Kyle Roth

The examples in this book make it clear that there is no easy line we can draw between autonomous and non-autonomous weapons (and by extension, autonomous AI agents). There is a smooth gradient of autonomy, which makes the question of allowing autonomous weapons much more nuanced. It’s probably the case that higher-level alignment becomes important proportionally to the level of autonomy and intelligence. He analyzes the Patriot fratricides,In a military context, the word fratricide means the killing of someone on the same side of a conflict. and ends up blaming the individuals involved for automation bias. I would say that these humans in the system were set up to fail by the training and the functioning of the system. They’re expected to decide whether the computer is right, with only seconds to decide. He acknowledges this later when he talks about Aegis.

The first thing you should know is that this book is only 2 hours long in audio form. That’s short! She managed to get into the difficult details while keeping the jargon accessible. (It helps that we literally know nothing about consciousness.) This book argued alternately for neuroscientific, illusionist, and panpsychist theories of consciousness. It explains the hard problem of consciousness, and then later really explains why it’s so hard. As a science-oriented person, t’s so easy to forget why it’s hard and start to explain things purely physically. When I do that, I end up thinking there’s got to be a neuroscience explanation. When I pay attention once again to my own experience, I lean towards some kind of panpsychism. The author really lays bare her own thoughts, and carefully spends time walking us through simple thought experiments to fight off the assumptions that we bring to the word “consciousness”.

Read this book before you turn 60. In fact, read it before you’re 40. Read it before your parents are 60. Read it if you have parents! Read it if you’re a person who is likely to die sometime in the future. This book gave me tools for the hard decisions that exist for people in the last decade(s) of their lives. Before reaching this stage of life ourselves, we don’t think about it much because we’ve tended to separate the aged from our communities. We’ve lost a cultural understanding of what a good death looks like. This book brings that knowledge back to a world with modern medicine.

This book was published in 2007, before the Great Recession. It definitely reads that way. Very capitalist, very Christian, very neo-liberal. I enjoyed learning more about Adam Smith. I feel like Skousen does a good job painting the importance of his ideas as an invention that drove the Industrial Revolution. According to Skousen, Marx is the devil incarnate, and his ideas are a dangerous disease infecting the minds of intellectuals and workers. Skousen takes a strange interest in painting Marx and Keynes as deranged, sexual deviants, etc. (“The Truth about Keynes’ Homosexuality” is a section in this book.)

This is a good intro for non-statisticians to avoid some common pitfalls and misconceptions that the public often has. It’ll help you understand what it means when something is statistically significant, why sometimes studies contradict each other, and how to avoid believing in patterns that don’t exist. You’ll understand the following biases and fallacies: confirmation bias gambler’s fallacy hot hand fallacy “hindsight is 20/20”: the illusion of hindsight for explaining historical performance/events One mistake I want to point out: