Year: 2022

GREY ZONE THRESHOLD. "An artificial intelligence could rewrite its code from scratch — it could change the underlying dynamics of optimization. Such an optimization process would wrap around much more strongly than either evolution accumulating adaptations or humans accumulating knowledge. The key implication for our purposes is that AI might make a huge jump in intelligence after reaching some threshold of criticality." https://lnkd.in/dp3ZKye View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGICAL LEAPS. "A growing number of scientists do say that neo-Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain certain jumps in biological complexity: from single-celled to multicellular organisms, from single organisms to entire communities." https://lnkd.in/ezFxqyc View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PHENOMENA. "The jumps — saltations, in complexity parlance — appear to be non-linear emergent phenomena, the result of networked interactions that produce self-organization at ever higher levels. From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is a mechanism of a higher universal law, perhaps even a variant on the second law of thermodynamics." https://lnkd.in/ezFxqyc View in LinkedIn

SMALL BEGINNINGS. "Code that's capable of altering its own instructions while it's still executing has been around for a while. Typically, it's done to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance, or to simply reduce repetitively similar code. But for all intents and purposes, there are no self-aware, self-improving AI systems today." https://lnkd.in/dp3ZKye View in LinkedIn

ESCHER'S DRAWING HAND. "The idea of programs that write programs is inherent in the concept of the universal Turing machine, set forth by Alan M. Turing in 1936. He showed that any computation can be described in terms of a machine shifting among a finite number of states in response to a sequence of symbols read and written one at a time on a potentially infinite tape." https://lnkd.in/d854b7f View in LinkedIn

UNIVERSAL MACHINE. "Since the description of the machine can itself be expressed as a sequence of symbols, Turing went on to describe a universal machine which can read the description of any specific machine and then carry out the computation it describes." https://lnkd.in/d854b7f View in LinkedIn

GÖDEL'S NUMBERS. "Andrew Hodges, Turing’s biographer, describes certain aspects of the “universal machine”:"…underneath here lay the same powerful idea that Gödel had used, that there was no essential distinction between “numbers” and operations on numbers. From a modern mathematical point of view, they were all alike symbols. With this done, it followed that one particular machine could simulate the work done by any machine." https://lnkd.in/dCVHq5S View in LinkedIn

EXPONENTIAL SMARTS. "Once sophisticated enough, an AI will be able to engage in what's called "recursive self-improvement." As an AI becomes smarter and more capable, it will subsequently become better at the task of developing its internal cognitive functions." https://lnkd.in/dp3ZKye View in LinkedIn

GENERATIVE ROOT. "A program that copies itself can generally be written extremely succinctly. In English, such a program might be: "Write this sentence twice, the second time in quotes. ‘‘Write this sentence twice, the second time in quotes.’’ https://lnkd.in/dhc7k7H View in LinkedIn

ALTER COMMAND. "Although code can be generated by other code (metaprogamming), programs generally don’t change their own code as they run; this has the potential to devolve into a mess of difficult-to-track changes. However, some languages do allow programs to alter "their own script as it ran, such as with COBOL’s ALTER command.” https://lnkd.in/dScXnfT View in LinkedIn