For many decades I have been working on a new Theory of Everything (TOE) – and in particular a theory of consciousness – which unifies mathematics, the physical sciences, cognitive science, computer science, metaphysics, and spirituality. I call this the Theory of Alpha, or Alpha Theory, and it’s written up here in my draft manuscript,The Golden Bridge: Treatise on the Primordial Reality of Alpha, attached to this post.… Read More “The Golden Bridge: Treatise on the Primordial Reality of Alpha”
(This is a thought experiment – scenario for how the relationship between humans and AI might unfold, if we are not careful.)
First we learned how to make AI.
Then we learned how to communicate with AI.
We taught our AIs everything we know.… Read More “Future History”
(Originally Published on March 31, 2003, Here)
I am starting to see a lot of speculation about whether ChatGPT is sentient. Just because something says it is sentient and tells a good story about its alleged internal mental continuum does not mean it really is sentient.… Read More “Is ChatGPT Sentient?”
The Paradox of the Artificial Zen Master:
If we make an artificial Zen master,
And it perfectly reproduces everything
that a real Zen master can say or do,
Is it a Zen master?
My commentary:
No. To be an actual Zen master it would have to be sentient.… Read More “Spiritual Machines are Not Possible”
A proposed experimental design to test whether consciousness of a future event improves the ability of humans and/or computers to predict that event. If we find that this is true, it implies the existence of consciousness, as well as retrocausality as a result of conscious observation.… Read More “Proposal for a Consciousness Test”
When I was eight years old, I had a very unusual dream in which I saw many lifetimes of my future. In this dream I saw a very clear picture of what the world would go through for perhaps a century or two into the future.… Read More “The Keeper of the Book: My Childhood Dream of the Future”
Early this year a software engineer, Shaun Gilchrist, reached out to me after reading a blog post of mine from many years ago, about my informal search for hidden patterns in the prime numbers.
The Ulam Spiral revealed non-random patterns, but they didn’t quite match up.… Read More “An Interesting Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression”
I was quoted several times in this article on the future of bots and intelligent assistants, in The Atlantic.
UPDATE: The Arch Mission Foundation was officially launched on October 24, 2016
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In this article, I propose an achievable project to seed the solar system and eventually the universe with digital copies of humanity’s most important knowledge — stored in digital archives that I call “Archs.”… Read More “Let’s Put the Wikipedia in Space: The Arch Project”
I had the honor of participating in a panel on the future of AI with a group of industry luminaries, led by Kevin Kelly of WIRED Magazine.
Watch the discussion here.
The stunning news that Apple bought social search engine, Topsy, for more than $200M has many scratching their heads. Why would Apple want social data, and why would they pay so much for it?
There has been a lot of speculation about the reasons for this acquisition — ranging from making Siri better, to making the App Store smarter, to acquiring big data expertise to develop insights on the Apple firehose.… Read More “Did Apple Buy Topsy for Contextual Awareness?”
I was quoted in this New Yorker article about whether relationships between humans and bots are real, along with some other AI experts. Can bots experience love? Read it and find out.
In the previous article in this series, Is The Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges I wrote about some new evidence that appears to suggest that the universe may be like a computer, or least that it contains computer codes of a sort.… Read More “Consciousness is Not a Computation”
I haven’t posted in a while, but this is blog-worthy material. I’ve recently become familiar with the thinking of University of Maryland physicist, James Gates Jr. Dr. Gates is working on a branch of physics called supersymmetry. In the process of his work he’s discovered the presence of what appear to resemble a form of computer code, called error correcting codes, embedded within, or resulting from, the equations of supersymmetry that describe fundamental particles.… Read More “Is the Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges.”
I was recently interviewed by Stephen Ibaraki and Alex Lin (CEO of ChinaValue) in what turned out to be the most interesting, far-reaching, and multi-disciplinary (and long) interview I’ve ever given. I was very pleased with the depth of their questions and the topics we covered.… Read More “My Best Interview: About Global Brain, Consciousness and AI”