Monday, May 19, 2008

Friendly Artificial Intelligence

A Friendly Artificial Intelligence or FAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) which has a positive rather than negative effect on humanity. Friendly AI also refers to the field of knowledge required to build such an AI. This term particularly applies to AIs which have the potential to significantly impact humanity, such as those with intelligence comparable to or exceeding that of humans. This specific term was coined by researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence as a term of art distinct from the everyday meaning of the word "friendly"; however, the concern is much older

Requirements for FAI and Effective FAI
The requirements for FAI to be effective, both internally, to protect humanity against unintended consequence of the AI in question and externally to protect against other non-FAIs arising from whatever source are:
  • Friendliness that an AI feels sympathetic towards humanity and all life, and seeks for their best interests
  • Conservation of Friendliness that an AI must desire to pass on its value system to its entire offspring and inculcate its values into others of its kind.
  • Intelligence that an AI be smart enough to see how it might engage in altruistic behavior to the greatest degree of equality, so that it is not kind to some but more cruel to others as a consequence, and to balance interests effectively
  • Self-improvement that an AI feel a sense of longing and striving for improvement both of itself and of all life as part of the consideration of wealth, while respecting and sympathizing with the informed choices of lesser intellects not to improve themselves
  • First mover advantage.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Planet Math

PlanetMath is a free, collaborative, online mathematics encyclopedia. The emphasis is on peer review, rigor, openness, pedagogy, real-time content, interlinked content, and community. Intended to be comprehensive, the project is located at the Digital Library Research Lab at Virginia Tech.

PlanetMath was started when the popular free online mathematics encyclopedia Math World was taken offline for 12 months by a court injunction as a result of the CRC Press lawsuit against the Wolfram Research Company and its employee Eric Weisstein.

PlanetMath content is licensed under the ‘copyleft’ GNU Free Documentation License. An author who starts a new article becomes the copyright holder of that article; he or she may then choose to grant editing rights to other individuals or groups. All content is written in Latex, a typesetting system popular among mathematicians because of its support of the technical needs of mathematical typesetting and its high-quality output. The user can explicitly create links to other articles, and the system also automatically turns certain words into links to the defining articles. The topic area of every article is classified by the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Users may attach addenda, errata and discussions to articles. A system for private messaging among users is also in place.

The software running PlanetMath is written in Perl and runs on Linux and the web server Apache. It is known as Noosphere and has been released under the free BSD License.