Mathematician vs. Philosopher’s first post summarizes perfectly my feelings about our little experiment here:

Eventually, this site will blossom into a formidable team blog, where the uneducated masses will come to dip their dirty heads into our trough of knowledge and irreverent commentary — supping until they are filled full of our unique brand of highly-informed and magnificently-recorded insolence. But that’s eventually. Presently, the site is more like a drunken street person — staggering about in all directions and yelling in an agitated fashion, but not making a lot of sense, nor looking terribly fabulous for the effort. And is that lady over on that corner a little bit frightened? Yes, I think she is.

George Dyson visited Google headquarters on the 60th anniversary of Von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer. He wrote a short piece which ended with this musing:

For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn’t be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings: “When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”

Full piece. [via boingboing.net]

A new study suggests that humans are the only primate species inclined towards non-reciprocal giving. Apart from its implications for the ongoing war for the future, I find this result very exciting for my personal/academic life. One of the questions that keeps drawing me to study cognitive neuroscience is the search for why humans do not always act according to the self-serving economic definition of ‘rationality.’ Knowing that such a close relative is different in this way provides an excellent opportunity for meaningful contrast.

I wonder if this is somehow related to the results of Glimcher and others that chimps don’t incorporate negative feedback into their prediction mechanisms to the same degree we do. Perhaps they can’t adequately model the potential negative consequences of helping a brother out, and so don’t bother. If that is the case, then what exactly are the negative consequences we model when we act altruistically? How can we quantify these? Why do some people seem to value them in greater absolute terms than others?

Once we discover the neural basis of this difference, can we leverage that knowledge to real-world applications? Tax policy? International relations? Just simply getting along?

An exciting time ahead…

Frodo: What are we holding on to Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.

Sam: [The good folk] had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Good advice for times when evil men possess destructive power in a dark and dangerous world.