Edge #547: Polythetics and the Boeing 737 Max - An Edge Original Essay by Timothy Taylor; Humans: Doing More With Less - A Talk By Tom Griffiths

News from Edge To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves. July 17, 2019 THE THIRD CULTURE [Polythetics and the Boeing 737 Max]( An Edge Original Essay By Timothy Taylor A 737-badged Boeing aircraft was first certified for flight by the US Federal Aviation Authority in 1967. The aircraft was 28.6 m long and carried up to 103 passengers; in 2019, the distant descendant of that aircraft model, the 737 MAX-10, was 43.8 m long and carried 230 passengers. In between, there have been all sorts of civilian and military variants, and the plane (‘the plane’) was immensely successful (so that in 2005 one quarter of all large commercial airliners worldwide carried the 737 badge). However, certain decisions, made at the very outset, constrained how aircraft of this kind could evolve. Now, I realize by talking about descent (in a genealogical sense), and evolution (in the sense of gradual change over time), I am already potentially getting caught up in a biological metaphor—almost as if I thought 737s got together and had babies, each generation similar to but different from themselves. Manufacturing firms, who make cars, or aircraft, or computers, use the terms ‘generation’, ‘next generation’ and so on to describe salient step changes in parts of a design chain which has both continuities and discontinuities. But how do we measure these changes, and who decides (at Boeing or elsewhere) which changes are radically discontinuous? When does one artefact type become another? TIMOTHY TAYLOR is a professor of the prehistory of humanity at the University of Vienna, and author of The Artificial Ape. [ED NOTE: Tim Taylor's piece is the third offering in our 2019 initiative, "The Edge Original Essay," in which we are commissioning recognized authors to write a new and original piece exclusively for publication by Edge. The first two pieces were ["Childhood's End: The Digital Revolution Isn't Over But Has Turned Into Something Else"]( by George Dyson and ["Biological and Cultural Evolution: Six Characters in Search of an Author"]( by Freeman Dyson. —JB] [ [Continue...]( ] [Humans: Doing More With Less]( A Talk By Tom Griffiths Imagine a superintelligent system with far more computational resources than us mere humans that’s trying to make inferences about what the humans who are surrounding it—which it thinks of as cute little pets—are trying to achieve so that it is then able to act in a way that is consistent with what those human beings might want. That system needs to be able to simulate what an agent with greater constraints on its cognitive resources should be doing, and it should be able to make inferences, like the fact that we’re not able to calculate the zeros of the Riemann zeta function or discover a cure for cancer. It doesn’t mean we’re not interested in those things; it’s just a consequence of the cognitive limitations that we have. As a parent of two small children, this is a problem that I face all the time, which is trying to figure out what my kids want—kids who are operating in an entirely different mode of computation, and having to build a kind of internal model of how a toddler’s mind works such that it’s possible to unravel that and work out that there’s a particular motivation for the very strange pattern of actions that they’re taking. Both from the perspective of understanding human cognition and from the perspective of being able to build AI systems that can understand human cognition, it’s desirable for us to have a better model of how rational agents should act if those rational agents have limited cognitive resources. That’s something I’ve been working on for the last few years. We have an approach to thinking about this that we call resource rationality. And this is closely related to similar ideas that are being proposed in the artificial intelligence literature. One of these ideas is the notion of bounded optimality, proposed by Stuart Russell. TOM GRIFFITHS is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information, Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He is co-author (with Brian Christian) of Algorithms to Live By. [ [Continue...]( ] IN THE NEWS THE OBJECTIVE [On the shoulders of giants]( By Jorge Freire [7.13.19] Picking up C. P. Snow's glove in his famous lecture on the two cultures, the scientific and the humanistic, John Brockman founded three decades ago EDGE, a modern Bloomsbury Circle in which high personalities swarm and that every year asks a question. The one we are dealing with here asks about "the most beautiful, profound or elegant explanation" and is answered by, among others, psychiatrist Judith Rich Harris, neuroscientist David Eagleman, physicist Carlo Rovelli, anthropologist Helen Fisher, philosopher Daniel Dennett, archaeologist Christine Finn and even musician Brian Eno, in an anthology entitled That Explains It All (Deusto). There are, of course, very diverse answers: natural selection, magnetism, entropy, germs, the principle of uncertainty... The result is an attempt at natural philosophy in which the apparent border between sciences and humanities seems to be blurred. Is it that this never existed? [ [Continue...]( ] EL TIEMPO [Edge and the last unknowns]( By Moisés Wasserman [7.11.19] John Brockman, writer and editor, created a website called Edge (edge, or boundary) in which a conversation takes place between the academic world and an intellectually curious audience. That page was classified in the same category as magazines such as The New Yorker and The Economist. Brockman considered himself heir to the artist J. L. Byars, who last century organized a club of very diverse thinkers and said that to reach the edge of knowledge one had to ask others the questions they ask themselves. Discussions in Edge could be collected today in a manuscript of more than ten million words. One of his initiatives was the annual publication of a book with various answers to a great question he asked. This year, to celebrate twenty years of the initiative (and to close it), Brockman decided not to ask a question, but to ask each participant for his, that last unknown that won't let him sleep. The book has more than 300 pages; each has only a brief question printed and the name of the one who asks it. Natural and social scientists, writers, artists and entrepreneurs participated. [ [Continue...]( ] Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. [EDGE.ORG]( John Brockman, Editor and Publisher; Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher; Nina Stegeman, Associate Editor Copyright (c) 2019 by Edge Foundation, Inc., 260 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10001. 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