The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 12 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Shanahan: Supercomputers will reach human brain scale computing within two years
“Well, depending on how you calculate it, we're pretty close to human brain scale computing already in the world's fastest supercomputers. And we will get there within the next couple of years.”
Shanahan: Physical embodiment is the origin of human intelligence
“No doubt when it comes to human intelligence and human consciousness Our physical embodiment is a huge part of that. It's in, it's where our intelligence originates from because what we, what our brains are really here to do is to help us to navigate and manip…”
DeepMind's DQN is arguably one of the first artificial general intelligences
“To my mind, DQN is in a sense, one of the very first general intelligences because it learns completely from scratch. You can throw A whole variety of problems at it, and it, you know, it doesn't always do that well, but in many cases it does pretty well.”
Shanahan: Symbolic AI ideas can be rehabilitated into deep reinforcement learning
“It made me realize that there were various ideas from symbolic AI that could be rehabilitated and put into deep reinforcement learning systems in a more modern guise. And so that's the kind of thing that I'm most interested in.”
Shanahan: Raw speech recognition has essentially been solved
“So speech recognition has more or less been cracked. The, they're just the process of turning the way raw waveform into text into, so that that's been cracked.”
Shanahan: Humans mistakenly project consciousness onto machines without actual agency
“We see someone there when there isn't, and of course that, for me, that was very interesting because it made me think about when we do that with machines, where we often, we do Maybe, you know, we think that there's someone at home when there isn't.”
The AI frame problem is determining relevance without being computationally overwhelmed
“The frame problem in its largest guise is all about how how a thinking mechanism or thinking creature or a thinking machine, if you like can work out what's relevant and what's not relevant to its To its ongoing cognitive processes and how it isn't overwhelmed…”
Shanahan abandoned classical AI in 2000 over lack of AGI progress
“By kind of the turn of the millennium, I'd more or less abandoned classical AI because I didn't think it was moving, moving towards what we now call AGI, artificial general intelligence, the big vision of human level AI.”
Shanahan: AlphaGo's Move 37 revolutionized top-level Go strategy
“So we've already seen that with our, with AlphaGo in the match with Lee Sedol. So as you probably know, there was a famous move in the second match against Lee Sedol, move 37, where all the commentators, all these sort of nine Dan masters were saying, saying, …”
Ex Machina's on-screen code prints the ISBN of Shanahan's book
“So when you look at this code on the screen, it's just gobbledygook, but something to do with prime numbers. If you run it prints out ISBN equals and the ISBN of my book in bottomers in the inner life.”
Shanahan: AI research evolved from an isolated niche into intense public attention
“Certainly when I was a PhD student and when I was a young postdoc, it was a fairly niche area. So you could just kind of like beaver away in your little, little kind of corner. Doing things that you thought were intellectually interesting and being reasonably …”