Why sacred texts, intelligence tests, and our newest machines all draw their power from seeming unchangeable — and why that is the very thing that hollows them out. The keyboard you are reading this on is badly designed, and everyone knows it. The QWERTY layout was arranged for the mechanical typewriters of the 1870s, and … Continue reading The Permanence Trap
Superintelligent A.I: The Measure Moves
Brains, eyes, environments, and why no trajectory of intelligence we can actually inspect supports the idea of monotonic improvement toward "superintelligence." Start with an animal that should embarrass us. The mantis shrimp has twelve types of color photoreceptor; you have three. For decades the natural inference ran straight downhill from that number: twelve channels against … Continue reading Superintelligent A.I: The Measure Moves
