Launch fever again?

 Once again there is a lot of impatience to launch Spacex Starship. With the long delay in the self-destruct system if Starship Superheavy had gone horizontal on its first launch a lot of people could have died. Would the project survive something like that? 

Raspberry Pi 5

I see that they hope to have Raspberry Pi 5s available late next month. I hope to get a couple of them. The processor is about twice as fast as the Pi 4. I only wish that they had increased the RAM like they did when they went from the Pi 3 to the Pi 4. The active cooler does look nice.

On the importance of concepts again

In their new paper* "Concepts is All You Need: A More Direct Path to AGI" Peter Voss and Mladjan Jovanovic stress the importance of concept formation for AGI and, as with A.s.a. H., they suggest that concepts should be encoded as vectors in a hierarchically organized structure. They also note the importance of sensory input and output actions.

* arXiv:2309.01622, 4 Sept. 2023  

Continental philosophy

 My A.s.a. H. project can be thought of as experimental phenomenology since "phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity."* A.s.a. involves all of these.

* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 16 Dec. 2013.

Rational voting systems, auctions

 I have previously discussed the fact that 51% of the population should not get 100% of things their way while 49% of the population get 0% of what they want. There are various ways to set things up so the 51% majority only gets 51% of their objectives. In a legislative setting, for example, each legislator can be given an equal amount of "currency" at the beginning of a legislative term. Each legislator gets to spend (bid) as much of their "currency" as they wish on each of the scheduled votes. On some votes the minority party will prevail over the majority depending upon the importance of each vote to each individual's priorities, the idea of saving your strength for the fight that matters to you.

Space junk

The problem of debris in earth orbit (and elsewhere) is another example of the tragedy of the commons, something capitalism is not good at handling. 

Version control indexing

When I start a new experiment with A.s.a. I am never sure if I should "write code from scratch"* or spend time hunting for legacy code** that I seem to remember is "almost" what I need. Part of the issue is with some kind of adequate indexing (which I don't currently have). The index really needs to be a vector quantity or at least a bag of words.

* Hardly ever completely from scratch but rather from some more fundamental example in legacy code.

** Perhaps a long time as I have thousands of AI programs in my code library.

More sensors more intelligence?

 I have previously asked whether having more sensors would help make systems more intelligent.* One reason for believing this would be the so called critical learning periods: "Critical learning periods are time periods early in development where temporary sensory deficits can permanently damage the outcome of learning."** Critical learning periods are known to occur in machines as well as in animals.**

* See, for example, my blogs of 17 July 2014, 2 September 2014, 11 December 2014, 11 November 2013. I have a small instrumentation lab to address this need.

**arXiv:2308.12221v1 23 August 2023, Kleinman et al and my blog of 17 July 2014.