AI researchers are familiar with a paradox: as soon as an AI system is released  as a product, it’s no longer AI. It even has a name, the “AI effect.”

Most of the cutting-edge AI research today deal with machine learning and big data. One particular topic, deep machine learning,  seems very promising in that it can work on many if not most of t…[Read more]

One way to think about this is to separate the report itself from the uses of the report by individuals and groups with various agendas. It’s fair to  say that the very existence of the IPCC is political, and AR5 certainly present a conclusion that the planet’s climate system is warming in response to increased levels of greenhouse gases, large…[Read more]

Marvin Minsky famously asked  what it would mean if the only way to make computers much smarter is to make them ore self-conscious. If  that were so, which is the less dangerous:  a smart self-aware computers, or dumber computers?

I’ll side with intelligence, whether human or machine, over ign…[Read more]

Education is shifting from a push model to a pull model. MOOCs are an example of this (and associated changes in tradional universities are one example. An even more striking one is cell phone access to education of any sort in parts of the world that never knew it.

The radical changes relate to lowering or eliminating the costs of e…[Read more]

McArdle’s article mentions Hannan and Freeman’s book Organizational Ecology and discusses the idea of ‘selection for stability’, that is, that (once) successful businesses evolve to support the status quo.

I’m minded of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Perhaps ‘selection for stability’ explains why those dedicated…[Read more]

Memes cross-pollinate and produce new memes, and Richard Dawkins has written about how natural selection applies to ideas. Harford’s isolated ecosystems concept makes perfect sense in regard to memes, and two examples come to mind:

In the late eleventh century, all glassblowers in Venice were forced to relocate to the islands of Murano since g…[Read more]

Thanks for an interesting topic.

Affluence is the product of many factors, of which technical progress is certainly at the top, but also there’s education, abundance of resources, institutional structure. You could argue that these are also types of technical progress.

The age of affluence is already upon us: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…[Read more]

Viewed as an experiment, current events in Hong Kong may provide some answers.

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works is developing it. 🙂

The paper (“High Altitude Launch for a Practical SSTO”) describes a doubling of payload mass compared to a ground-launched SSTO. The propellant launch fraction resulting in that improvement doesn’t go down by more than a few percent, though, so it looks to me like you’d have to pump a lot of fuel to the top of the tower. That and what to do with…[Read more]