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I think that outside view estimates- "here's Moore's Law, this is the point at which the processing power of a human brain will cost the equivalent of $1,000 in 2012 dollars"- are way more robust than inside view estimates- "we just came up with subtechnology 734 out of ~5k necessary."
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How does remote Joule heating of carbon nanotubes advance singularity timelines?
it seems much more important than tech 734/5000 necessary... carbon nanotubes are one of the core scientific discoveries of our generation and this shows a really interesting property of them directly related to electronics development. The heat dissapation bottleneck has been the most serious issue with nanotech and much, much faster and smaller processors. When we went from faster chips to multiple cores, things became really different - parallel algorithms are inherently more difficult and tech that could reinstate an exponentiation phase is extremely significant. This is more important than that though, if substantiated it is a truly weird physics advance and there's no telling what applications it will find. The first AI or human decision support system that will offer dangerous self improvement capabilties is most likely going to be on some $10M-$100M system and the question is how do you see that coming? I mentioned moore's law as the first of many obvious and important areas this advance will impact if there is not some serious engineering bottleneck in putting it into practice, be that in moving up orders of magnitude in clock speed or providing wiring for brain implants that is small enough not to damage neural tissue and so forth. I'm seriously surprised to see a response to this advance that is not at least curious interest at an obviously related physics advance.
How does remote Joule heating of carbon nanotubes advance singularity timelines?
Carbon nanotubes: The weird world of 'remote Joule heating'
Minimizing Joule heating remains an important goal in the design of electronic devices1, 2. The prevailing model of Joule heating relies on a simple semiclassical picture in which electrons collide with the atoms of a conductor, generating heat locally and only in regions of non-zero current density, and this model has been supported by most experiments. Recently, however, it has been predicted that electric currents in graphene and carbon nanotubes can couple to the vibrational modes of a neighbouring material3, 4, heating it remotely5. Here, we use in situ electron thermal microscopy to detect the remote Joule heating of a silicon nitride substrate by a single multiwalled carbon nanotube. At least 84%of the electrical power supplied to the nanotube is dissipated directly into the substrate, rather than in the nanotube itself. Although it has different physical origins, this phenomenon is reminiscent of induction heating or microwave dielectric heating. Such an ability to dissipate waste energy remotely could lead to improved thermal management in electronic devices6."
These experiments seem extremely important in constructing AI singularity timelines, what does lesswrong think?
What is the impact on life extension research?
Carbon nanotubes in biology and medicine: In vitro and in vivo detection, imaging and drug delivery
I don't see a line of inference free of holes, but one can imagine the sort of uses a scifi author would come up with.
I was a civ junkie for a long time... one interesting thing is that the manual had structured data representations of everything in the game. It was also deadly exploitable, you would usually just not use certain strategies because they're boring.
I don't mean average, but yes, ordinary, as in typical physics PhD from a good but not necessarily very top program. Darwin and Smith seem to have been such people to start, but aspired to more. Possibly Socrates and Einstein. No Newtons required, nor even Faradays or Fields Medalists.
even the most extraordinary eat, shit, sleep, fuck, become addicted and I also feel that merging needs is the key to cooperation
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I'm scared.
I think I could help, but it would take a while. I seriously need someone else to be able to start doing that helping in the not so long term. For now, I will flatly assert that I expect an intense, rational effort to succeed by a quite moderate number of otherwise ordinary people to be enough to swing the balance for the light-cone's future, but such an effort must actually acknowledge human realities and work with them, rather than punishing people for their imperfections.
Understanding what some call the terror of the situation will change a lot. People should volunteer at shelters or prisons or with something like big brothers/big sisters and see the pain that stupidity, weakness, irrationality, love of ignorance and all the rest cause. The real terror of the traits commonly possessed by the people and economic entities that shape our society. Think hard about daily life in rural china, north korea, iran, the ghettos and the trailer parks and think about the evolutionary pressure that puts on the 150+ IQs that happen to be born there and what the consequences of a little bit of love and reason can be. Thinking about this forces one to admit to selfishness and yield to temptation or intentional suffering to purify this, or admit that one is choosing love of misery over ripples of rationality that can add to a critical mass for breaking cycles of ignorance, corruption and abuse.
I think that you are you are on a solid research path here. I think you have reached the bounds of business oriented software and it's time to look into something like apache mahout or RDF. Decision tree implementations are available all over, just find a data structure and share them and run inference engines like owlim or pellet and see what you can see.
RDF is a good interim solution because you can start encoding things as structured data. I have some JSON->RDF stuff for inference if you get to that point.
Here is one way to represent these graphs as RDF.
Each edge becomes an edge to a blank node, that blank node has the label, arrival probability and could link to evidence supporting. Representing weighted graphs in RDF is fairly well studied.
The question is, what is your net goal of this from a computational artifact point of view?
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Looking for reductionism help
reductionism = (reduce until you have good reason not to);
I think this is a good construction for pragmatic reductionism. It feels like there is some connection to ockham's razor, using an excessively complex model ends up binding up computational resources that you are likely to need for some time sensitive problem. I think this is what is going on in your description of the thought chain you get bound up in. It's fine for fun to think about how relatively or quantum mechanics relate to some problem that is easily solved (or approximated quite accurately) with newtownian mechanics, but if you have some actual reason to solve that problem, it's best to take the easy answer and move on.
I would have had to prepare all that in advance and they would have been less satisfactory.
It's going to happen over and over again throughout your life, particularly if you start doing things like training neural networks or svms or whatever you are playing with. If you set aside a weekend and visit your local linux users group, they will get you all sorted out for free. The additional advantage of this is that once you are in a known clean infrastructure, it's likely that you will feel more free to write and research.
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It's worth noting media is consumed in different modes. I am constantly watching BSG or buffy or stargate as I'm coding because there are these alternating phases of concentration and boring repetition so it's nice to have something I can glance at and appreciate something from. This is very different from watching for entertainment like game of thrones or justified.
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There are two different things going on here; one of them is that nanotechnology has potential and is interesting, and the other is estimating if/when the next Singularity will occur.
The second is done best by taking the outside view. An estimate that the Singularity will happen in 2100 assumes there will be many technological improvements between then and now- both big and small- and so doesn't depend on the details- that we fixed the heating problem now and the parallelism problem ten years from now, or did them in the reverse order.
The first is interesting, but should be separated from the second.
"Taking the outside view means using an estimate based on a class of roughly similar previous cases"
so the singularity by far is something after which we cannot predict how things are, but we're going to look at roughly similar cases for that?
I'm also an insider in this in the sense that I've been a professional software engineer for 16 years, dropped out of a phd program after passing qualification exam with a masters in compsci and eng, so yes, I am trying to imagine possible outcomes and look at trajectories and I hope other people with training on this board are doing the same.