Reddit reviews From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

Hi I am Jason Malcolm from Edinburgh, Scotland.

I am flying to San Francisco to attend the Deep Reinforcement Learning Bootcamp, and staying for 3 weeks - so if anyone has any local knowledge of labs, hacklabs, meetups, art-studios, organic/ permaculture farms or any intersection of art, craft, making, engineering, computers or robots in the Berkeley / San Fran Cisco area ( & will visit L.A. to see cousins ) then reply or PM me.

I am staying in Berkeley for 3 weeks if anyone has any recommendations for hacklabs, or computery robotic stuff, or fun or interesting things.

I have been studying Neural Nets for a few years, part time and online so this will be my first IRL course.

My father, Chris Malcolm, lectured in & researched AI & robotics at Edinburgh University and so I was exposed to computing and intelligent robots from a early age.

At Edinburgh College of Art, (part of Edinburgh University) I attained a Masters Degree in Tapestry - so I am a trained weaver, dyer and spinner of wool :) and I have been creatively exploring materials, ideas and inspiration for a couple of decades.

I have always been into math & programming, beginning with Microsoft BASIC on the NASCOM II, PASCAL and then BBC BASIC, BBC LOGO. Gave it up to do art for a few years. Then computer animation, old-school realtime VRML97 for VJs, 3ds-max, then Blender & python.

I support my creativity by making websites for others, initially handwritten HTML ( and VRML :) ), Javascript, then PHP and now often Wordpress - I program quite a bit in my spare time.

A Lecture by Professor Geoffrey Hinton, demonstrating the wake sleep algorithm training a Restricted Boltzmann Machine to draw digits from MNIST made me think, machines can be creative.

Then the first MOOCs happened and I took, Professor Andrew Ng's Machine Learning and Professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun's MOOC Introduction to AI ( based on the textbook Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach by Peter Norvig and Stuart Russel ).

I then took Geoffrey Hinton's MOOC Neural Networks for Machine Learning and this enabled me to read & comprehend papers and try replicating experiments using some of the libraries from Toronto University.

Since then studying to varying degrees of success parallel GPU programming, elementry physics, calculus, haskell, Stanford's CS231n, & Berkeley's CS294-112.

I want to study robotics because I believe that AI can best succeed when computation is embodied in a creature.

I hope to work towards developing robots that can learn to assist and perform useful tasks, like gardening, housebuilding, ecology or folding shirts.

My (current) long term research goals are to enable robots to talk about what they are doing, short term: get Tensorflow to control my Cheerson CX-10WD nano FPV drone and learn to fly it using Reinforcement Learning.

The idea of Strong AI ( where the machines 'awaken' ) may happen but I think Professor Dan Dennet is correct that we will build machines that will build machines that build machines, &c, that may achieve strong AI, i.e. self-evolution.

I sometimes dream of machine learning coming up with creative solutions to help us colonise the solar system. Occaisionaly I imagine a far flung future when Robots may become considered another domain of life with their own wants, dreams and motivations that are a paradigm shift away from what we know now - perhaps in a millenia or so.

Probably just getting a robot to make a really good cup of tea is a not ignoble goal.

> I'm fine with words having baggage, it is what gives them their weight and meaning, after all; as long as the baggage is representative of reality.

It's complicated, isn't it?

The problem is if the words prevent us from examining the actual situation.

Do we deal with brain cancer because we have thought about whether we should (and can), or because of a word that somehow got tagged on?

Anyway, gotta go. This tuned out to be interesting.

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I'm currently reading Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach...

https://www.amazon.com/Bacteria-Bach-Back-Evolution-Minds/dp/0393242072

You might enjoy it :-)

Ants individually aren't intelligent, but as a group they can behave in intelligent ways, although they don't do it the same way we do. If you ask a random person to guess how many marbles are in a container you won't get a very accurate answer, but if you ask 1000 people and average their answers you'll get a much more accurate result. We can understand our environment and communicate with others to create a more accurate model of the world, we are the only animal that does this. An individual ant will run in a random direction when it feels vibration such as a foot stomping on the ground. This doesn't help the individual ant much but when thousands of ants all run in random directions it results in them scattering, protecting the colony. Ants release pheromones in response to environmental stimuli. They do this automatically, it requires no understanding. The pheromones they release are received by other ants who are influenced and also release their owns pheromones. This complex network of ants signalling eachother can respond in ways more intelligent than any individual ant. It's similar to how you can understand this sentence, but no individual neuron in your brain can understand anything. I recommend the book From Bacteria to Bach and Back. It talks about how consciousness may have evolved, and how cultural evolution began to overtake biological evolution.