What do you know about Japan and their economy?  Their nominal GDP and stock market seem to be “losing” relative to other countries, but upon further examination you will find that the real GDP/capita has been quite reasonable throughout the period.  but what’s money got to do with it? ...

I guess we already have the  “machine” built.  Its intelligence increases proportionally to # of people and time.  Next year we will celebrate it’s birthday :)  Time to get plugged in and kick out human politicians and decision makers.  Of course Rafe and Kevin have already asked the...

The New York Times Year in Review section always has some good ones. Some highlights for me from this year: Does feeling like a fraud make you act like one? Researchers gave experiment subjects designer-style sunglasses from boxes marked “authentic” or “counterfeit”. They then put...

As readers of my blog posts know, I talk a lot about evolutionary systems, the formal structure of cooperation, the role of both in emergence of new levels of complexity, and I sometimes use cellular automata to make points about all these things and the reification of useful models (here’s a summary...

I’ll call Rafe’s Daniel Nocera Nobel prize in <10 years and offer up that Artifical Collective Intelligence technology developed at MIT CCI will bring such breakthroughs that Daniel Nocera will be one of the last few INDIVIDUAL contributors to our inventive/discovery process.  Yes, they are...

PROBLEMS Our economic system hasn’t been self correcting through arbitrage, because markets have stayed irrational longer than one could stay solvent.  Our legal system has not been just because precedents have been bluffed into existence using legal costs instead of legal arguments.  Our...

-”Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Churchill (from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)  I’ve been meaning to do a post on the Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec), but Tyler Cowen’s post on Range...

(Back from Alex’s European adventures) Michael Martin of Broken Symmetry with two incredibly insightful posts on Soros’ theory of reflexivity, distinction between social and physical sciences, and the ability of markets to regulate us as well as themselves. 1. “Are markets flawed? Or is it...

A few more findings on how we discover and learn (in case you don’t have a dog as I assumed in the post about Discovery and Being Self Aware ).  Computational Approaches section discusses the use of artificial inteligence to help scientists make discoveries: Scientific thinking as problem...

“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward” – Thomas Edison “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”.  But what if we teach a man to learn? Was Thomas Edison a genius or “merely” a hard...

Continuation of: Focusing on “Autonomy” I’ve been trying to reconcile Rafe’s an my views on this topic.  I actually think we agree on the broad themes related to our argument over “autonomy”.  From my perspective, it seems like the only real disagreement is on the...

Continuation of: Superfoo Rafe and I had a great chat on the phone today about Superfoos.  I think we agreed that there will be multiple instances of agents emerging in the level immediately above humans but there is always a single top-level network in local space.  I think we also agreed that the...

Response to Superorganism as Terminology. I was actually about to post something about terminology, so I’m glad this came up. It’s just so difficult to choose words to describe concepts that have little precedent, without going to the extreme of overloading on the one end (e.g....

Until recently, Artificial Intelligence research has been grounded on a theory of cognition that is based on symbolic reasoning.  That is, somewhere in our heads the concepts are represented symbolically and reasoned about via deduction and induction. At long last, AI researchers are truly learning from...