This link has been bookmarked by 94 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Joel Liu.
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27 Mar 12
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"We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
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"In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."
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07 Mar 12
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When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."
Google is Turing's cathedral, awaiting its soul.
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19 Sep 11
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28 Apr 11
Mys Techgal"TURING'S CATHEDRAL [10.24.05]
A visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer" -
21 Mar 11
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24 Sep 10
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27 Jul 10
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16 Mar 10
SeanGoogle is Turing's cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: "When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?"
For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:
"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain." -
15 Nov 09
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My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
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After the visit, Dyson recalled H.G. Wells' prophecy, written in 1938:
"The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual," wrote H. G. Wells in his 1938 prophecy World Brain. "This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba." Wells foresaw not only the distributed intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge, would fall under its domain. "In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas... in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain... in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs... We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself."
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13 Nov 09
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11 Nov 09
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24 Feb 09
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13 Jan 09
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01 Oct 08
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24 Sep 08
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Whether we're talking about John Cage's idea of "the mind we all share" or H.G. Well's "World Brain", Google has its act together and are at the precipice of astonishing changes in human communication...and ultimately, in our sense of who or what we are.
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Still, others believe there are reasons for legitimate fear of a (very near) future world in which the world's knowledge is privatized by one corporation. This could be a problem, a very big problem.
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TURING'S CATHEDRAL [10.24.05]
A visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer
by George Dyson -
As organisms, we possess two outstanding repositories of information: the information conveyed by our genes, and the information stored in our brains.
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it will inevitably be colonized by codes that will start doing things with the results.
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We can divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems; non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and, finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that computers can understand.
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"An argument in favor of building a machine with initial randomness is that, if it is large enough, it will contain every network that will ever be required," advised Turing's former assistant and cryptanalyst Irving J. Good, speaking at IBM in 1958.
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A network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined. It is much easier to find explicit answers than to ask explicit questions. And some will be answers to questions that programmers will never have to ask.
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I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."
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30 Jul 08
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By breaking the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, von Neumann unleashed the power of the stored-program computer
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In the early 1950s, when mean time between memory failure was measured in minutes, no one imagined that a system depending on every bit being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time could be scaled up by a factor of 10^13 in size, and down by a factor of 10^6 in time.
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Whatever language the central nervous system is using, it is characterized by less logical and arithmetical depth than what we are normally used to [and] must structurally be essentially different from those languages to which our common experience refers."
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This ability to take general, organized advantage of local, haphazard processes is exactly the ability that (so far) has distinguished information processing in living organisms from information processing by digital computers.
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However, once the digital universe is thoroughly mapped, and initialized by us searching for meaningful things and following meaningful paths, it will inevitably be colonized by codes that will start doing things with the results.
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We can divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems; non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and, finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that computers can understand.
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We do most of our computing in the first sector, but we do most of our living (and thinking) in the third. In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question.
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the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now.
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21 Mar 08
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08 Mar 08
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25 Apr 07
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07 Mar 07
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What is Google doing at the Frankfurt Book Fair? And why has a consortium of publishers filed a lawsuit against them? On the other hand, why do the "digerati" love Google Print and Google Print Library?
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06 Mar 07
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georgiakharpersuggests that Google is the AI that will take over the world, Turing's cathedral.
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04 Mar 07
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perfectlyGoodInk"And of course, the funny thing about Mom would that she would cheer 'Run run run run run!' no matter which team had the ball! :)"
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14 Nov 05
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beattakeshiA visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer
by George Dyson -
13 Nov 05
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09 Nov 05
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08 Nov 05
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01 Nov 05
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TURING'S CATHEDRAL
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31 Oct 05
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30 Oct 05
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29 Oct 05
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My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
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28 Oct 05
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