Nils Müller-Sheffer

Managing Director / CTO. Enthusiast Photographer & Drummer. Always looking for Tech Talent. Views are my own.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

Turing Test 2.0

1.) We have a theory of AGI, and based on this theory/explanation have built a system to achieve it.
2.) System can guess (conjecture) new theories and create new knowledge in line with our best theory of epistemology.
@DavidDeutschOxf

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

Yes. Mind virus.

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Woman removes the Israeli flag 🇮🇱 in a bar, while leaving the North Korean 🇰🇵 flag next to it intact 👇

Hatred of Israel is a mental illness.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

Absolut richtig.
Dennoch denke ich, eine Reform unseres Wahlsystems ist notwendig, damit wir zu handlungsfähigen Regierungen kommen.

Wir überbetonen „Repräsentation“ und enden mit Verlegenheits-Koalitionsregierungen.

[Andreas Möller @andmoeller]

Warum Freiheit die besten Technologien hervorbringt
https://t.co/iwXZ4TSZEp

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@NeilHudsonexp @AlistairCarns The fact that Turing was later destroyed by the laws of his own country breaks my heart. The fact that error correction is possible in free societies and did subsequently happen in Britain and elsewhere gives me confidence into the future and possibility of progress.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@Rainmaker1973 There is one thing, and one thing alone, that will make you lose body fat, and it’s caloric deficit. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@Hello_World @yanisvaroufakis I assume with Mr. Varoufakis there is no discussion about a good explanation of reality - unless it conforms to the one he already holds.

Seems to come with the political system we have - and while it’s the best we know of - that for sure is a problem to overcome in future

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

Nur in Deutschland. In Hamm demonstrieren Leute *gegen* neue Gaskraftwerke und wollen die Energiewende verteidigen.

Dabei sind Gaskraftwerke unverzichtbarer Teil des Plans einer wie auch immer ausgestalteten Energiewende. Wer sagt‘s ihnen?

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@LESolution_de Staccato-Sätze, Behauptung-Dementi („Das ist keine Meinung. Das ist Rechnung.”), Dreierketten, Crescendo-Finale. Muster: Mensch liefert Fakten, KI baut die Dramaturgie.

Aber ich glaube inhaltlich hab ich gar keine Kritik, und darum sollte es ja gehen.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

Listen to this man

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@elonmusk However - once different explanations *exist* - AI shall favor and give the current „best explanation“, regardless of how seldom it appears in training data.
But this - again - would be something very different than an LLM. Probably also requires AGI.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@elonmusk You can’t demand truth from AI or any entity for ideas not yet imagined.

Paradigm shifts start with bold conjectures—then criticism.

But YES. We want AI that wonders, imagines, and finds better explanations of reality. That! will be AGI in my book and nothing short of it.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@mitsuhiko @thorstenball Brilliant post. "Non-sentient machines will never be able to carry responsibility, and it looks like we will need to deal with this problem before machines achieve this status." Sweet. Deserving of not just a blog post on its own, but probably a dedicated book to unpack.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@johnpalmer This made me LOL. Thanks for this. I feel you.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@hanno_sauer BOI from David Deutsch was a pivotal read for me. Basically when I gave up overall on the notion of political „spectrum“.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@naomiseibt Get yourself elected in Germany, find a platform in Germany, fight your fight in Germany. But stop this circus.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@Hello_World @DavidDeutschOxf Found your other recent summaries excellent - this one leaves me a bit confused, i.e. reference to FoR.
Isn’t constructor theory the attempt to shift away from „initial state plus laws of motion“ towards „what - in principle - can and cannot happen“ description of physics?

[ThomPete @Hello_World]

Of all the many ideas @DavidDeutschOxf is exploring in his two books, the one that is most counter intuitive, and provokes the most people in my experience, is his view of the relationship between problems, progress and resources.

David certainly isn't the first to talk about this, but he is to my knowledge the first person who took the time to sit down and explain it.

As a consequence we now have not just an epistemology but a way to apply epistemology that pulls us away from the evolutionary dead-ends of pessimism, scientism, instrumentalism and shut-up-and-calculaeteism.

Here is how it works:

Problems are everywhere.

All problems are soluble as long as they are allowed by the laws of physics.

All solutions to problems leads to new but better problems.

Lets look at a few examples:

Dealing with pollution from burning fossil fuel is a better problem to have than not having access to fossil fuel.

Dealing with plastic in the oceans is a better problem to have than not having access to plastic in the first place.

Dealing with space debris is a better problem to have than not being able to get into space.

In other words progress can best be defined creating better problems. We will never run out of them, but we can improve what we have to deal with.

This of course have many people up in arms because to them, all problems are not soluble, even if they are allowed by the laws of physics.

A typical pushback I get is that of earths ressources. To most people, through most of history, and even up to this day today, the world is a place of scarcity.

From their perspective earth provides us with some resources, we then go ahead and consume them and sooner or later we are going to run out of resources.

From Davids perspective however resources are not something we just consume, it's something we create through the application of knowledge.

Oil was just gray goo before we found ways to turn it into a resource

Coal was just black stones until we found ways to them into a ressource.

Uranium was useless before we found ways to turn it into a ressource.

Aluminum had no value until we found a way to turn it into a ressource.

In other words the there is no lack of resources only a lack of knowledge. Knowledge that can turn anything from the sun to hydrogen atoms in outer space into a ressource.

This is a radically different view than the current consensus. It replaces irrational pessimism with rational optimism. It approach problems as something that can be resolve rather than something to be avoided.

Using Davids epistemology and view of problems and resources, creating new knowledge becomes a beacon of light when everything seems dark and provides us with a bridge towards better problems rather than a bunker to hide from them.

[ThomPete @Hello_World]

It's hard to truly understand how radical some of @DavidDeutschOxf theories are compared to much of modern scientific consensus.

One of Davids most controversial but valuable contributions to society is the rejection of probability (with the exception ex. card games) as an expression of truthiness or justified beliefs when applied to predictions or conclusions.

There is no probability of how likely we are to be hit by a meteor tomorrow.
There is no probability of how likely the stock market is going to be doing as well tomorrow as it is today.
There is no P(Doom), no percentage you can put on whether AI is likely to wipe out humanity or not.

Things either happen or they don't and we can either explain why they will and how or we can't.

All attempts at putting percentage on a prediction is really just guesswork dressed up as reasoning.

If a meteor is going to hit us tomorrow it's already on the way and the probability is 100%.

If the stock market is going to crash tomorrow the reasons for it's crash have already been put in motion maybe decades before.

If the AI is going to kill us all depends on what we decide to do with it not what some calculation says.

Davids primary critique is for the field of science but it goes beyond that.

Far too many of decisions done in modern society is based around the false certainty of using Bayesian probability. It's like a placebo for a society that demands certainty in an uncertain world. It's not just false it's regressive as it slows down knowledge creation.

The only thing that can change the outcome of the future is the creation of new knowledge. Knowledge based on good explanations that are hard to vary.

We can create knowledge that allow us to divert the meteor before it hits earth.
We can create knowledge that will allow us to hinder a crash of the stock market (both directly or indirectly)
We can create knowledge that let us evolve side by side with very powerful AI instead of enslaving it or be enslaved by it.

Like everything else in life there are no guarantees but there are definitely better or worse ways to deal with uncertainty, probability just isn't one of them.

[Nils Müller-Sheffer @_NilsMS]

@DavidDeutschOxf Finished Atlas Shrugged few hours ago. Coincidence this shows up in my timeline today?

Book is worth reading still today (especially?!) - but boy needs stamina! Can not fathom why she didn’t work with an editor to compress to half the length. Good philosophy, though.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

The West, or perhaps only the Anglosphere, is the historically unique idea that individuals exist not for the sake of their ruler, their class, their society, their ancestors, their gods, or any other such superstition, but for their own sake.