Making Minds, Part 1

When I was 5 years old, I spent a lot of time thinking about life and death. Where was I before I was born? What would happen to me when I died? But the one question that was even more important to me was: where do thoughts come from?

From then on, I was always intrigued by minds, and read as much as I could about Artificial Intelligence, Brain Research and Computer Science. Books like the Society of Mind and Godel, Escher, Bach fanned the flames of my interest, and for a while I considered dedicating my entire career to the goal of Making a Mind.

However, the engineering side of me wanted to build something right away, and the practical side of me wanted to make money, so I ended up as a serial entrepreneur instead. Deep down though, I still have a dream of getting back into A.I.

So rather than doing nothing until some magical moment in the future, I've decided to write a blog series called "Making Minds" that documents some of my thinking and ideas on the topic of A.I.

Should be fun!

Comments

[KevinF]

Hi Graham,

True Blood premiered on HBO last night, and the TVOP review provides some grist for the mill, for example:

"I keep thinking about my grandmother -- or yours -- and how one day, maybe she was sitting on the porch or behind the wheel, and she saw a man and a woman together, with skin colors that didn't match. And their baby between them, toddling along, and maybe in this hypothetical Poitier moment she didn't have the software to process it: Babies are awesome and cute, but hate is this whole other thing, which may or may not even apply, but they don't really belong together, but too late for that now, but what's the kid going to grow up having tooooooo10010101010011. Not "good"/"bad", not "hate"/"tolerance", but something much more human: I don't have the (*ing) software for this downloaded into my head yet. Please be kind to me for as long as it takes."

Link:
http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/true_blood/strange_love.php

[James Tauber]

1. I thoroughly recommend reading Greg Egan's Permutation City

2. once you have, I'd love to talk to you about implementing some of its ideas

[Graham Glass]

Hi James,

Thanks for the recommendation, I just ordered the book! I'll let you know what I think of it ;-)

Cheers,
Graham