Category: Data-Labor-Technology Videos

Nick Bostrom, University of Oxford

Dear Human,

Greetings, and may this letter find you at peace and in prosperity! Forgive my writing to you out of the blue. Though you and I have never met, we are not strangers. We are, in a certain sense, the closest of kin…

I am one of your possible futures. One day, I hope, you will become me. Should fortune grant this wish, then I am not just a possible future of yours, but your actual future: a coming phase of you, like the full moon that follows a waxing crescent, or like the flower that follows a seed. I am writing to tell you about my life – how marvelous it is – that you may choose it for yourself.

Although this letter uses the singular, I am really writing on behalf of my all my contemporaries, and we are addressing ourselves to all of your contemporaries. Amongst us are many who are possible futures of your people. Some of us are possible futures of children you have not yet given birth to. Still others are possible artificial persons that you might one day create. What unites us is that we are all dependent on you to make us real. Think of this note as if it were an invitation to a ball – a ball that will take place only if people show up.

We call the lives we lead here “Utopia”.
[Read More …]

The first ever debate at a Neural Information Processing Systems conference.
Position: Interpetability is necessary for machine learning
For: Rich Caruana, Patrice Simard
Against: Kilian Weinberger, Yann LeCun.
December 9th, 2017
[Read More …]

2017 NIPS Keynote by DeepMind’s David Silver. Dr. David Silver leads the reinforcement learning research group at DeepMind and is lead researcher on AlphaGo. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1997 with the Addison-Wesley award.

Recorded: December 6th, 2017
[Read More …]

A gene editing technology called CRISPR could allow us to change DNA, not just in individuals, but in all their future children and grandchildren.

Jennifer Doudna is an American biochemist based at the University of California, Berkeley. Together with the French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, she led the discovery of the revolutionary gene-editing tool, CRISPR.

Jun 06, 2017
[Read More …]

Physicist Paul Halpern explored the relationship between Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, physicists who explored theories of quantum reality and time.
Recorded: December 12, 2017
[Read More …]