Links of the week

Morning mist rolling through beech forest in Monte Amiata, Val d’Orcia, Tuscany, Italy.

Conscious exotica: From algorithms to aliens, could humans ever understand minds that are radically unlike our own? – Aeon
A philosophical attempt to map minds other than human, with implications to what it means to be conscious. Is consciousness an intrinsic, inscrutable subjective phenomenon or a fact of matter that can be known? Read on.

Crash Space – Scott Bakker
What would happen if we engineered our brains to be able to tweak our personality and emotional responses as we experience life? What would life look like? Scott Bakker gives us a glimpse in this short story.

AlphaGo, in context – Andrej Karpathy
A short, but comprehensive explanation of why the recent AlphaGo victories do not represent a big breakthrough in artificial intelligence, and how real-world problems differ, from an algorithmic point of view, from the game of Go.

Multiply or Add? – Scott Young
In many business and personal projects, factors multiply, meaning that the performance you get is heavily influenced by the performance of weakest factor. In some other cases, e.g., learning a language, factors add. The strategy to take in developing factors/skills depends by which context, add or multiply, you’re in. For more insights, read the original article.

Human Resources Isn’t About Humans – BackChannel
Often, HR is not there to help us or solve people’s problems, it is just another corporate division with its own strict rules. But it can be changed for the better. Read on.

Links of the week

Using Machine Learning to Explore Neural Network Architecture – Google
Designing Neural Network Architectures using Reinforcement Learning – MIT
How neural networks can generate successful offsprings and alleviate the burden from human designers using reinforcement learning.

Data as Agriculture’s New Currency: The Farmer’s Perspective – AgFunder News
A classification of three types of agricultural data and how they related to the farmer’s needs.

The AI Cargo Cult: The Myth of a Superhuman AI – Kevin Kelly
The founding executive editor of Wired explains why he believes superhuman AI is very unlikely. Instead, we already see many form of extra-human new species of intelligence.

Everything that Works Works Because it’s Bayesian: Why Deep Nets Generalize? – inFERENCe
Finally, Bayesian can also say that they can explain why Deep Learning works! Jokes apart, this article overviews several recent useful interpretations of Deep Learning from a Bayesian perspective.

Links of the week

Arches onto high cliff over the Mediterranean. Portovenere, Italy.

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day – Study Hacks
How to increase your productivity by taking control of your time via time blocking.

Chaos, Ignorance and Newton’s Great Puzzle – Scott Young
Luck, chaos or ignorance? Understanding this mixture for your projects may help to better allocate resources.

Garry Kasparov on AI, Chess, and the Future of Creativity – Mercatus Center
A very interesting conversation with Garry Kasparov on chess, AI, Russian politics, education and creativity.

If everything is measured, can we still see one another as equals? – Justice Everywhere
The dangers of measuring everything and ranking ourselves on different scales, neglecting those human skills and experiences that cannot and should not quantified.

Links of the week

Ski-mountaineers climbing the last steep meters to the summit of the Bishorn (4153m) in Valais, Switzerland

Time And Tide Wait For No Economist – UNLIMITED
The changing market of time and how the leisure time gap is widening between skilled and unskilled labour.

The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence – Harvard Business Review
AI-based prediction tasks will get cheaper and cheaper, but the value of still-to-be-automatized complementary tasks, such as judgement will increase. A simple, but effective, economic perspective on the impact of AI.

Do you need a Data Engineer before you need a Data Scientist? – Michael Young
How Data Engineer and Data Architects can make your Data Science team more effective and satisfied.

The Art of the Finish: How to Go From Busy to Accomplished – Cal Newport
How task-based planning makes you productive, but not accomplished. A simple strategy to change that.

Data Science jargon buster – for Data Scientists – Guerrilla Analytics
Do your data scientists confuse your customers. Here’s a useful translating table.

 

Links of the week

• The Rise of the Monk Mode Morning – Study Hacks
  How a fully offline and deep work morning is enhancing productivity for more and more people.
• ‘AI brain scans’ reveal what happens inside machine learning – Wired
  Complex deep learning architectures visualized in action.
• Lecture slides and course description for the Deep Natural Language Processing course offered in Hilary Term 2017 at the University of Oxford
• Attacking machine learning with adversarial examples – OpenAI
  How adversarial examples can fool your machine learning algorithm and what you can do about it.

Links of the week

• Highlights of NIPS 2016: Adversarial Learning, Meta-learning and more – Aylien
• Best Data Visualization Projects of 2016 – FlowingData
• A Guide to Deep Learning – YerevaNN
• How Artificial Intelligence and Robots Will Radically Transform the Economy – Newsweek
• MIT Media Lab to participate in $27 million initiative on AI ethics and governance

Ray Kurzweil joins Google to tackle Artificial Intelligence

SingularityHUB reports that Ray Kurzeil, author of The Singularity is Near has joined Google as Director of Engineering, “to create truly useful AI that will make all of us smarter.”

Computational Intelligence and Politeness

What rights do we give to a fledgling AI? Should we kill it if it starts swearing? This is what IBM did to Watson 1, that started swearing after it ingested the Urban Dictionary.
Read the article on the Daily Mail.
A related captivating science fiction book is Accelerando by Charles Stross.