Be passionate about the territory, not the map
I just finished this excellent book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
This book influenced my opinions on p(doom). Before reading the book, I was uncertain about whether AI could pose an existential risk for humanity. After reading the book, I’m starting to entertain the possibility that the probability of doom from a superintelligent AI is above zero. I’m still not sure where I would put my own p(doom) but it’s definitely non-zero.
The question I’m interested in is this: ...
I know it’s been awfully quiet here. I’ve not posted for a while.
But I’ve been writing prolifically somewhere else. Earlier this year, I started an AI lab called Lossfunk and that is what has kept me (happily) busy. We have a newsletter there called Lossfunk Letters where I write very often, so if you’re interested in my thoughts, please follow that publication.
The initial posts there are about me trying to build a mental model for what is that thing we call scientific research. I explored this topic via a series of posts: ...
Brace yourself for some wild speculations!
Been thinking if nothing is even possible.
When we’re sleeping, it’s not as if we’re feeling nothing. There’s actually no feeling then. It’s as if such moments don’t even exist, and that’s a hint..
So the more I think, the harder it’s for me to imagine nothing existing. Can you really imagine no concepts existing? No numbers, no space, no time, no blip – just nothing at all. If you can imagine that, something (the imaginer) must exist. ...
The following is the essay I had submitted as part of the one week summer course I took at the Oxford University, where we read Plato’s Republic. The essay includes a few references to structure and specific content from the book, so if something doesn’t make sense, it’s probably because it refers to an “insider” joke.
I was sitting at my lunch table, eating bread and ruminating whether it was worth it for me to fly thousands of kilometers from India to Oxford, just to study one book: Plato’s Republic. ...
It’s always hard to define life. Everyone has their favorite definition – some describe it as a struggle against entropy, while others describe it as an emergent property of chemicals. Countless books have been written on the topic, yet we’re far from a consensus.
Against the backdrop of the second law of thermodynamics, life seems like an improbable accident. When everything tends to go towards disorder, how come life is able to create cities, computers and space ships? How do we reconcile all the beautiful complexity we see around us with the stupidly simple laws we observe in physics? ...
I thought I knew! But the more I introspected, the hazy my understanding got. Is GDP amount of stuff produced or consumed? Does it include imports or exports? What does it have to do with well being? Why does it keep increasing?
So, I fired up Claude and started understanding what GDP really is. This post contains my notes on the same.
But before we start, it’s worthwhile to reflect how many such concepts that we think we know, do we really know. Often there’s a gap between what we think we know, and what we actually know. It’s worthwhile to question your understanding of commonplace phenomena. Do we know what life is? What does productivity mean? How do greenhouse emissions warm the Earth, and so on. For so many such things, our mind convinces us that we know stuff when upon probing, it turns out to be a vague miasma. ...
The Internet is full of people winning all the time. Someone is traveling to exotic locations, someone else is raising funds, and another person is winning awards. Essentially, everyone around you is succeeding while you do spend your days as the nature intended – sleeping, eating, smiling, chatting with friends, and spending time with your cat.
But, who here is really winning?
Imagine our society as a living and breathing organism with its own agenda. What would be on its agenda? First of all, like you, society would want to not die. Second, like you, it would want to thrive. ...
This year’s review is going to be shorter than 2023 (and previous years) because I’m in Goa right now for a holiday and I don’t feel like being in front of a screen for long.
I mean, just look at this view and tell me that you’d rather be in front of a screen writing a review.
But traditions must be upheld, so here’s a quick review of my eventful year.
Earlier in the year, I shut down my startup Nintee and returned (the remaining) ~75% of funding back to investors. Everyone in my team got 6 months salary as a severance and an open offer to join my other company Wingify. ...
I recently finished a very short book with an intriguing title: Why Greatness Cannot be Planned.
It’s an unconventional self-help book disguised as a computer science research exposition (that’s why the publisher is Springer). I strongly recommend reading it. Here is a taste of the book’s main ideas.
Setting a goal makes sense when you know how to achieve them. Let’s say you’re a published author working on your next book and you already have an agreement with a publisher. In this case, setting an objective for yourself that you should finish the first draft by a specific date makes sense because everything is in place for you to achieve it. ...
A musing on how intelligence comes to be.
The bedrock of intelligence is abstractions – the thing we do when we throw away a lot of information and just emphasise on a subset of it (e.g. calling that thing an apple instead of describing all its atoms and their x, y, z positions).
But where does the drive to form abstractions comes from? What if it rose from our desire to communicate with others? Since communication bandwidth is always limited, we are driven to find most efficient way of getting an idea across which leads to abstractions. Imagine a world where energy and time is unlimited, we might be communicating all x,y,z positions of things instead of putting labels on them. ...