource' links include this: http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html which is the Jorge Luis Borges essay with the amusing mention of a system of animal classification: "(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame ..." Borges lucidly nails the Achilles' heel - the definition of the database scheme. I stand by my less insightful comment of three weeks ago - care and feeding of 'fact databases' is hard (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520281)

Exactly this. Conscious information processing constitutes only a tiny part of the processing within the brain. Real computational power of the brain is in the order of petaflops to exaflops 1). On the other hand, AZ used a lot more than 1E18 calculations of training to beat human level play, so that part is also wrong. In fact, the total processing power of the 5000 TPU's used are in the order of 1E17 operations per second. Still, since 1E17 flops is comparable (within 1-2 orders of magnitude) to the human brain's raw capacity, and AZ could reach superhuman level in GO in less than 10 hours, that means that AZ can be seen as more efficient than human brains at GO (in terms of learning rate/calculation, not necessarily per watt) This should also not be surprising. After all, GO (like chess) is a very abstract game, far removed from the tasks that the biological brain has evolved to do well. For tasks that the brain does well, such as pattern recognition in the environment that humans live, the human brain is still much more efficient. A human can learn to drive a car in 10's of hours, while AI's still require millions of hours of training, and they still end up inferior. So, in the end, the title is correct (and also common knowledge for anyone following this development), even if almost all of the content in the article is way off. Was this a high school essay? 1) http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/

A very interesting article, I just wish whatever ad plugins they have going didn't constantly crash Chrome. Those disembodied lungs are amazing. And incredibly creepy. The business plan -- patching up donor lungs not approved for transplant (which is most of them) and keeping them alive long enough to find a patient they can save... to the tune of perhaps 2,000 lungs and lives per year. That's pretty amazing. Approved in Canada and awaiting FDA approval as well? That's incredible. I couldn't find a news reports of their first rejuvenated lung, the article doesn't really give much detail on how the procedure went. Martine, I'm sure YC would want her at their Female Founder's Conference! ;-) Some other interesting posts I found; Martine Rothblatt - The Trans-Everything CEO http://nymag.com/news/features/martine-rothblatt-transgender-ceo/ Book Review: Virtually Human by Martine Rothblatt http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/09/09/book-review-virtually-human-martin… United Therapeutics Website http://www.unither.com/

The following is more tangentially related to the article then a direct comment about the interesting points it makes. An interesting hypothesis I read about aging was that it's an anticancer mechanism necessary to become old enough to reproduce. The cellular metabolic process creates a lot free radicals that cause damage, while the body has built in mechanisms to repair the damage at high rates of replication the chance of damage resulting in turning on an oncogene increases. In order to combat this the body slows down its division process to prevent the likelihood of cancer but as a side effect we experiencing the symptoms of aging and inevitable death (usually by cancer if you live long enough to get it). Not sure if any of this is accurate, but the idea is interesting and something I hadn't thought of. It also introduces problems since if at all accurate trying to prevent aging may result in higher cancer risk. Talk of this also reminds me of a quote I like (from http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/13/longevity-science-needs-documentat… "We all express the symptoms of a fatal, inherited degenerative condition called aging - or so the joke goes. It's a dark joke, but there's truth to be found in it, as is often the case in black humor. Unfortunately, all too few people think of themselves as patients suffering aging, and fewer still would call themselves patient advocates, agitating for research leading towards therapies and cures for aging. This is a sorry state…

Here's an interesting article on that: http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/26/hear-that-its-the-singularity-comi… "A common misnomer about the Singularity and the idea of greater-than-human AI is that it will involve a conscious, self-reflective, and even morally accountable agent. This has led some people to believe that it will have deep and profound thoughts, quote Satre, and resultantly act in a quasi-human manner. This will not be the case. We are not talking about artificial consciousness or even human-like cognition. Rather, we are talking about super-expert systems that are capable of executing tasks that exceed human capacities. It will stem from a multiplicity of systems that are individually singular in purpose, or at the very least, very limited in terms of functional scope. And in virtually all cases, these systems won’t reflect on the consequences of their actions unless they are programmed to do so."

Green500 top supercomputer, gets 65Gflops/W. 65Gflops/W = 6.5e10 operations per joule = 2.34×10^17 per kWh Assume $0.05/kWh electricity: (2.34×10^17 operations/kWh) / ($0.05/kWh) = 4.68×10^18 operations per US dollar Human brain computational estimates are all over the place, but one from ages ago is 36.8×10^15 flops ≈ 3.7e16 operations/second ≈ 1.3e20 operations/hour: https://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/ This is equivalent to a human that costs $28.31/hour. Of course, as we haven't actually done this yet, we don't know if that computational estimate is correct, nor if we do or don't need to give it off-hours and holidays. Still, general explanation is there's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to energy efficiently in computation; calling this Moore's Law may be inaccurate, but the reality happens to have rhymed thus far.

Well, Wikipedia was my source [0] and it links http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/ as its source. Google has TPU that are off from the estimated power required to simulate a brain by a factor of 3, so technology is reaching the ballpark. Given that brains were evolved, the part that does symbolic thinking is probably "easy to stumble on" in some practical sense. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders_of_magnit…

Reminds me of the gelatin analog computer http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/01/10/defend-your-network-with-a-bucket-…

A more in depth version of this article that covers more examples: http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/05/10/gardens-as-crypto-water-computers/

Parts two and three: http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/08/10/engineering-enlightenment-part-two… http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/08/13/engineering-enlightenment-part-thr…

Isn't the military looking into nootropics ? I'm not really sure how legitimate this link is but . . . http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/03/12/the-coming-revolution-in-mental-en… I've definitely heard of some military folks looking into nootropics pretty heavily in the specific context of training drone pilots. Since those drones cost 1.3 million usd. It seems strange, they wouldn't have some ivy league scientists on the experiments as well.

This is hilarious! They're already using coconuts in ITER (the fusion reactor) http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/10/27/coconut-futures-and-thermonuclear-… It seems coconuts are the hi-tech fruit of the future!

For those who think that nanotechnology is too mundane, what about machines made from nucleons? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtotechnology Greg Egan speculates on femtotechnology in some of his sci-fi, mostly as insanely fast computers. (I mean, jeez, it takes SO MUCH TIME for an electron to whirl around the nucleus of an atom... it's so much faster when your computer is the nucleus.) An excerpt from a Egan short story: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/00/SchildExcerpt.html More on femtocomputing: http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/11/01/femtocomputing/

Possible avenues of escape are under consideration: http://www.superhappiness.com http://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/09/16/genomic-bodhisattva/ http://www.paradise-engineering.com/heaven.htm

More information can be found here, http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/02/11/scrapheap-transhumanism/, or here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-Dv6dDtdcs The illness is pre-existing, and the hard drive death unconnected; the size of magnet used for implantation is too weak to affect anything stored on a hard drive. And yes, there are. Most of them are being funded by the DoD and are doing things miles beyond the reach of mere mortals; the rest are in Warwick's lab in Reading - in fact, on that note: https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/cyborg/attachments/20110120/89cc… - the research paper on implanted magnets written by two of Warwick's research students.

For those wanting to know the difference between this and openCV, Anthony summed it up pretty nicely: http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/09/20/make-computers-see-with-simplecv-t… (4th comment)

This article is one example (pre-cognition as opposed to ESP, but in the same vein): http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-cornell-univer… I think it comes down to we don't know nearly as much about our little existence as we like to think.

Direct link to the referenced article, print version (I should have posted this): http://hplusmagazine.com/print/1093

Yeah, After a reading this article, http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/forever-young/eldorado-desperadoes-i… I could see calorie restriction really had little basis and moreover, little logic, to it. But also, I'm 40+, 6', 135 pounds and I eat as much as I possibly can. I'm probably on the high of high metabolism. Losing 15% of body weight for me would, uh, really bad. And that's the thing, there's lot of genetic variation concerning gain weight propensity and a lot environmental variation concerning diet and level of activity. NONE of this is apparent in lab-animal studies. Lab animals are genetically uniform creatures who just sit around and eat dull food, even for a mouse (or monkey or whatever). If you've lived like a lab animal so-far, time to get out a bit but otherwise, the conclusions might not be warranted.

Anotehr article about the same study: http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-cornell-univer… From the article : "The sequencing of the pictures on these trials was randomly determined by a randomizing algorithm … and their left/right target positions were determined by an Araneus Alea I hardware-based random number generator." At the very least they were using Araneus Alea wich is a hardware random number generator, so the numbers were not predictable. It's possible that the "randomizing algorithm" did something dumb and made the sequence not random, but I doubt it. I think that it's more likely thet the sudy was done so many times that it eventually gave significant results than it is that the sequence was not random. Or maybe prescience is real to some degree, or the study is a statistical glitch. However the replication package they provide has the compiled program without the source code, and that is a red flag to me.