Introspection, supervenience, consciousness, and the gut
"My personal Turing test is that I will accept machine consciousness when I can internalize that consciousness to the same degree that I can internalize...
Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices
A drawing of Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Paperclip Maximizer that I commissioned back in 2016 and have had an alarming number of chances to use since This is a...
It's still what computers still can't do
The cover of John McPhee’s book Oranges, which is about, you guesed it, oranges. It’s great. The New Yorker writer John McPhee, perhaps the 20th century's...
"AI" is bad UX
teapot from the cover of Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” clumsily ‘shopped by me "AI" means bad UX There is an emergent strain of thought in...
Supervision and truth
A diagram I found online about distinguishing facts and value judgments. Seems easy enough! For more than a decade the dominant training methodology in...
What Waymo's NHTSA investigation says about how far along autonomous cars are
Computer vision’s bête noire, believe it or not NHTSA is investigating Waymo. They're investigating Zoox, too, and have reopened an investigation into Tesla...
Why those "training data poisoning" gimmicks don't really work
The human visual cortex uses an optimal representation of the world One of my favorite science papers is Olshausen and Field (1996). It's about receptive...
Destructive investing and the siren song of software
Auto manufacturing is a strikingly tough business. Your upfront costs are incredibly high: you need huge factories, massive amounts of raw materials. Design...
How LLMs are and are not like the brain
Hi from buttondown! At the bottom of this newsletter is a bit of administrivia about the new platform How LLMs are and are not like the brain Beneath all the...
The emptiness at the heart of emotion recognition
Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash Every few months a new company flashes into the news doing emotion recognition with machine learning. This time it's...
How the field of "AI" got like this
Photo by Nick Wessaert on Unsplash The AI world can a deeply hostile place for people who are not white men. This is inarguable, and is a huge problem for...
I knew this was coming
3rd gen Cruise vehicle in happier times. Pic by Dillu, via wikimedia commons In 2016, when we originally raised money for our self-driving car company, we...
The cost we bear
Photo by Jim Wilson on Unsplash A cyclist got killed here a few weeks back. He was 57, I assume a commuter, riding in a wealthy suburb. He was hit by a truck...
Understanding (and) psychology
Photo by Bret Kavanaugh on Unsplash I've talked in the past about the difficulty of knowing what you're measuring, and how important that is to machine...
The value-destroying potential of AI
Photo by Nick Jio on Unsplash When my company was trying to sell our solution for theory of mind to autonomous vehicle companies, the biggest problem we had...
Helpful and unhelpful anthropomorphism
Photo by Rock'n Roll Monkey on Unsplash I've said before that the reason "AI" is so powerful (and difficult to get right) is that it deploys the single most...
Is artificial intelligence as a term per se racist?
Photo by Ag PIC on Unsplash Artificial intelligence is an old term. It came into common usage, famously, in 1956, at the Dartmouth Summer Conference on...
Knowing how to measure
Photo by William Warby on Unsplash One of my regular hobbyhorses is that computer science/machine learning as a field failed to learn the correct lessons...
Self-serving thought experiments
Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash A few years ago my collaborator Julian de Freitas and I published the first of what became a series of papers about the...
AI as UX
Photo by Daniel Perunov on Unsplash I was talking to my friend Kieran about the argument I made in my last newsletter, about AI being UX. That is to say,...