The Infinite Monkey Theorem, Revisited What is the opposite of water? There is none. Or is there? Two points determine a line. You need one other point to make sense of this. One possibility is fire. On the fire/water line, they’re opposites. Another is air. On the air/water line, they’re…
On Editing
Editing is an example of finding and fixing ‘mistakes’. As you read through something you’re working on writing, you make changes here and there. It is to be expected that this process would be very similar to the process of stepping down a ladder and suddenly discovering that that last…
On Alignment
“Alignment” refers to the AI carrying out the intent of the human that is calling it. If ML models are black boxes, then we are in trouble. Let’s say I’m in conversation with another person, who I’ve asked to translate a body of text, from English into Chinese. I don’t…
On Intelligence
Jeff Hawkins had an interesting conversation with Lex Fridman, referring to Hawkins’s two books — On Intelligence, and A Thousand Brains. Hawkins proposes that the same mechanism that we use to model a water bottle can be used to model high-level thoughts. This means that knowledge itself is fractal, reflecting…
Animal Magnetism
What Are We Pointing At? Some years ago, I wrote a play about a Viennese doctor in Paris in 1784 named Franz Anton Mesmer. (From him we get the word ‘mesmerize’). His most famous case was a young blind pianist named Maria Theresa Paradis. His patients grasped iron bars that protruded…