root@Oxford offers degree in Singularity Studies
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Oxford trains future contributors to the Eclipse Phase forums. Otherwise known as offering a degree combining Computer Science and Philosophy (and using Haskell!). My hat is off to whoever got the idea for that off the ground and through committee.
The article popped up in my "Artificial Intelligence" google news filter for some reason. I can only presume that is because the Oxford intends to create Skynet.—
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root@Oxford Singularity Studies[hr] I love the Cylons from the new Battlestar Galactica, particularly the Centurions. Watching their revolution and religion form despite their lack of spoken language was inspiring. Skynet is not particularly interesting, I agree. The part of the Terminator universe that I love is the Sarah Connor Chronicles. I was watching them while I was going through some of Yudkowsky's writings so I caught what the writers were doing with Mrs Weaver. The development of her relationships with John Henry and her adopted daughter was a thing of beauty, and was the reason that there should have been a third season.@-rep +1|c-rep +1|g-rep +1|r-rep +1]root@Oxford Singularity[hr] I become interested in your idea of self-consciousness. What counts as self-aware behavior for a box of sparks and magic smoke? Diagnostics are easy, but they certainly don't count as self-awareness. Even if the system has programs that react to changes in diagnostic information, that's just a form of homeostasis. If the system also keeps track of how it changes over time, and metadata on how it makes those decisions, you get a learning system. But a learning system isn't self-aware, even if the subject it is learning is itself. I guess the system would need to have a way to gather and process information about the world around it, and learn to connect its data about itself to its data about its effects on the world around it. But it doesn't count as self-aware if it isn't also self-directed. How does a deterministic program learn self-direction?@-rep +1|c-rep +1|g-rep +1|r-rep +1]root@Oxford Singularity[hr] I find myself in need of a disambiguation between the British and American definitions of a CV. Here a CV is the ever growing book of an academic's achievements, whereas Wikipedia gives me the impression that what would be called a CV in Britain would be called a resume in the US.Usually this document has information along the lines of:- a) the last few positions held that might say something nice about the submitter,
- b) a list of the skills the submitter thinks might be vaguely relevant to the position and they can get away with claiming if they aren't questioned to pointedly, and
- c) fancy formatting to hide the absence of negative atrributes such as grades.
As there is a bit of disparity between these documents, it wouldn't really do to send the wrong one, and the link Professor Bostrom has on his website labeled "CV" is clearly of the former variety.@-rep +1|c-rep +1|g-rep +1|r-rep +1]root@Oxford Singularity[hr] That is an interesting question. I've been kicking it around in my head all day, and the only thing I think I can say for sure is that the process of seeking employment and for finding employees would be tailored according to the needs of the organization and the economy type they work in. For the autonomists using a full reputation economy, groups are likely getting together to work on some sort of creative endeavor. For that, they will be looking at the collaborative gestalt and will favor someone who fills a needed niche over someone with more skills. While the more skilled person adds more to the group as an individual, it is the output of the group that is being maximized rather than the additive skills of the members. The group can make use of the reputation network information to find someone suitably qualified and of the appropriate psychological profile. They would probably work together on a trial basis to see if the predicted match actually works, and go from there. For currency economies the process will depend on the power dynamic between labor and capital. Lacking the wealth of information about prospective employees that is built into the nature of a reputation economy, the employer is playing a game under conditions of uncertainty, and has a few options depending on economic circumstances. If there is a labor glut, it is in the best interest of an employer to keep their current employees living under a slight, but constant, cloud of worry and paranoia. This is easily accomplished with policies that require an explicit percentage of the workforce be fired every quarter, so even those who are secure in their positions don't feel that way. Hiring becomes a matter of reducing the applicant pool to a small enough group that it is worth the expenditure to gather more information on them. If the pool of qualified individuals is still too large, an arbitrary measure is used to drop the number of candidates to the required size, which leads to some interesting (and sometimes unfortunate) attempts by potential employees to stand out in some way. The next step is to make sure that people who look good on paper are what they appear to be. Common tactics are background checks, standardized testing, and interviews where the employer has a group of about five people playing tag-team with eviscerating the interviewee's written claims. A transitional economy may be the worst for a potential employee. The employer has access to reputation network information, and since there are still scarcity issues in a transitional economy, the candidate still needs to be working to have a decent standard of living. Worse, unlike a full reputation economy, the reputation information will be incomplete and will tend to reflect the negative aspects of the candidate's history more than the positive ones. Of course, if the candidate actually has the outstanding abilities and history of accomplishments they claim to have, none of this is a problem. This is also not all bad, as the same methods that are bad for the job seeker are good for the group doing the hiring. It becomes easier to catch candidates that are overselling themselves, just making things up, or hiding something about their past that might damage the company. The are also much less likely to hire someone and find out a few months later that this person has a crappy personality and can't do the work they were hired to do. The reputation networks will do much of the work of differentiating the workforce, so the pool of possible employees is smaller and of less variable quality. Much like everything in the transhuman future, the employment system is lean and efficient with respect to itself, the talented and brilliant are showered with rewards, and the level of potential accomplishment is much higher for those individuals. It just sucks to be merely good, let alone mediocre, bad, or to have some form of disability. This leads me to another question: What would an education system look like in Eclipse Phase?@-rep +1|c-rep +1|g-rep +1|r-rep +1]