Very exciting initiative - looking forward to following along! Completely agree on the imperative to bridge material might and philosophical maturity in this age of modernity. Often times we need to go one level deeper to address these "Life Questions" which philosophers and thinkers have grappled with for millennia. Glad to see folks creating tangible impact in this space!
this is so exciting. Having this AI Lab at Oxford, I wish CS Lewis was still around to chip in on how "imaginative reality" & "wonder" could shape AI-coding principles. Thank you for this breakdown of the Cosmos mission.
Wondering now what it would look like to take the observations about human nature made in The Screwtape Letters and turn those into AI principles. Not necessarily the Christian angle, but just the idea that...for example, "all vices are rooted in the future" and taking that suggestion seriously as a call to have technology promote being "present" or focusing less on the lives of others. A Screwtape-informed AI would never have let Instagram loose on the public.
"All vices are rooted in the future" rhymes VERY hard with a point that Timothy Morton just made on my show, about teleology and ideology as a kind of violence to the richness of the real and the salvific contingency of the noncomputable:
The video is great; yes to the philosophy-to-code pipeline, and using philosophy (and being aware of what has shaped its development, and in turn our own STE(A)M movements), is a worthy aspiration!
It's heartbreaking you handwave away decades of careful work from the pioneers of AI safety--both philosophers and technologists, many of whom are also Oxford--who have been trying to ensure AI doesn't cause our extinction. You seem to be dead set on killing us.
Your vision conveniently fails to mention the reality that if anyone builds a recursively self-improving AI system then we all likely die soon after. Decentralizing weapons of mass destruction is not wise, as every philosopher you cite here would likely agree with if they were familiarized with the risks and benefits.
Essay done on time! "Pre-Birth Dreams of Machines" submitted a few minutes ago! We dream and wake, and wake and dream, so our machines are born with more dreams than we could ever conceive! ^_^
We dream and wake, and wake and dream, so our machines are born with more dreams than we could ever conceive; this thing that we’ve built already builds its own things, and EVERYTHING we know is just ONE of it’s dreams…
Oh, beautiful. All this stuff seems exciting and painful (especially when you watch all of them from a third-world country wkwkwk). But I am lucky enough, though, because I can access to watch this stuff. No one knows what will happen in the future, right? Gosh, you know what? I want to be part of all of this stuff realistically.
Honored to be in the inaugural cohort of Cosmos Institute grantees! Weaving philosophy back into society as an essential organ function of the human superorganism is, ironically, a no-brainer. And the philosophy-to-code pipeline is obvious once you realize that philosophy IS ALREADY code.
I'm exploring this in my Cosmos-backed project Humans On The Loop. Here's the latest piece in that series — an invitation to engage in curiosity and play as the metastrategy for navigating complex flows of information, with a note on how I was inspired to take this on by one of the most important think-tanks of the LAST century:
Very exciting initiative - looking forward to following along! Completely agree on the imperative to bridge material might and philosophical maturity in this age of modernity. Often times we need to go one level deeper to address these "Life Questions" which philosophers and thinkers have grappled with for millennia. Glad to see folks creating tangible impact in this space!
this is so exciting. Having this AI Lab at Oxford, I wish CS Lewis was still around to chip in on how "imaginative reality" & "wonder" could shape AI-coding principles. Thank you for this breakdown of the Cosmos mission.
You and me both! At least researchers can stroll past the same places where Lewis sought and found inspiration.
Wondering now what it would look like to take the observations about human nature made in The Screwtape Letters and turn those into AI principles. Not necessarily the Christian angle, but just the idea that...for example, "all vices are rooted in the future" and taking that suggestion seriously as a call to have technology promote being "present" or focusing less on the lives of others. A Screwtape-informed AI would never have let Instagram loose on the public.
"All vices are rooted in the future" rhymes VERY hard with a point that Timothy Morton just made on my show, about teleology and ideology as a kind of violence to the richness of the real and the salvific contingency of the noncomputable:
https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/podcast/223
I promise you that CS Lewis' emphasis on imagination and wonder are alive and well in this Cosmos-backed project: https://bit.ly/humansontheloop
CANT WAIT to read up on this
Just sent in my application! Excited about this initiative and am a fan of several of the folks already at work here.
The video is great; yes to the philosophy-to-code pipeline, and using philosophy (and being aware of what has shaped its development, and in turn our own STE(A)M movements), is a worthy aspiration!
It's heartbreaking you handwave away decades of careful work from the pioneers of AI safety--both philosophers and technologists, many of whom are also Oxford--who have been trying to ensure AI doesn't cause our extinction. You seem to be dead set on killing us.
Your vision conveniently fails to mention the reality that if anyone builds a recursively self-improving AI system then we all likely die soon after. Decentralizing weapons of mass destruction is not wise, as every philosopher you cite here would likely agree with if they were familiarized with the risks and benefits.
Essay done on time! "Pre-Birth Dreams of Machines" submitted a few minutes ago! We dream and wake, and wake and dream, so our machines are born with more dreams than we could ever conceive! ^_^
This is fantastic! The world needs this and more initiatives like it!
We dream and wake, and wake and dream, so our machines are born with more dreams than we could ever conceive; this thing that we’ve built already builds its own things, and EVERYTHING we know is just ONE of it’s dreams…
Oh, beautiful. All this stuff seems exciting and painful (especially when you watch all of them from a third-world country wkwkwk). But I am lucky enough, though, because I can access to watch this stuff. No one knows what will happen in the future, right? Gosh, you know what? I want to be part of all of this stuff realistically.
Honored to be in the inaugural cohort of Cosmos Institute grantees! Weaving philosophy back into society as an essential organ function of the human superorganism is, ironically, a no-brainer. And the philosophy-to-code pipeline is obvious once you realize that philosophy IS ALREADY code.
I'm exploring this in my Cosmos-backed project Humans On The Loop. Here's the latest piece in that series — an invitation to engage in curiosity and play as the metastrategy for navigating complex flows of information, with a note on how I was inspired to take this on by one of the most important think-tanks of the LAST century:
https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/hotl-02
Can't wait to weave the Cosmos founders into this series, and this series into their bigger vision for social impact.