So, obviously all you smart people in science and technology have built internal algorithms for keeping up with this insane progress. In particular, it is especially visible in peer reviewed software and publications. More stuff of incredible quality are being produced than any person can contain in his head. If you compute the bits of input you have via physical constraints of the nurons in your eyes and ears and nose, skin, etc. It receives less information in 24 hour period than that which is produced. Imho.

I am looking for how people think about the totality of human knowledge, its organization, advancement and teaching. There was a decade or so when Google was set to perform this task: organize the world’s information. But, apparently, they have abandoned that for Alphabet.

Let’s see. If I were to think about it, and I will disclaim that I know of a lot of people who are better than me at knowing more and thinking effectively, but for a person of my knowledge and skill, I can imagine all scientific knowledge and software as code.

OSS and scientific publications are versioned objects in this language. It may inherit from Publication, with Peer Review. Publication class may contain Authors, title, abstract, section, reference and appendix, it may also have venue(Nature, GitHub) and genre(immunology, reinforcement learning, group theory, reversed web proxy), date. More generically, there is a vocabulary associated with the publication of genre. Commonly used subroutines may include metrics, sampling or experimentation methodology, methods of comparison(i.e. a function that takes in present paper and other papers and judges present paper worthy of publication (irrespective of peer reviewers))

For example

better_rocauc(this_paper_algo1, [other_papers], [Iris, mushroom, mnist])

smaller_amotized_runtime(this_paper_algo2, [algos from other referred papers], [imagenet])

better_false_discovery_rate(this_paper_procedure_A, [text book approaches, procedures in popular use])

best_worst_case_performance(my_algo, your_algo)

…

The publication objects most importantly exposes to the public

• Context of the publication, including references to previous publications documenting relavent or comparable knowledge.
• Export data for future publication comparison
• Export of functionality via API
• Explanation of what it improves on(beats what other publication on what metric)
• Describes sufficiently how to replicate the representation of knowledge in this publication.
• State known limitations and directions of improvements.

For technical publication, the API might be a new procedure for distilling gold out of stream water, for scientific publications, we have to come up with a functions or procedural representation of knowledge. Consider a new measurement of speed of light, it’s obvious that this can be done. What about discovery of a new planet or organism or organ?… What about a nonterminating program? What about a new useful transcendental functions? It will rely on the establishment of a vocabulary and semantics–the language of knowledge.

But there seems to be an infinite way to write these things. Is Occam’s razor the principal to take in designing this language? I would propose a couple of approaches to solving knowledge.

• Communication: One important principle is to restrict considerations to knowledge as communication. Knowledge as we know it may have powers for us to think and act. But the knowledge that this blog post is considering is mainly the communication of knowledge. Publications in scientific journals and OSS are mainly to teach and empower other systems or people to think and act. Admittedly, the knowledge within, it’s representation in my head or that cluster of massively parallel computers are highly important to our success. They may be of great research interest to any, but we have no real power over them unless the communication of knowledge is established. Otherwise we can only stand idly by and watch each of our separate intelligence perform separately based on their separate knowledges.
• Generalization: This is a subsequent restriction to knowledge of interest to those as communication. Roughly speaking, generalized communication is an effective broadcast of knowledge. This is to contrast with, for example, point-to-point communication, or multi-cast communication, and encrypted communication, where in each case the communication is either intended or guaranteed to be comprehensible only by designated parties and not a general unrestricted pipulation. Dissemination of knowledge is the sole goal of present endeavor.
• Efficiency: Another important principle is to balance efficiency and expandability. Occam’s razor, as great as it is suffers from short-sightedness. The modern knowledge-base designer must be conscientious of the present limits of total human-computer cognition on earth. It must admit the imminent possibility of a redesign to include new knowledge that we do not yet know and those that we have not anticipated. This is the only prudent path forward and must be audited frequently.
• Verification: A second balance is the one between theoretic guarantees and empirical verifiability. Properties of the language must be empirically verified. Theoretical analysis on its limits and powers are also very important. This balance is not mutually exclusive and is not subservient to any other principles.
• Usefulness: A final principle of solution is that they must be requirements-driven.

One must always ask: what’s this for?? Each of these design seem like monumental to pursue, and they certainly intermix and needs to be translatable between each other.

• The language is for human consumption.
• The language is for human production.
• The language is for machine consumption.
• The language is for automated scientific or programming systems.

Each language will have dialects for different genres. For example the human consumption language may have

• Biological Sciences
• Numerical Algorithms
• Psychology
• Theology
• …

The dialects for machine interpretation may be:

• Python
• Perl
• ADA
• Java

Although, one note of caution, these organically grown programming languages often communicate meaning both to human and computers. Additionally, the “source code” often explicitly stipulates internal machine representation during execution. In this regard, we must rethink language design and separate all these concerns!

These abstractions can also result in other changes such as new formal peer review system. Machine invention, machine experimentation, and the one thing I could really use: Machine Teaching. The machine should teach me the agglomeration of human knowledge and history, all that is interesting and necessary I want to learn before 12… next life time perhaps.

Okay, that’s all for now. Time to hit the books on epistemology… I have to learn everything the old way before the machines can teach it all back to me a better way.

P.s. this blog post was Made on Earth™, and © 2018 FAM Blog.

Still reading Homo Deus. It occurs to me that there is a chance that humans intelligence are a local optimum, that it is a limit that we have arrived at after many years of evolution. (Calculus limit in the sense of the place one arrives at after many iterations of getting closer to better)

That is to say that there is some small chance that even if we put all of the energy the sun and elements on earth gives to us that the result may not be as intelligent as human kind intelligence at the evolutionary competition.

That is not a very scientific assertion. We’d have to have an AI to test that in case people loses.

That may also be very delusional. Guns, cars, planes. The only reason why other extensions to our faculties are not injuring us at a higher rate is the self restrain human has while using them. It is the coordination and enforcement that we have developed to ensure that they do not exceed their safe boundaries. It may more likely be the case that we put on a brake before we reach that evolutionarily competitive stage.

Yes laziness and greediness will make everything AI based. Just as we have segways and powered wheel chairs, we ride them if it is fun and avoid them if it is not fun.

Maybe… fingers crossed.

…We have come so far! advanced so much!! too far  too much to perish at our own indiscretions… or elseI watched too many Dr. Who episodes recently and have come to believes that will prove to be delusional…

The future feels like M$-DOS 3.0… or a VM screen. If we look at today’s google search box, we would miss things that we have come used to… I don’t know what it is that we will miss, but I do feel it when I can’t escape into vim mode and edit command line. There’s an internal finger that hits the escape to enter command mode and suddenly finds it missing… it feels unspeakably frustrating, there are symbols floating in the head that cannot be typed, there are keys that just don’t exist.

A modern man looking at future AI computer are insanely overwhelmed with information, unable to keep up with the multiple simultaneous threads of correlated flow of input. The brain become quickly fatigued, eyes starts crossing and closing, mouth drooling, legs and arms waving uncontrollably to trying to keep it all together.

Or he could just desire copulation with said apparatus. Who knows what kind of junk they put into future machines to sell them. Peh!

Okay, recovering Trekkie here, and reborn Whovian. Just watching the seasons backwards from nine and now on s2e1… having just seen Amelia’s final farewell. So sad that the show is so honest about age and usefulness to a TV show.

It occurs to me that some day in the future, haha, in the future, that an angels episode should be shot in Tibet, or in one of the other major Buddhist temples such as those in Shaolin temple. There are literally rows upon rows of these sculptures of people and some monsters that look like they’re trying to scare you. And some are smiling too of course and others are doing kungfu..(google Shao Lin arhats for example there are a few of lots of these)

If I didn’t know any better, I’d suggest that a time traveler from the future where all of our cultures are all mixed together has come back and brought those future daemons from future Buddhism to modern fiction.

But who knows, maybe a time traveler like dr. Who traveled back to ancient China and inspired these meditations in sculptures…