Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 2, 2019
An edge.org Possible Minds talk on communal intelligence by MIT's Seth Lloyd; 50,000 year old Neanderthal tool suggests complex thinking; A robot that gains agility by teleoperation with a human operator; A study finds that octaves are learned, not inherited; and a Steem essay on the topic of mental overload
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- Communal Intelligence - Here's another post in the edge.org "Possible Minds" series. This talk is by Seth Lloyd. As with previous links in the series, Lloyd talks for about 25 minutes, then the discussion is followed by a Q&A session with participants like Steven Wolfram, David Chalmers, Freeman Dyson, Caroline Jones, and others. In the beginning of his talk, Lloyd surveys some of the information from previous talks, noting that Moore's Law basically ended about 15 years ago, for processor speed, and it has been replaced in a new form by advances in parallelism. He also resists the temptation to say that computation is either analog or digital, saying that at the quantum layer everything is both analog and digital. Pointing at both actual history, and historical science fiction, he rejects the idea of "the singularity" in any close time frame. After all, people have been searching for immortality for many millennia. He argues that the raw numbers don't support the idea that a large number of conscious minds could be uploaded into "the cloud." Instead, he favors the idea that our devices will get increasingly smarter, and increasingly enmeshed in our lives. Echoing Chalmers, he says that people already treat our unintelligent digital devices as if they were conscious. As he sees it, there will be a long period of coevolution in a symbiotic loop, where people create newer and better forms of intelligence, and these creations change the way people do things. He also says that people are not successful because of individual intelligence, but because of something he calls "communal intelligence" - and it's important to note that "communal intelligence" is enhanced by progressively smarter and smarter devices, so it's a moving target for machines to outperform humans. Interesting footnote: Lloyd agrees with Wolfram that the entire universe should be thought of as a giant computer. He notes that both of them have written books making that argument.
This edge.org series has also been covered here:
- Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 17, 2019 - George Dyson
- Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 12, 2019 - David Chalmers
- Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for July 27, 2019 - Frank Wilczek
- Science and technology micro-summaries for July 16, 2019 - Allison Gopnik
- Science and technology micro-summaries for June 21, 2019 - Caroline Jones
- Interesting Links: June 13, 2019 - Freeman Dyson
- Interesting Links: June 1, 2019 - Stephen Wolfram
- Interesting Links: May 17, 2019 - Rodney Brooks
- Neanderthal 'glue' points to complex thinking - A Neanderthal tool that spent the last 50,000 years burried under the North Sea has been found in the Netherlands. The surprising thing about the tool is that it contained traces of a sort of glue that was made out of birch tar. The difficulty of making this glue shows evidence of forward planning, and suggests that archaeologists may have been underestimating the capabilities of our Neanderthal cousins. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal. h/t archaeology.org
- This MIT Robot Wants to Use Your Reflexes to Walk and Balance - MIT researchers have developed the Little HERMES robot as a device that borrows its agility from a human operator. The device is described in this month's issue of Science Robotics, and it was created by João Ramos and Sangbae Kim. According to the researchers, this capability brings robotocists a step closer to developing a more capable robot for use at disaster sites.
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