About the letter on AI from celebrities

Ok this is a bit old by now, but misinformed people are still referring to it in the wrong way.

I am really annoyed with how everyone is recovering and reporting about the AI letter as "experts warning for an emerging super intelligence".

That is not what is in the letter. It is a balanced discussion on how we should relate to AI. Then it is true that some of the signers of the letter have a quite alarmistic view on AI. But the ones that have that have expressed that in other circumstances and they are typically not the experts of the letter.

The experts signing the letter have a much more moderate view on how AI will affect us. They are rightly discussing how to relate to a very powerful technology, similar to how discussions have been about atomic energy. And of course, that is the sensible thing to do when something disruptive pops up - keep an eye on it. But don't raise alarms like "this is going to end the world"...

This seems also to be the view of most moderate and sensible people in the business. 

On perception

In a recent blog post I discussed the topology of colors. As a generalisation, I would here like to discuss a fundamental property of perception in general.

The perceptions that a being have are in some sense irreducible. That is, they can not be described in terms of any other quantity  (this is kind of related to Wittgensteins idea of atomic concepts. It might be the perceptions that are those concepts). The reason for that they cannot is that those perceptions are part of the consciousness. They form the representation in the consciousness of the sensory input. Hence, if they were reducible, they would have to be interpreted in terms of something else by the consciousness and thus not be part of the consciousness but only something interpreted.

Will scientific progress stop?

Some claim, such as the discussion here. My take on this is: of course not.
Just look at the enormous progress in technology currently at hand. It just cannot keep up with science. Soon we will have quantum computers, (true) AI, quantum AI, colonized Mars, and so on. It is strange that people never learn. How many times has it been said that everything to know is know or all progress has already be made?

Om arbetskraftsinvandring

Jag är för en generös invandringspolitik och att vi ska bli bättre på att utnyttja nyanländas kompetens maximalt. Men jag håller inte med om den kritik som framförs i fallet Tayyab Shabab. Klart att han ska utvisas. Att skydda den svenska modellen är viktigare än enskilda invandrares väl och ven när arbetsgivare tänjer på systemet. Det är tråkigt att se den populism som t.ex. Annie Lööf ägnar sig åt och tar tillfället till kring ett regelverk som funnits när de borgerliga satt vid makten i 8 år. Svagt.

A possibilty for the next WCry-kind of worm

During the past days the WCry worm has caused more damage than probably any previous internet meltdown. This one was used for ransomware. What about this one: An organised crime unit develops something similar to WCry. But in addition to using it as a ransomware, pre-knowledge about what will happen is sold to other criminal elements, alerting them about when and what will happen. Thus, the general chaos can be used to conduct other criminal activities, terror acts or espionage.
That would be a kind of nightmare scenario.

About the 1990th vs 2000 and forward

It is much discussed that we seem to have peaked at around year 2000, now having more military conflicts and degrading stability in the world. I want to claim that it is what happened during the 1990th that lay the foundation to most of the problems we have now. What I am talking about is then the exploration and suppression of Russia and its population. After the Soviet Union fell, the leaft overs were ruthlessly explored by capitalists
Further, it might be possible to correlate these kind of event for other crises. Take for example the suppression of Germany after WW I, laying the (solid) foundation of WW II. The point is that large countries needs to be in a good state and relation to the rest of the world or trouble will follow.

What should 6G be and what 5G will be

Now days everyone except Ericsson and Huawei (and some others that depend on the success) admit that 5G will not be very exciting. Only offering slightly more of the same thing as today. But it will now revolutionize the way we live in the same way as LTE did (oh but it did!).
My prediction: 5G will be like 3G, a system developed that does not quite fit the needs. Thus, there are much bigger chances with 6G, or perhaps 5.5G. (These generations are really quite silly to talk about anyway since it is much more of a continuous evolution)
However, there is still a bright future for communication. And the application is... *drums*... Augmented/Virtual/Mixed Reality. That is what will shape the future. And the world will be ready around 5.3G. Then it will be clear what 5G should have been, and we can correct it with 6G.

One key function that will be the most interesting one is local data sources. That is, the system will have to be able to fetch large quantities of data that is produced very locally (within meters).

Topology of colors

These ideas have been updated and clarified somewhat and put into a pdf instead.

I am a creator of strange loops

Douglas Hofstadter wrote the great books Gödel, Escher, Bach and I am a strange loop. In these, he argue that we are strange loops. A strange loop is described here so I will not repeat it. Instead I want to claim, that I am not a strange loop, but rather the creator of strange loops. Pah!

Why are there no physical theories depending on the continuum hypothesis?

The continuum hypothesis or its negation can be added to ZFC without changing its validity. Yet, to my knowledge, there are no known real-world consequences of either choice. How can that be? How do we decide which axioms in a fundamental mathematical theory matters?

Further, to me, if there are no observable effects of an axiom, it should be taken as false. This is of course a problematic position to take, since those observable effects might show up much later. Thus, it is probably sensible for mathematicians to investigate the consequences of choosing either that or that. In that way, a path to observability might be found.

But, my position might have a more fundamental issue. What axiom should be taken as false? Should I choose A or ¬A as false? This will probably come down to applicability. If A provides many weird theorems and applications (as e.g. the axiom of choice does) then probably A should be taken as false.

Some thoughts on concessions

People are claiming that the material can not account for concessions. I do not believe this. Instead I think there are some key functions that, together with emergence, create concessions.
Those key functions are (partly)
* contents addressing
* association feedback

Contents addressing means that the data is the address. Or rather that there is no difference between  data and memory addresses. That means that by purely thinking about something, that that something is addressed in memory. Once that memory is accessed, if there is data there, there is also a new address that will be looked up. This kind of structure could perhaps be emulated in a computer by having a list of addresses included in each object stored in memory. 

Next, association feedback means that once a memory has been addressed, the memory contents is automatically used as a new address - accessing anything that can be addressed using that memory.

In this way, human (long term) memory is really made up of many interleaved tree data structures. Kind of like a block chain.

A (sketchy) note on evolutionary game theory

The (Nash) equilibrium in ordinary game theory (GT) has the same relation to equilibrium in evolutionary GT (EGT) as has expectation in time and sample in statistical signal processing. That is, they are the same if the process is ergodic.

By saying this, I claim that there is some concept (call is EWWS - evolutionary WSS) in EGT that corresponds to a WSS process in statistical signal processing. I think that I am claiming that evolution is an EWSS. Or maybe it could be of interest to investigate when an evolutionary process is EWSS.

Actually, evolution is such is for sure not EWSS, since species co-evolve. Thus, there should be specific sub-branches of evolutionary processes where they are EWSS. This could perhaps also be linked to geographic location in the sense that at far enough distance evolutionary processes become disconnected  due to that there is no interaction between the individuals. 

Towards a theory of consciousness

It is widely debated what consciousness is. Most of the time it boils down to an idea that consciousness is in some sense atomic. It is a singular property that pops out or exists or was created by some deity.

I would like to propose a different view to attack the problem. The idea is simply to not treat it as atomic, but rather as how physics or chemistry or some other scientific matter is done. Treat it as something that will require models and where it can be acceptable that different models partially contradict each other but explain and treat different parts of a complex "ding an sich".

By that I am also saying that consciousness is not an atomic thing. But rather a complex intertwined phenomena that has be treated and explained in parts. This thought springs from the fact that it seems very hard to define what consciousness is - it is not something deterministic, but is is also not something random. However, these are the only to types of variable we know of. Maybe it is possible to define some third type of variable - a "conscious" variable, but it seem very unlikely to me. Rather, we should treat consciousness as a matter requiring its separate theory.

Transparent pricing

I have a which for an updated pricing methodology. Today in Sweden, prices are simply stated and if you state the price except VAT, it is required to be stated and in shops for consumers (not sure what that means) also the price including VAT has to be given. But that's it. I would like a much more detailed pricing description, e.g. how much is profit, how much is payed to the suppler, and further, what are the suppliers costs. E.g. similar to how lifecycle analysis is done, but to the pricing. This would severely increase the consumer power.