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Philosophy

Artificial Intelligence, Language Models and Understanding

Emerson AI, a GPT-3 based chatbot
Emerson AI, a GPT-3 based chatbot

Update: I discuss more on the measure of intelligence in this post.

Every decade, huge advancements are being made in the field of artificial intelligence, and each time we are amazed. In the 1960s we had ELIZA, a convincing human-like chatbot. In the 1980s, the world watched as Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov for the first time. In the 2010s, the resurgence of deep learning completely transformed prior approaches in nearly all domains, from images and video, to text and speech.

On Happiness

One of the experiences I've had which cemented my belief that money, or that attempting to purchase happiness cannot in itself bring happiness, was when I picked up the Dvorak1 keyboard layout. At the time, I was in the military doing clerical work, and there were hundreds of pages of documents that we were supposed to transcribe into Microsoft Word documents. The task itself was extremely monotonous and I was thinking of ways to improve it further. Once I picked up Dvorak, however, my outlook on the work changed. The task became fun, as I found myself slowly beginning to pick up the layout, and learn touch typing (something I had previously never attempted).

Determinism and Stoicism

Billiards

Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants.
Arthur Schopenhauer

It is very likely that the outcome of most things in the world, including the desires1 and mental states2 of ourselves3 and others, are already predetermined4 by events in the distant past. A criminal or good Samaritan, for example, can be viewed as a person whose antecedent moral, social and genetic factors have resulted in them being bound, so to speak, to have either the desire to help others or a lack of self control resulting in the criminal act. This is not to say that they should not be punished or praised, for we know that such interventions can be beneficial. Rather, we should view their acts with the same amount of significance as we would to our expectations of a faulty program running smoothly or a mouse outrunning a cheetah, because we know that the outcome could not have been otherwise, given the antecedent factors.

On Deep Work

Girl Studying

I believe that useful work, of lasting value to oneself and others, comes from uninterrupted concentration. Intuitively it makes sense - imaging working on a complex task, requiring you to hold many pieces of information in your mind simultaneously in order to produce a result, something common in knowledge fields. When you are interrupted, such as by an instant message or some other notification, your attention on the main task is lost, some new context is loaded into your memory as necessary to deal with processing the distraction, and by the time you resume the main task, it becomes harder to recall the pieces of information you were holding in your memory earlier.