Why We Should Be Concerned About Artificial Superintelligence

This article is a bit long in its entirety,  but if you find the subject as fascinating as I do, it is worth the time to read it.

BY MATTHEW GRAVES

The human brain isn’t magic; nor are the problem-solving abilities our brains possess. They are, however, still poorly understood. If there’s nothing magical about our brains or essential about the carbon atoms that make them up, then we can imagine eventually building machines that possess all the same cognitive abilities we do. Despite the recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence, it is still unclear how we might achieve this feat, how many pieces of the puzzle are still missing, and what the consequences might be when we do. There are, I will argue, good reasons to be concerned about AI.

The Capabilities Challenge

While we lack a robust and general theory of intelligence of the kind that would tell us how to build intelligence from scratch, we aren’t completely in the dark. We can still make some predictions, especially if we focus on the consequences of capabilities instead of their construction. If we define intelligence as the general ability to figure out solutions to a variety of problems or identify good policies for achieving a variety of goals, then we can reason about the impacts that more intelligent systems could have, without relying too much on the implementation details of those systems.

Our intelligence is ultimately a mechanistic process that happens in the brain, but there is no reason to assume that human intelligence is the only possible form of intelligence. And while the brain is complex, this is partly an artifact of the blind, incremental progress that shaped it—natural selection. This suggests that developing machine intelligence may turn out to be a simpler task than reverse- engineering the entire brain. The brain sets an upper bound on the difficulty of building machine intelligence; work to date in the field of artificial intelligence sets a lower bound; and within that range, it’s highly uncertain exactly how difficult the problem is. We could be 15 years away from the conceptual breakthroughs required, or 50 years away, or more.

The fact that artificial intelligence may be very different from human intelligence also suggests that we should be very careful about anthropomorphizing AI. Depending on the design choices AI scientists make, future AI systems may not share our goals or motivations; they may have very different concepts and intuitions; or terms like “goal” and “intuition” may not even be particularly applicable to the way AI systems think and act. AI systems may also have blind spots regarding questions that strike us as obvious. AI systems might also end up far more intelligent than any human.

The last possibility deserves special attention, since superintelligent AI has far more practical significance than other kinds of AI. […]

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Ways To Improve Strength Without Increasing Resistance

"Put some weight on that bar!" It's shouted across weight rooms around the country and usually signifies that whatever someone just lifted was too easy or light. That is the prototypical way to add intensity on a given exercise: just add more weight.

However, at some point, just adding weight to the bar isn't prudent anymore, as things like technical breakdown can occur. One of the basic principles of exercise is that of progressive overload. Your body won't adapt and get bigger and/or stronger unless you place a large enough demand on it and overload your muscles. But, we need to figure out other ways to drive up the intensity of the movement, without simply throwing more plates on the bar. So, how do we do that?

Tempo: One of the easiest ways to add intensity to your basic exercises is to alter the tempo of the movement. For most, we just do the exercise in front of us, which doesn't normally include any set tempo scheme. We just move the weight.

By manipulating the concentric (up) and/or eccentric (down) parts, we change how hard the actual exercise is. An example of this would be doing Squats on a 2-0-2-0 tempo, meaning a 2-second lowering portion (eccentric), followed by no pause (we'll get to that later), then 2 seconds to stand back up (concentric) with no pause at the top.

This creates more time under tension for your muscles, which equals more strength and more muscle gain. Raise your hand if you want those two things.

Pause: Pauses are literally where you stop during an exercise for a specific amount of time, usually 2-3 seconds. The most common portion of a lift to throw in a pause? At the hardest portion, for example the bottom of a Push-Up or Squat, or the top of a Pull-Up.

These force you to maintain tension throughout your entire body as you hold everything tight. Additionally, a pause eliminates the stretch reflex, or that bounce feeling you get from the muscles as you move through a range of motion. Eliminating that "bounce" creates the need for more strength. More strength equals more gains, and we've already established that we're after more gains.

1.5 Reps: Using 1.5 reps is a way to add more work instead of more weight. In the case of a Squat, you would go all the way into the bottom of your Squat, come halfway up, then back into the bottom, only to finally come all the way to standing. Sounds like a ton of fun.

Similar to tempo, we're increasing the amount of time our muscles are under tension by doing that extra half of a rep. Additionally, since we have come out of the weakest part of our movement, we're going to see more strength gains as well.

Density: Density is all about doing more work in less time, which can easily ramp up the intensity of an exercise. Set a timer for 10-15 minutes, work within a certain amount of reps, and see how many sets you can fit in that given time. Then, the following week you aim to do more sets than before. Try pairing opposite exercises in a superset when adding in density. This way there is a little recovery time in between sets.

In addition to doing more work in less time, creating more overall volume, you are forced to take less rest time between sets. This will hinder your body's ability to recover fully from set to set, making each one subsequently more intense.

Negatives: Negatives solely focus on the lowering portion of the movement. There are some exercises where overloading the lowering or eccentric part of the movement can lead to larger increases in strength.

One exercise in which to often use negatives is Pull-Ups. The actual pull-up part of the exercise, where you lift yourself up to the bar, can be a challenge, but rather than eliminate the exercise all together, we use negatives to develop the strength and control to eventually be able to do a Pull-Up.

One thing is crucial—master the basics of each lift before you venture into some of these alternative loading strategies. Then add one of these to your training and get ready for more gains and plateau-busting training sessions.

Are You An Unconscious Racist?

BY CAROL TAVRIS

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be a racist?

• A person who thinks their “race” or ethnic group is better than everyone else’s by virtue of genetic superiority, religion, customs, food, way of life, or beliefs.
• A person who fails to hire an applicant with the best qualifications if that person is from a different ethnic or religious group from the employer’s.
• A person who is part of an institution that requires him or her to systematically target and discriminate against African Americans or other minorities.
• A person of any race, ethnicity, or religion who feels more comfortable with others who are like themselves.

or:

• A person whose score on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) reveals that he or she is unconsciously biased against black people.

Some of the above? All of the above?

Michael Shermer Examines the Implicit Association Test

Throughout the first decade of this century, surveys repeatedly found that prejudiced attitudes—notably the once-common beliefs that blacks were inferior to whites, women inferior to men, gay men and lesbians inferior to straights—had declined sharply, especially among young people. Surveys, of course, supposedly assess what you think. But what if they assess what you think others think you should think? What if they simply reflect your awareness that it isn’t cool to reveal your actual negative feelings about another group? Self-report data is inherently plagued with this problem. Thus, most social psychologists who study prejudice and discrimination focus on what people do, not what they say they might do. For example, when researchers have sent identical résumés to potential employers, varying only a name that indicates gender, or implies race (a black-sounding name or membership in an African American organization), or mentions religious affiliation, many employers have revealed a bias in whom they choose to call for an interview[…]

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