Новости за 01.03.2016

The experience of World War Two made clear to the US Air Force the need for a continuously updated catalogue of high-value bombing targets worldwide — military, enabling maximally efficient bombing raids from day one of any new conflict. By 1959 the punch-card-based Bombing Encyclopaedia listed 78,000 targets, and is still kept current. Compilation of the encyclopaedia yielded much new understanding of how countries work, leading to a new science of catastrophe modelling

Interview with rationalist thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky about probability, immortality, and artificial intelligence. “The fatal scenario is an AI that neither loves you nor hates you, because you’re still made of atoms that it can use for something else. Game theory and cooperation don’t emerge when something is sufficiently more powerful than you that it can disassemble you whether you press Cooperate or Defect”

“All apocryphal writing has its oddities, but the literature involving Bartholomew is highly peculiar. One episode involves the apostle learning secret cosmic knowledge from Mary the mother of Jesus, despite her warning that this information will destroy the world. Another has Jesus battling the six serpent sons of Death. In The Acts of Philip the apostles come across a talking baby goat and leopard who take Communion together”

Albert Speer, a “thirty-year-old prodigy with a movie-star face”, was the first architect ever to appear on television, when Nazi Germany launched TV broadcasting for the Nuremberg rally in 1935. A decade later in the same city Speer gave the “performance of his life”, feigning naivety and escaping the gallows. But in truth he was as bad as the rest of them, and he wasn’t even much of an architect. His best ideas he got from Hitler

Conversation about artificial intelligence, with particular focus on the language needed for people and computers to communicate more efficiently. There will be a convergence: more people will learn to code, and computers will get better at processing natural language. There is no “bright line” between computation and intelligence. What makes humans different is their history and their goals: can machines share those?

“The possible election of Donald Trump as President is the greatest present threat to the prosperity and security of the United States. I have had a strong point of view on each of the last ten presidential elections, but never before had I feared that the wrong outcome would risk grave damage to the American project … The United States has always been governed by the authority of ideas, rather than the idea of authority”

In which the author explains how he helped eight people die. “I created an underground assisted death service that offered innovative non-medical ­methods of dying to Society members. Following Jack Kevorkian’s example, we didn’t require clients to pay for our services. We operated on the Robin Hood principle: members who could afford to cover the costs of our illegal ­operations helped compensate for those who couldn’t”

To be reading William Empson’s book on Buddhist art, Face of The Buddha, is “not far short of a miracle”, since the manuscript was long thought lost in the Blitz. It was, in fact, mislaid in Soho by a drunken friend of the author’s who was too embarrassed to confess his error. It turned up in a dead critic’s papers in the British Library, and now it is published. As generally with Empson, the thesis is fanciful, but the argument is interesting