Draft schedule for fom 5 "The new AI scare?" Nov 3-4 2017, CIIS, SF

FRIDAY, November 3, 2017

9:00 am            Introduction by FOM chair Seán Ó Nualláin

9:05 am           Mind & World Introduction by session chair Brian Swimme

9:15  am          What a Real Theory of Consciousness, Quantum Observation, Awareness

                                     and Attention May Look Like – Seán Ó Nualláin

10:00 am         Quantum Mind: Cognition as Vibration – Aamod Shanker et al

BREAK

11:00 am         Reality, Subjectivity and Truth in a Self-Aware Mind – Kirill Popov

11:40 am         Plasma Brain Dynamics (PBD): II Quantum Effects – Zhen Ma

12:20 pm         Cosmogenetic consciousness  - Brian Swimme CIIS

BREAK

2:00 pm           Henry Stapp

2:40 pm           Commentary & Role of Observation in the Quantum World - Menas Kafatos

3:00 pm           Consciousness & Causality: Sub-Quantum Time-Symmetric - Adrian Klein

3:30 pm           Linear Thinking & Self-Consciousness Process - Mansoor Vakili

4:00 pm           Voluntary Action, Conscious Will & Readiness Potential - Syamala Hari

4:30 pm           If AI Asks Questions, Will Nature Answer? - Cynthia Sue Larson

5:00 pm           New Approaches to QM Measurement Problem - Stan Klein, Chris Cochran

5:30 pm           PANEL: Henry Stapp, Adrian Klein, Mansoor Vakili, Stan Klein

SATURDAY, November 4, 2017

11:00 am         Quantum, Entheogenic and Ethnogenic Healing – Chair Tania Re

11:00 am         Are there enough scientific evidences to recommend psychotropic substances for therapeutic use? Implications of a critical umbrella review.  –  Tania Re

11:40 am         Reterritorialization & Mental Illness - Seán Ó Nualláin

12:20 pm         Difficulties in Inorganic and Organic Measurement of Energy, Nature’s Influence and Mind Training (Yi) in Qigong (Qi).Phillip Shinnick and Laurence Porter

BREAK

2:00 pm           Observations – Arora & Behera

2:40 pm           QM Automata, Gödel Numbers & Self-Ref Consciousness - Fred Alan Wolf

3:20 pm           Continuity, Time & Opposition of the Dominant Paradigm - Stan McDaniel

4:00 pm           Mimicking Intelligence - Wolfgang Baer

4:40 pm           AI & the Human Biofield: New Opportunities & Challenges - Bev Rubik

5:20pm            Intention at a Distance as Source of Information Transfer & Wave Function

                                     Collapse – Karla Galdamez

6:00 pm           PANEL: Fred Alan Wolf, Wolfgang Baer, and others

Web 3.0; beyond Silly con Valley

The HBO series “Silicon Valley” has taken over from “The big bang theory”, now gone all soft and domestic, in exploring the inner world of the nerd. In this case, however, the nerds are cast adrift amid vulture capitalists, peers who want to steal their algorithms, and the redoubtable Peter Thiel (a thinly disguised character called Peter Gregory “died” after the first series, probably due to Thiel’s lawyers).

The main character, Richie Hendrix, is a programming elitist; some of the most insightful sequences show that his ideas derive, or can be reconstructed, from physical motion. His capacity to handle meetings is limited and hilariously he loses control of one to his salespeople. A classic line due to Gavin Belsom whose Huli company resembles an anarchic Google; yes, we all want to make the world a better place, but to hell with any company doing so better than us…….

It is unlikely to end well for Richie and Pied Piper. It also fits perfectly with the intuitions many of us have about the real Silicon Valley. It started with the egomaniac nobellist Shockley losing the “traitorous 8” whence came Fairchild, Intel and much else. With Netscape’s launch in the mid-90’s, a frenzy started that famously ended badly in 2001. Yet web 1.0 had many good ideas.

Web 2.0 took no chances whatsoever. After Google plagiarized Adsense, the way was open for companies that produced no content whatsoever but simply channeled Wall Street values. It may be hard to convey to younger readers that it was originally OUR internet; one went there to escape Wall Street values. While the jury is out on Google, there is no doubt that Facebook was initially funded by the CIA. The deal; put all your personal data up on social media and you get spying 24/7 thrown in for free.

Of course, Facebook and Google would not succeed without copyright violation on a cosmic scale. Producers of “content” ie artists, investigative journalists, and others who add greatly to society, are used as a means to the end of enriching upstart multi-billionaires. What can be done?

First, countries like Ireland need to stop whoring themselves out to these companies. Secondly, nation-states need to follow the EC in bringing these scams to book for their copyright violation on Youtube, Facebook, and elsewhere. Thirdly, nation-states should begin to stop Google crawling government sites and demand that all these companies delete all information held on their citizens without a meeting of minds taking place to hand it over. Fourthly, the EU and big countries like Brazil, India and China can create their  own packet-switching network that will allow secure e-mail and other services like blogs. Fifthly, the efforts of the unlucky Richie are paralleled in real life by thousands of gifted coders who might have competed with Silicon Valley but cannot compete with Silicon Valley + the CIA, NSA and the other 3-letter agencies we saw to be involved when a journalist got hold of a new Apple phone left in a bar and these coders must be encouraged. Finally, the nascent violation of safety regulations by Air BnB plus others needs to be stopped now.

The fact that Facebook,  Google and others were founded by college drop-outs will do the rest. In particular, not only are they making classic AI mistakes; Google is also spending billions on biology problems neither it not its hires understand. Let them fail, without further CIA help, please!

PS June 25 2017

I travel reluctantly, and thiswill probably get worse. This year so far the following problems were web-related and maybe GAFA should work on this rather than making unemplyed the whole human race;

1. Are lingus does not really want you to change your booking over the web. So it has an option to do so that doesn't work  and you have t phone them(Lost 3 hours; Feb 2017)

2. Irish Ferries does not really want you to change your booking over the web. So it has an option to do so that doesn't work  and you have t phone them(Lost 3 hours; June 2017)

3. Allied Irish misspelled my name on my credit card. So neither Are lingus nor SNCF had a record of my booking (lost much time and meetingsMay 2017)

Non web-related
In the meantime, SNCF trains are late or pulled; connections missed are already enough stress, thanks

Taxis and public transport from where I live unreliable and you may never get started 

Fom 5 cfp Nov 3 2017 at CIIS - The new AI scare

Foundations of mind 5: The new AI scare

Room 304  CIIS • 1453 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94103 Nov 3-4 2017

In terms of downloads (150k per year), annual page views (27 million +) and peer-reviewed papers ( over 100 in its first 3 years from March 2014 to March 2017), Foundations of mind (http://foundationsofmind.org/) is now the world’s leading science of mind research group. While centered on cognitive science, it has featured many papers on the quantum mechanics view of mind, the foundations of physics and biology, and indeed ecology and health as manifestations of mind.

Its most recent proceedings volume published in March 2017 received a total of 4,333 downloads in its first month, with the top papers receiving 750+, about what  ACM papers typically take 25 years to achieve. Please note we are secular, and totally independent; we have never taken corporate or state money, nor have we gamed the system as others do by asking our students to link to or download our work.

Abstracts to universityofireland@gmail.com by July 1 2017. Invitation to present at conference and submit a full paper will follow by July 8. Full papers by July 31; notification of acceptance for the proceedings volume will follow your presentation at the conference.

Nov 3: The new AI scare

AI systems will keep us as pets. Massive unemployment as computers learn to drive cars, translate accurately,  stock shelves, and much else. Silicon-based life forms reflecting on the brief carbon-based intelligence era before the singularity.

All of these themes are rampant in the second decade of the 21^st century. Yet they do not reveal the full story. The “pets” idea, repeated ad nauseam by Elon Musk, is an echo of Marvin Minsky a generation ago. It is a safe bet that no, you will not be ordering a driverless taxi to take you to a random destination you specify anytime before 2022. The much-vaunted successes of Deep Thought  are due to a venerable algorithm called stochastic gradient descent, which now converges to a solution because computers are about 100 million times faster than they were during the last AI scare of the 1980’s and almost infinitely faster than during Minsky’s abortive 1950’s scare.

This session invites papers on what computers, even now, can’t do and above all why that is the case. It encourages participants to speculate on aspects of the architecture of the cortex that allows a 20 Watt “computer” (that would be the thing  under your skull) to outperform machines with Terahertz speed and petabyte memory. It invites papers on quantum computation as a natural outcome of human cognition and noesis. It also welcomes those who in turn wish to usher in the new post-singularity era. After all, the phrase and concept originally derive from Johnny von Neumann, the founder of many aspects of computing as well as quantum mechanics.

Above all, we invite recapitulation of the themes broached in Penrose’s masterpiece about the relationship between consciousness and computability. His viewpoint fused elements from the theory of computability (partially recursive functions), non-determinism, tiling theory and phenomenology. The relationship with formal language theory was not explored, nor was an explicit engagement with the fact that all observer-dependent measurement in QM involves the  infinite. The re-assertion of human noesis may pave the way for that of human dignity.

Specifically, we invite papers on the following themes;

1. Machine Translation (MT). Computers have been getting MT almost right since the 1950’s. attendees are asked to consider two dilemmas; that checking  a translation is at least as time-consuming as producing one, and that 99.9% correct is not good enough even for an academic textbook.
2. Kill Chain; use of AI systems in the “Kill Chain” in  combat is burgeoning. Yet it is being done in the face of objections like military strategists Rivollo and van Riper, who insist on precise targeting and reading of the enemy’s psychology.
3. Neglected research: the apparent magic wrought by the likes of Sutskever at Google has meant that linguistics research into issues like speech-acts and conversational implicatures is being elided? The inappropriate use of the word “neural” as a modifier for convolutional nets has led to neuroscience reverting to its 1940’s archetype with invasive fiddling around under the hood again the method de jour?
4. Language was famously promoted as the royal road to the infinite by the symbolists. What is the relation between their “semantic transcendentalism” and the role of infinite quantities in quantum mechanics? What does this mean for AI?
5. Finally, we invite papers that explore the fact that ordering on a  smartphone has met that both AirBnB and Uber were somehow exempt from normal regulations for accommodation and transport. Could this AI scare be a way of persuading us that resistance is futile in our Taskrabbit dystopia? Papers also  are welcome that explain that it is in fact a Utopia. Or is it arguable that the successes of Google, Facbook et al are largely based on truly cosmic levels of copyright violation, and that states should administer many of their functions under the rubric of public libraries (and indeed e-mail systems)

Papers also are invited on the classic foundations of mind themes; the formal  inadequacy of received accounts of mind and brain (leading to $6 billion being spent by the NIH in 25 years on brain imaging without a single therapy emerging); the foundations of biology; the observer in physics; quantum mind..

Proceedings fom4

http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/issue/view/32