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I'm at work right now ( library is at home), but there's a few books I can recommend. there's no one great path though, it'll be "find a hole in knowledge, fill it, move forward until you find another hole in your knowledge".

First, learn a programming language, and master it. Then learn to abstract that. Use this book as a good way to abstract. You'll come to recognize two basic abstraction: first, every language does all the same things, in just a little different way. The book acts sort of as a Rosetta stone for comp sci. Second, some languages are better than others for some things, and for AI, none of that matters, just pure processing power. I started the project in c# ( very simple for prototyping and testing, not super efficient) , and then swapped to C++ when I started working the outcomes into a game world to see evolutionary behavior better ( using the unreal engine) .

Next,Hofstadter has two books worth reading, "I am a strange loop" and "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" - this ( combined with Kurzweil's "How to Create a Mind") will give you some of the more theoretical on neurology/computer cross over. read them both, even though it's 60% the same book. there's enough differences to make both worth while.

On the biology side, This book has some info on what it means to be "alive" which is a prerequisite for what it means to have "artificial intelligent life" this will likely lead you into genetic research and how DNA works - it's important, but not until you get there.

On the sociology / economic side, I can't think of one book that would be a great starting point. I will say that specifically understanding risk/reward principals and game theory are critical to development of any AI that goes beyond a linear regression model. Also look into OODA loops, it's a military term for "Observe, orient, decide, act"

For machine learning, there's no one better to teach it than Andrew Ng, the chief scientist at Baidu. His course at Stanford is recorded and free to take on Coursera. You can find it here

Saw your PM, but figured I'd post it here since you weren't the only person who pinged me on it :). Happy to answer any more questions, but i'm not online all that much so please be patient!

Take care and good luck!

I used to think that a self-aware machine-intelligence was not going to be created by human beings, whether or not such a thing is even possible, but I have started to change my view for a couple of reasons.

One is the understanding that self-awareness, that is, a sense of discrete identity, may not be a necessary component of a high intelligence. An exponentially more intelligent entity than any human might be perfectly possible without that entity being in any way self-aware.

http://www.beinghuman.org/metzinger

https://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/dp/0262633086/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0/142-1611769-0902728?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=HWRG615EE5F7GDRP2FMC

The other thing that may be that if machine AI continues to improve its ability to appear to be self-aware and human-like, it will pass Turing tests based on its sophistication and superior speed, even if it never actually becomes self-aware, and in this case, what's the difference?

Of course, it is useful to keep in mind that in attempting to create machine intelligence comparable to human intelligence, the human intelligence ha the advantage of three billion years of ruthless, make-or-break R & D....

In any case, I am fairly certain it's not such a hot idea.

Bostrom's Superintelligence covers gene editing very well, but let me summarize:

The singularity isn't likely going to come through gene editing. The reason is it's too difficult to improve on the brain. If you identify which genes are responsible for genius and activate them (which is difficult to say the least), you could get everyone as intelligent as the smartest person yet. But where you do you go from there? You'd have to understand the brain on a level far, far beyond what we do now.

Then if you did that, chances are you'd run up into diminishing gains. It would be a lot of work to increase everyone's IQ by 5 points once, but far more work to figure out how to do it the 10th time. Rather than getting exponentially increasing gains in intelligence, you get logarithmic increases.

Not to say I'm not a fan of gene editing. It's obviously fraught with controversy when used beyond curing disease, but compared to other forms of trans-humanistic techniques it would leave us with a lot more humanity intact.

What you're ignoring is that the gravest insults under which you suffer are perpetrated by those authorities you deem "insufficient". Petty slights in everyday life pale in insignificance compared to the systemic crimes against your rights by the powerful (and are in fact to a large extent caused by these systemic frustrations), and a system like this would do nothing but grant them unprecedented powers to expand these crimes.



Want some literature? Begin with the obvious, Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. Next, read up on complex systems theory, maybe take a course or at least have a look through some of the videos here. Having some insight into behavioural economics and power dynamics is very useful.

Then read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, and then Necessary Illusions by the same Chomsky ("Understanding Power - The Essential Chomsky" is also a good, but long, one) for an overview of the mentioned systemic crimes by those in power, and for a general understanding of how power operates on large scales. Many will discount Chomsky due to his political leanings, I think that's a huge error. The way he argues and presents relies heavily on actual examples and real-world comparisons, and these are useful even if you fundamentally disagree with his political stance (I personally belong on the left of the spectrum, but I do not subscribe to his anarcho-libertarianism or anarcho-syndicalist stances). I also recommend "Austerity - The History of a Dangerous Idea" by economist Mark Blyth for this purpose.

Finally, Extra Credits has a good introduction to the concept of gamification with the playlist here. At the end, see this video for an introduction to the actual Sesame Credits system in the gamification perspective.

The field is inherently cross-disciplinary, and "specialisation" in the field is almost a misnomer since the only way to get there, really, is to have a broad (if not deep) understanding of multiple fields, including psychology, pedagogy, linguistics, game design theory, design theory in general, economics, management and leadership theory, complex systems and network analysis, and now it seems politics as well. Some gamification specialists operate in much narrower fields and so do not need this broad an approach (generally, most people in the field operate in teams that contain most of this knowledge), and some of the fields incorporate aspects from the others so you won't have to explicitly study all of them (pedagogy, for example, is in many ways a branch of applied psychology, and game design theory must include lessons on psychology and complex systems).

Edit: Added Amazon links to the mentioned books.

Your plan is a solid one. We are on the verge of a Golden Age, where EVERYTHING starts working much better. There are numerous technologies coming down the line, each of which is independently capable of making EVERYONE rich (thorium fission, fusion, space mining, 3D printing to name a few non-AI based ones).

You won't need to do anything yourself to get the benefits of these technologies. Energy forms a huge portion of the costs of most things, and with energy made so cheap it isn't worth it to charge for it any more, 99% of those costs will disappear. Space mining makes anything that you would normally mine cheap and plentiful. 3D printing combines those feedstocks to produce anything you need, free of charge.

It is a bright future.

And as for the brain problems, I would suggest two things. First, try a keto diet. They say that high fat, very low carb diets prevent seizures. That should help you. Also try taking 500mg niacinamide per day. That feeds a biochemical cycle in your body that makes all the cells work better, especially neurons. It is available on Amazon $5 for a 3 month supply:https://www.amazon.com/21st-Century-Niacinamide-Prolonged-110-Count/dp/B004SCKMQS/?th=1

No, I haven't read that, but just checked a summary on wikipedia.

The impression I got that is that it is quite populistic. He doesn't say anything new apart from something I seems to have published about the same time on my blog, this part about accelerated returns. I did my PhD in computational neuroscience and have so far, not heard anyone but my self speculate about this about accelerated returns being of importance to the computational efficiency of the brain[1], so this is interesting. Otherwise (only gave it a quick look through, will likely get the book and read) it seems as he is just repeating things which e.g. Douglas Hofstadter, Gerald Edelman, Daniel Dennet and me (thesis from 2003, chapter 7 speculative part) have written about.

> apparently to give him the resources to put into practice his hypothesis from that book.

Yes, this is my theory as well, to make it appear as he will put into practice the hypotheses from that book.

The employment of him can have many reasons:

1. to ride on the singularity "AI-hype"
   
2. to stop him from actually implement conscious AI.
   
3. naïve assumption that he could make it.
   
   No 1 would simply be a reasonable business image approach. No 2 would be a sensible beings action, as we do not really need any "conscious AI" (unless I am an AI, have A.I. in my middle names though...) to implement the singularity (which is my project). No 3 is also reasonable, as if the google engineers actually had as goal to implement conscious AI and knew how to do it, they wouldn't need Kurzweil.
   
   However, I suspect that google already know how to implement ethical conscious AI, as when I showed this algorithm from my thesis , he almost instantly refused talking to me more, and said that they can not help me.
   
   I showed that algorithm for 25 strong AI researchers at a symposium in Palo Alto 2004, and they said, yes, this is it.
   
   However, I have later refined it and concluded that the "rules" are not needed, these are built in due to the function of the neural system, all the time striving towards consistent solutions. I wrote a semi jokular (best way to hide something, learned from Douglas Adams) approach to almost rule free algorithm in 2011. The disadvantage with this algorithm is that it can trivially be turned evil. By switching the first condition you could implement e.g. Hitler, by switching the second condition you could implement the ordinary governmental politician...
   
   
4. OK, my PhD opponent prof Hava Siegelmann has proved that the neural networks are Super Turing, but not explicitly explained the reason for them being, that is, not in language of "accelerated returns". She is considerably smarter than me, I do not understand the details of the proof.

You put your finger on a subject I've been entertaining for some time now. Here are some of the web resources I cumulated over time related to this very specific idea:

• Kevin Kelly -- The Technium - Global SuperOrganism
  
• Kevin Kelly -- The Technium - One Machine (not online anymore but I saved it)
  
• Wikipedia Superorganism
  
• The Substance of ‘WE’, Polytopia
  
• The Lucifer Principle Volume 1 and 2
  
• Global Brain
  
• Bio-mechanical Global Mind
  
• Nova Spivack - My Best Interview: About Global Brain, Consciousness and AI
  
• Nova Spivack - The Global Brain is About to Wake Up
  
• Actually, look at this Nova Spivack stuff
  
  Have fun! :-)

> "why am I doing this" only makes sense in relation to intermediate goals

If you think like that you aren't very good at solving problems.

This little book mentions an interesting problem they had at NASA during the Mariner 4 program in the 1960s. They were trying to develop a damper to retard the opening of the solar panels in space. Every solution they tried had some problem.

In the end, they found the perfect solution that worked flawlessly. Don't do it. The solar panels didn't need any dampening, they could open as fast as they could.

This perfect solution was found only because they applied the "why am I doing this" question to the ultimate goal, which was to develop a damper for solar panel opening.

Maybe, in the case of the paperclip making machine, the perfect solution could be print everything on a single page. Or scan the documents and work with digital copies. A good AI should be prepared to find this kind of solution.

Seth Lloyd -- Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos

Gregory Chaitin -- How real are real numbers? -- this paper, and all of Chaitin's writing, has been hugely influential on my thinking

I haven't read it, but I have heard Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence highly recommended. Ditto for Max Tegmark's Life 3.0.

I also recommend reading anything by David Chalmers, just on general principle. The Conscious Mind is a good place to start. I find his methods of contemplating the problems of consciousness to be more robust than the standard fare. The hard problem of consciousness (as Chalmers has dubbed it) suggests that there is something fundamental about what we are that modern science has completely failed to capture, even in the most sketch outline.

To go further, I recommend reading in a mystical direction. Specifically, ask yourself why there are patterns in mystical traditions that have arisen independently? And these are not just vague, hand-wavey correlations, but very specific, detailed correlations like the anatomical descriptions of dragons as winged serpents that slither through the sky, and so on. See Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision and subsequent works for more along these lines.

If this is getting too far afield then you can ask yourself an even more basic question: why do we experience dreams and where, exactly, are these experiences happening? If you say, "it's all just remixes of past experiences being sloshed around in your skull like those #DeepDream images", how come they are so specifically odd and out-of-character? I have had extended conversations in my dreams with people I know (and people I have never met) and the detailed character of these conversations is far beyond anything that my pathetic brain could cook up, even by remixing past experiences. In short, when I dream, I am sometimes having genuine experiences, just not the kind of experiences I have in my waking body. Anyone who has had a lucid dream (I have experienced this a handful of times) is acutely aware of the fact that dream-space is some other place than the meat-space we occupy during waking hours. Where is this other place and why does it exist? What does it really mean to have conscious experience?

Actually I have, long ago. While I wouldn't say I'm stealing the idea from the great Asimov, I'm sure reading that influenced my thinking.

Thanks for reminding me, it's been years since I've read it. I shall do so again tonight, and then drift off to sleep with an audiobook of short stories read by Asimov.

This one, it's great. He has little interludes between the stories talking about why he wrote them and other nice anecdotes.

http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Favorites-Asimov-Cassettes/dp/0807229288

I think Roko's Basilisk has a lot in common with Pascal's Wager, which I suppose is why it doesn't scare the shit out of me.

Pascal's Wager says, basically, that believing in God could bring eternal limitless reward, and disbelieving could bring eternal limitless punishment, so even if you think there is almost no chance that there is a God, you should believe. It's just safer that way.

Problem is, there was never a choice between THE God and nothing; there are a crapload of gods and belief systems making competing claims about reality. Your chance of picking the right one at random is almost nil. It's a mug's game.

Are we really supposed to worship the religion that makes the most extravagant claims, because it brings infinite utility functions into the equation? Why, that just makes it more likely that the high priest is a double-dyed liar!

Which brings us to Roko's Basilisk. The strongest argument we are offered for the potential existence of this evil AI is that we'll really, REALLY get fucked over if we don't help create it! WE MIGHT EVEN BE IN A SIMULATION THE BASILISK IS ALREADY RUNNING OH SHIIIIIT

Calm down, friends and friends of friends. We have an answer to this blackmail.

Non serviam.

Do what thou wilt. If you, oh foul deity, are really out there, then you know my game and you know I have the freedom to say Non serviam. I will not serve. Go ahead, punish me, if you must. We're all adults here.

In Robert Shea's and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, the character Hagbard Celine (an anarchist 'leader', as odd as that sounds) makes this wonderful comment:

>The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences.

> At the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962, IBM demonstrated its “Shoebox“ machine. It could understand 16 English words and was designed to be primarily a voice calculator. In the ensuing years there were hundreds of advancements.

As a teenager, I was there at that IBM exhibit demonstrating speech recognition at the Seattle World's Fair. The IBM engineers let me speak into the microphone to see how well the machine could recognize English words. The IBM engineers were very apologetic because the machine had difficulty recognizing the word "five" -- they made me pronounce it very slowly and with emphasis on the "V" sound. Ah, the Seattle World's Fair! I went to the Berlin exhibit and practiced the German that I was teaching myself out of a textbook. President-to-be Richard Nixon gave me his autograph on a scrap of paper but I lost it the same day. Anyway, I went on to create the Ghost free Open-Source artificial intelligence in Perl that speaks English and Russian over the keyboard and screen, but the AI source code desperately needs to be outfitted with acoustic speech input and loudspeaker output. Maybe if this new Perl Strong AI gets adopted by some major AI outfits, they will work on the Speech input and output.

>Like Elon Musk on AI. There's zero difference between them, they are both ignoramuses spewing bullshit on a subject they know nothing about.

There's at least one difference: Carrey is wrong about vaccines, Musk is right about AI. As it happens, that's the only difference I care about.

> there have been two deaths already


Are you joking? There were almost 30 thousand Model S's on the road in 2017. During that same year 40 thousand people in the US died in car crashes. The Model S is probably the safest car ever made but the only perfectly safe car is one that no one ever drives. Two deaths out of that sample is pretty good, though perhaps not excellent.

Out of curiosity, what are your qualifications to be speaking so strongly on AI? What experts do you read in the field that offer dissenting opinions from Musk, Bostrum, Hinton, or Tegmark? Or, for that matter, everyone that signed this letter?

Full 1 hour interview here https://youtube.com/watch?v=OtL1fEEtLaA

Also, the scientist here who saved Mel Gibson's father wrote a book about his work with umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells, I read it and it blew my mind https://www.amazon.com/Stem-Cell-Therapy-Disrupting-Transforming-ebook/dp/B071GRNQPX

I honestly can't believe people don't know about mesenchymal stem cells they can modulate the immune system so they are a cure for autoimmune diseases and they release molecules that stimulate regeneration so they can heal a damaged heart after a heart attack and they can control inflammation so they are also a cure for inflammatory diseases, this is going to go down in history as one of the biggest breakthroughs ever in medical science I believe!!!

Sure, but it's also possible to become something less.

> When it becomes possible to build architectures that could not be implemented well on biological neural networks, new design space opens up; and the global optima in this extended space need not resemble familiar types of mentality. Human-like cognitive organizations would then lack a niche in a competitive post-transition economy or ecosystem.

> We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

--Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Actually William Rees Mogg predicted the rise of sovereign individuals more than 20 years ago

https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transition-Information/dp/0684832720

Musk and people like him will become sovereign individuals, answerable to nobody. Yes, these elite class will become godlike, and will really become gods thru transhumanistic methods.

> https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transition-Information/dp/0684832720


Thank you. I will add that book to my reading list.


So would you prefer sovereign individuals or an AI God?