The computational anatomy of human values

Epistemic Status: Much of this draws from my studies in neuroscience and ML. Many of the ideas in this post are heavily inspired by the work of Steven Byrnes and the authors of Shard Theory. However, it speculates quite a long way in advance of the scientific frontier and is... [Read More]

Thoughts on the future of Predictive Coding

I have had several meetings and discussions recently about predictive coding and whether it is an interesting and viable direction of study with various people involved in PC. Naturally, I have a bunch of thoughts on this which are not always entirely expressed in published papers and which I thought... [Read More]

CEM as inference

Author’s note: I originally wrote this draft in mid 2020 as maths for a paper I never got around to writing. I think it may be somewhat valuable but primarily archiving for historical reasons. [Read More]

The Paperclip King, by GPT4

I got access to the GPT4 API yesterday and was playing around. GPT4 managed to zero-shot this entire greentext with nothing other than the prompt: “Please write a 4chan greentext about a self replicating probe that converts the universe into paperclips”. [Read More]

Orthogonality is expensive

A common assumption about AGI is the orthogonality thesis, which argues that goals/utility functions and the core intelligence of an AGI system are orthogonal or can be cleanly factored apart. More concretely, this perfect factoring occurs in model-based planning algorithms where it is assumed that we have a world model,... [Read More]