Financial Independence or Masters? Cognitive Science or something else?

[Shubhamkar Ayare]

Hi!

This isn't very much about OpenCog as much as pursuing AGI in general. And I don't know of a better place to seek advice on this.

I'm, currently, a third year (entering fourth year) undergrad student majoring in Computer Science. For long, I've been interested in AGI, and some time last year, I had decided that I'll focus on financial independence first until the age of 30-35 and then work full-time on AGI. In recent days, I'm considering to revise that decision - in my limited understanding, constructing AGI needs at least one person to have a broad yet deep background. Cognitive Science seems to provide the breadth. Plus, if previously, I had about 30 years of my life to work on AGI, I get 10 more years by pursuing a relevant Masters. 

So, my doubts are the following - 

- Can an AGI be made without there existing a single person knowing the relevant parts from Neuroscience, Psychology, Machine Learning, Philosophy - and perhaps some more relevant parts from Computer Science? I'd guess this question is impossible to answer, since we don't have an AGI yet; but from the perspective of how teams work - does it become necessary for at least one person to know the relevant parts from the various fields, so as to be able to coordinate the team's efforts? I myself don't have much (any perhaps) experience with leading teams; and hence, I wanted to seek experienced opinions. In essence, is the "broad yet deep" background too much to aim for?

- Are there any opinions about whether a Masters in Cognitive Science is worthwhile, or would I be better off pursuing the Masters in something more specific?

- In case I'm better off pursuing the Masters in something else, is it feasible to just do it from online courses? I've a strong bias towards online self-directed learning - and I want to learn things without being much involved in the research itself. For instance, I am learning machine learning, but I do not want to invest myself in ML research. I'm also not very convinced by the way academia exists today in the age of internet, and think it can be improved. This goes off on a tangent though. For self-learning AGI itself, there exist a ton of resources at agi-society.org (the links seem broken in recent days though; internet-archive helps); but I'd be very dubious if studying that would help me pay my bills.

Any input would be highly appreciated.

Thank you!

[Angel Arturo Ramirez Suárez]

Hi fellow researcher here. I think first of all that one doesn't need to know all of the relevant parts from Neuroscience, Psychology, Machine Learning, Philosophy and CS because usually research is built through teams and connections. The width and breadth of human knowledge is such that it's almost impossible to get an expect, especially in an area as complex as AGI.

I'd very much love to know your ideas on how Academia could be revolutionized. I'm also trying to get into AGI but sadly there're no research centers where I live. I think you need to get a position in a research center if you hope to focus full time on it and get money to pay the bills. For that a masters may not be enough and you need to aim for a doctorate at the very least in a related research field such as computer science or neurology.

[Jeremy Nixon]

While challenging, joining a research lab like Microsoft Research, Deepmind, OpenAI, or Google Brain could have you achieve both simultaneously.

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[Ben Goertzel]

> - Can an AGI be made without there existing a single person knowing the relevant parts from Neuroscience, Psychology, Machine Learning, Philosophy - and perhaps some more relevant parts from Computer Science? I'd guess this question is impossible to answer, since we don't have an AGI yet; but from the perspective of how teams work - does it become necessary for at least one person to know the relevant parts from the various fields, so as to be able to coordinate the team's efforts? I myself don't have much (any perhaps) experience with leading teams; and hence, I wanted to seek experienced opinions. In essence, is the "broad yet deep" background too much to aim for?

I think having one or preferably more people w/ that sort of
integrative knowledge is highly valuable for any AGI project

>
> - Are there any opinions about whether a Masters in Cognitive Science is worthwhile, or would I be better off pursuing the Masters in something more specific?

MS in Cog Sci is a great idea if you want to work seriously on AGI

> - In case I'm better off pursuing the Masters in something else, is it feasible to just do it from online courses? I've a strong bias towards online self-directed learning - and I want to learn things without being much involved in the research itself. For instance, I am learning machine learning, but I do not want to invest myself in ML research. I'm also not very convinced by the way academia exists today in the age of internet, and think it can be improved. This goes off on a tangent though. For self-learning AGI itself, there exist a ton of resources at agi-society.org (the links seem broken in recent days though; internet-archive helps); but I'd be very dubious if studying that would help me pay my bills.

Universities suck badly in many ways, yet they are the most reliably
OK institution humanity has yet found for systematically fostering
research and education. Online learning is fantastic, but does not
quite substitute for the complex implicit learning that comes from
being part of a social group focused on learning and advancing a
particular area of knowledge (such as one gets from good old F2F grad
school, as least in non-shitty cases...)

-- Ben

[Shubhamkar Ayare]

I think first of all that one doesn't need to know all of the relevant parts from Neuroscience, Psychology, Machine Learning, Philosophy and CS because usually research is built through teams and connections. The width and breadth of human knowledge is such that it's almost impossible to get an expect, especially in an area as complex as AGI.

 

While I think that is definitely true of research, I'm not sure if that also holds of engineering problems. But again, I lack any experience to draw a conclusion upon. I think, with the current state of human knowledge (of which I only possess a glimpse), I'd like to approach AGI from an engineering perspective and then generate the research questions from there. So, my worry, then, is does a engineering team require at least one person to have all the relevant knowledge? My expectations from such a team are rather: 1-2 people each having 2.5 years or equivalent experience in each of the different fields, and then 1-2 people each having 5-6 years of experience in 2 of these, or a 10-12 experience in a single of these - so, basically, a mix of generalists and specialists.

I find that specialists abound, while generalists as general as these are far and few - Cognitive Science seems the closest to produce such generalists.

I'd very much love to know your ideas on how Academia could be revolutionized.

 I'm not sure if revolutionize is the right term. My complaints stem from 

• reinventing the wheel: Aside from research based courses in the prof's specific areas, universities world wide could simply administer a course from a chosen top 5-6 course variants of that course from the world over. And then, the time of the profs and TAs could be better spent on doubt resolution, and learning feedback, as opposed to course material creation. This also lets the students access the best teachers for the course.
• artificial localization: Even if courses and classes are going online, we seem to be creating artificial boundaries for discussions - each university seems to employ their own forums for students to discuss any doubts. At this point, we have excellent sites like stackexchange for the whole internet to clarify their doubts, and I'd love if universities embrace these sites more. Reinventing the wheel is again a relevant problem here - it doesn't make much sense to clarify the same doubts year after year than simply maintaining a repository of doubts. stackexchange sites are the closest to such a repository I've known. Probably, one will need better search engines and indexing and some human effort to organize all the relevant doubts and make them searchable, but that seems like a much efficient way to do things. 
• research forums: I also imagine some sort of a research forum that contains all the research questions humans have ever had, organized in some manner. Each thread would be supplemented by reviews, whether the finding can be reproduced and so on. This, to avoid duplicated research efforts, unless they were aimed at reproducing the results; as well as make it easier to keep track of a field. The organization and tracking part, I guess, requires quite a bit of work in NLP; in particular, canonicalizing the research questions to avoid duplication. Because of my lack of experience, I don't know how relevant or useful these things are, but those are some ideas I have been having.

I'm also trying to get into AGI but sadly there're no research centers where I live. I think you need to get a position in a research center if you hope to focus full time on it and get money to pay the bills. For that a masters may not be enough and you need to aim for a doctorate at the very least in a related research field such as computer science or neurology.

Post the AI winter of the last century, I don't have much hopes of getting funded by working on pure AGI. I find CogSci to be the closest and even there it doesn't seem easy to get funding. The best I hope for is to generalize a bit using CogSci; and then, may be specialize in some relevant field - as you said in computer science or neuroscience (I assume you mean neuroscience), or perhaps, machine learning or I don't know.

[Shubhamkar Ayare]

Unless I'm missing something, all of these are involved in ML research, no? I mostly see ML as a tool than an end in itself; so, do not want to invest myself in ML research as much as picking up the tried and tested approaches from there. If anything, I fear excessive focus on approximating humans will yield us an approximation so human-like that it'd become near-impossible to determine whether we have really achieved AGI, or just an approximation. I speak this wrt to GPT and variants; I'm unaware how true that holds of other ML things.

[Shubhamkar Ayare]

While challenging, joining a research lab like Microsoft Research, Deepmind, OpenAI, or Google Brain could have you achieve both simultaneously.

The below was in response to above: 

[Shubhamkar Ayare]

I think having one or preferably more people w/ that sort of
integrative knowledge is highly valuable for any AGI project

 

MS in Cog Sci is a great idea if you want to work seriously on AGI

 

Universities suck badly in many ways, yet they are the most reliably

OK institution humanity has yet found for systematically fostering
research and education.   Online learning is fantastic, but does not
quite substitute for the complex implicit learning that comes from
being part of a social group focused on learning and advancing a
particular area of knowledge (such as one gets from good old F2F grad
school, as least in non-shitty cases...)

I see. Thank you for the assurance! My primary concern with CogSci was that 

it might make me a jack of all trades and master of none. But I'd also guess that

that highly depends on the exact programme I go into, and it should be possible

to be a jack of all trades and a master of at least one. I hope to consider this in 

the upcoming days. Thank you!

[Linas Vepstas]

I'm with Ben, on this.

To amplify a few points: Universities were invented 800 years ago as a social structure to allow old smart people to have the freedom to do research without worrying where their next meal is coming from, to recruit and train young geniuses to carry on, and to create walls to keep out the liars, cheats, morons and other destructive elements. It is the only social structure that I can think of to have survived for so long.  The only other thing I can think of is the legal theory of evidence, which was invented around the same time.

That said, there are problems. Being an academic requires you to take a vow of poverty. If you are lucky, you can pay your bills, but just barely. Modern capitalistic thinking has helped damage the university; assistant and associate professors are abused. Tenure and publish-or-perish has created the crisis of replication, with no cure in sight.

As to being a jack-of-all-trades, that takes time and patience. Grad school is designed to be a forced march to the top of the mountain-peak; there is no time to stop and smell the roses. Yet reading a bit of everything takes a very long time - a decade, or two or more. It is essential to obtain a strong foundation. Without that foundation, you become one of those people on facebook (or wikipedia) who ... I dunno... post smart-sounding drivel and nonsense about QM or general relativity or whatever. And then get into endless silly arguments about it. These people are jacks-of-no-trades, and anti-masters of all.

Re: cog-sci -- do not confuse it with software engineering. They are very different things. Cog-sci is theoretical, mathematical. Software engineering teaches you how to build things in a safe, functional, dependable fashion.

Re: AGI -- it requires research, not engineering. You can't assemble a team of engineers and say "build me an AGI". That said, let me contrast to "big science physics", and to "tabletop biochemistry".  So in "big-science physics", e.g. telescopes, colliders, you have 10-100 million dollar budgets, teams of 20-500 people working for a decade to construct a scientific instrument. An army of grad students function as engineers, building the thing, with professional engineers providing guidance. In "table-top biochemistry", you mail-order some reagents and some bacteria, and a week later, you are crispr-cas-ing some genes in your kitchen.

AGI research is mostly in the middle between these two. It's hard to do anything in AGI without "lab equipment", it's hard (impossible) to procure that "lab equipment", so you have to build it yourself. And it's almost impossible to convince someone else to build it for you (e.g. an "engineer") because they tend to mis-understand the problem, and build the thing they know how to build, instead of building what needs to be built.

Perhaps Microsoft or maybe google has good "lab equipment" lying around for you to use, but its ... proprietary, and it might take a decade before they let you lay your fingers on it. Or something. The goings-on in those companies are opaque to me.

--linas

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Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer.
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[Murilo Saraiva de Queiroz]

Hi Linas and Ben! Long time no see! :-)

Linas, I simply *loved* this part, I want to use it everytime someone asks me if going to college is " worth the effort":

Universities were invented 800 years ago as a social structure to allow old smart people to have the freedom to do research without worrying where their next meal is coming from, to recruit and train young geniuses to carry on, and to create walls to keep out the liars, cheats, morons and other destructive elements. It is the only social structure that I can think of to have survived for so long.  The only other thing I can think of is the legal theory of evidence, which was invented around the same time.

That said, there are problems. Being an academic requires you to take a vow of poverty. If you are lucky, you can pay your bills, but just barely. Modern capitalistic thinking has helped damage the university; assistant and associate professors are abused. Tenure and publish-or-perish has created the crisis of replication, with no cure in sight.

Best,

Murilo

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/CAHrUA35pwC%2Be%3D8Vcc-fgwe851MDHn795paaERs3y_0vM4AfwpA%40mail.gmail.com.

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Murilo Saraiva de Queiroz, MSc

Hardware Engineer at NVIDIA

[Lansana Camara]

Sorry to hijack this conversation, and double sorry for the pompous-sounding nature of my question and/or self-description; I just felt like this would be a fitting place to ask it, and I don't know any other way to phrase the question or describe myself.

I wanted to reiterate some things that were previously stated because they are causing me some cognitive dissonance. There seem to be some conflicting statements in this email thread, or maybe I'm just misinterpreting them.

I think having one or preferably more people w/ that sort of

integrative knowledge is highly valuable for any AGI project

 +

MS in Cog Sci is a great idea if you want to work seriously on AGI

 +

Universities were invented 800 years ago as a social structure to allow old smart people to have the freedom to do research without worrying where their next meal is coming from, to recruit and train young geniuses to carry on, and to create walls to keep out the liars, cheats, morons and other destructive elements. It is the only social structure that I can think of to have survived for so long.  The only other thing I can think of is the legal theory of evidence, which was invented around the same time.
That said, there are problems. Being an academic requires you to take a vow of poverty. If you are lucky, you can pay your bills, but just barely. Modern capitalistic thinking has helped damage the university; assistant and associate professors are abused. Tenure and publish-or-perish has created the crisis of replication, with no cure in sight. 

 

Questions:

• Is university recommended or not?
• If so, and based on my background (below), would a masters/PhD in Cognitive Science be a good path forward, or would another field be more ideal for someone like me?

Background: 

While I don't have an undergraduate degree (dropped out of university to start my tech career when I was 19), I am very broadly learned. That is to say that:

• I'm a Software Engineer with five years of professional experience and around a decade of overall IT experience. I have a decent understanding of CS fundamentals because I've studied them on my own outside of school. I have tested this knowledge by recently interviewing with FAANG companies and doing well, though that may not be a great measure. 
• In an intent to understand myself and the world around me, I have also built a good foundation on topics like Psychology, Neuroscience, Biology, Philosophy, Sociology, etc. These are topics that really interest me. I actively read books and study them through various mediums.
• I am well-travelled and feel like I have a lot of perspective; I was born in a third-world African country, I was raised in North America and live the privileged life of a 1%er, I've travelled through Europe and I have also lived in Asia for two years. 
• I am quadrilingual (some better than others).
• I have been deep in religion (through my upbringing), so I have an understanding of how the mind works in those sorts of contexts, but I also left religion so I can grasp the thinking process behind agnosticism, atheism, etc. as well.

I'm not sure if all of that personal background is relevant to AGI, but I figured it may be worth mentioning in case it changes the answer to my question at all.

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[Linas Vepstas]

Lansana,

You are smart, and can obviously learn things on your own. The real question is -- what do you want to do? Business? Engineering? Science research? Leadership?

Science is hard/impossible without a formal education (at the PhD level). Getting a license to practice engineering requires passing formal tests, which means college. In business there is a large (huge) financial advantage to getting an MBA (but only while young; business execs do not like old MBA's) and leadership - I dunno. Being in a society of peers helps you figure out how to lead.

So, a few comments about college and grad school, specific to your situation.

-- Schooling is best done while young, and achieves little once you are past the age of 30 or so.

-- Smart, self-taught people (like you) tend to fall into one major trap when it comes to "hard science" -- they avoid the hard stuff. Not on purpose, but because it feels uninteresting. Unimportant gibberish. Most likely, you don't even know it exists. Couldn't recognize it even if it punched you in the nose.

This lack is fatal for science research.  It's like .. I dunno .. trying to do biochemistry, and never having heard of atoms before. it's impossible. But there are legions of these people.  Usually technical people, science fans, but they .. don't know what a complex number is ... don't know what temperature is ... and then they argue... the software programmers are the worst. They don't know, they don't know that they don't know, and because they are programmers, they think they are smart. Terrible combination. 

College courses force you into studying the hard stuff. And even if you fail, you at least will find out it exists. You will have been punched in the nose a few times. More than a few.

-- Having a PhD attached to your name earns you some fair bit of social respect. The reality is that most PhD's are just ordinary people, and most of them are not even that smart; just above-average intelligence. But the  title confers respect, which can be useful.

-- Only 1 out of seven PhD's end up in academia (and even then, they are often not the smartest ones) Only 1 out of 4 law students practice law ... and so on. The schools generate more than they can employ. Industry jobs aren't always much fun. Depends on what you want from life.

-- Many common employers don't want, don't like PhD's. They are over-educated, and become very picky about the kind of work they want to do. They won't just do anything. Employers know this.

-- Science is about discovering the secrets of reality. Not everyone is interested in that. Some people say they are, but then do not actually behave that way. You might be one of them. If you never stopped completely, ignored everything else, to spend a few hours getting totally confused about the difference between .. say for example, infrared-heat and thermal heat, or square roots vs cube roots, .. the length of a diagonal .. then you are not a scientist. This starts early, before the age of 10. If you haven't done this by now, you never will. If you do this all the time, then get thyself to a top-tier university as fast as possible. It will save your life.

-- Linas

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[Lansana Camara]

Hi Linas,

Love the brutal honesty! I needed to hear a lot of this, it helped me frame some of the decisions I've made and rethink a path forward.

I thought I wanted to be in “business”, but I have quit every job I’ve had out of boredom and the feeling that I’m wasting my time doing something unimportant...the feeling that I should be on a grander mission. I suppose this is my own fault, though, because I didn't know myself enough then to realize that I was only choosing companies for perks and didn’t care much about their mission (not that they were doing anything particularly interesting to begin with). Then I would have the gall to wonder why the work didn’t interest me. It turns out that money doesn’t really fulfill me beyond a certain level of financial independence and the ability to help my loved ones.

After that, I decided to stop chasing money and chase experiences. But even the digital nomad lifestyle led to a dead end after two or so years of solo traveling and living in foreign nations. I kept begging the question, "what else?".

I also tried “leadership”, defined in two different ways:

1. Leadership in terms of what I find myself doing from time to time, such as helping my family and friends become the best version of themselves - somewhat of a life coach, if you will. But that’s more of a natural position I’ve found myself in given the people in my life than it is a profession or something I deliberately sought after. 
2. Leadership in terms of being a manager/executive of a company and telling people what to do all day long (assuming that's what the job entails). I have very little interest in that kind of thing. I prefer to be behind the scenes designing systems or something like that, and just delegating work in areas I have no expertise in. 

After all of this, I’ve found that nothing really invigorates me more than a curiosity that leads to some kind of deep insight and eureka moment. On my resume, I literally have a final line that states "...I love the feeling of eureka, so I try to learn something new every day". 

So, based on your final bullet, I think I qualify. Not only do I go down scientific rabbit holes from time to time in pursuit of eureka, I actually spent a cumulative of 400+ days over 15 years grinding out boring repetitive tasks on an MMORPG, just to get a cape. This is what actually led me to programming when I was younger, because I wanted to learn how to automate those tasks (aka cheat) by writing bot scripts. With that as a given, I would like to think that I have the anal retentive capacity to do deep research for an extended period of time, as long as their is a seemingly worthy mission attached to it. The reason I didn't give up on the MMORPG cape out of boredom (like I did with some jobs) was because there was a mission attached to it, and that mission gave me a reason to keep going; all I wanted was that cool cape. 

For the past year or so, I haven't been able to think of anything more exciting than doing some kind of research on the mind/consciousness, as that to me seems like one of the final frontiers. Cognitive Science seems like a good path for that kind of thing, and it sounds like I haven’t missed the mark you defined for college as I’m still just 24 years old (haven't hit that 30 number yet).

I think I'll find a path back into university to study Cognitive Science and see where that takes me. Thanks for thought juice. I hope to repay you some day.

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[Linas Vepstas]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 8:40 PM Lansana Camara <lxc...@gmail.com> wrote:

 I’m wasting my time doing something unimportant...the feeling that I should be on a grander mission.

Ah hah!

I also tried “leadership”, defined in two different ways:

1. Leadership in terms of what I find myself doing from time to time, such as helping my family and friends become the best version of themselves - somewhat of a life coach, if you will. But that’s more of a natural position I’ve found myself in given the people in my life than it is a profession or something I deliberately sought after. 
2. Leadership in terms of being a manager/executive of a company and telling people what to do all day long (assuming that's what the job entails). I have very little interest in that kind of thing. I prefer to be behind the scenes designing systems or something like that, and just delegating work in areas I have no expertise in. 

 OK, so telling people what to do is "management". Telling managers what to do is "executive management". Making things happen by working with organizations is "being an executive".

Today, all of the most important problems are systemic problems, -- global warming, poverty, wealth-inequality, lack of education, lack of social welfare, ignorance, racism, and 1001 other things that everyone is wildly complaining about.  We are severely lacking in leaders able to address those problems, and its clear that the current capitalistic+political system is fairly broken, and no obvious solution is in sight. So if you really want to do something "important" ... this is the thing.  But its also ... I dunno. Very hard.

 

For the past year or so, I haven't been able to think of anything more exciting than doing some kind of research on the mind/consciousness, as that to me seems like one of the final frontiers.

It's only a doorway, beyond which lies even more territory.  Let's start with jellyfish. They have neurons. The neurons help them eat  .. and to flee predators.  Unfortunately, they can't decide which is more important. So nature evolved more complex mechanisms. e.g. bilateral symmetry with a brain. Which has other control problems, and so then a hindbrain, a cortex, etc. is needed, each layered on top of the last. See for example:

"Forced moves or good tricks in design space?  Landmarks in the
    evolution of neural mechanisms for action selection", Tony J. Prescott
    (2007) https://www.academia.edu/30717257/Forced_Moves_or_Good_Tricks_in_Design_Space_Landmarks_in_the_Evolution_of_Neural_Mechanisms_for_Action_Selection

However, things don't stop with the human brain. John  Vervaeke has 60 hours of youtube college lectures entitled "waking up from the meaning crisis" and in episode 2 or 3 he explains the invention of the alphabet as a "psycho-technology" -- instead of being taught hieroglyphics from the age of 6, all you had to do was to learn 20-30 shapes and the corresponding sounds (if you are ethiopian, you are NOT so lucky...) and ordinary people could do that .. sailors, traders... and so this psycho-technology spread, virus-like, from human brain to human brain...

"Above" us, as individuals,  are memes, temes, corporations, political and social structures. So, "temes", for example: I quote:

"temes are the technological equivalent of genes or memes, a kind of replicator that can have a life of its own."

"Most manufactured goods enter in this category, like the cigarette being a kind of replicator that uses smokers to replicate; once they start replicating, they can't be stopped so easily. Temes tend to grow as much as they can to fill the market, regardless of "people's intentions". Seen like that, those kind of problems appear much more complex to manage..."

Above from a book I have  not read: Nicolas M. Kirchberger "The Evolving Self"

The cigarette is a good example, because it couples biochemistry, neurotransmitters, reinforcement feed-back loops in the brain, (half a dozen of these have been mapped out in the brain, acting on various different timescales, from seconds to minutes to weeks/years, which is why quitting smoking is so hard -- all these feedback/reinforcement loops interlock.) (all involving complex interplay between neural circuits, neurotransmitters, DNA expression up/down-regulation...) It's a good example, because the feedback loops don't stop with just one single brain addicted to cigarettes, but extend upwards into society and economic commerce.  Our political/capitalistic systems interact with these neurons and neurotransmitters... this is why political reform is so hard. If you are an executive or a politician, you are trying to manipulate these blobby messes of people and organizations and their instinctual reactions and learned behaviors.

 

I think I'll find a path back into university to study Cognitive Science and see where that takes me. Thanks for thought juice. I hope to repay you some day.

Spending 24 hours/day surrounded by other very smart people is ... a very interesting experience. Do it.

--linas

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[Lansana Camara]

Today, all of the most important problems are systemic problems, -- global warming, poverty, wealth-inequality, lack of education, lack of social welfare, ignorance, racism, and 1001 other things that everyone is wildly complaining about.  We are severely lacking in leaders able to address those problems, and its clear that the current capitalistic+political system is fairly broken, and no obvious solution is in sight. So if you really want to do something "important" ... this is the thing.  But its also ... I dunno. Very hard.

Wow, I find it really interesting that you mentioned those human-centric issues. Coincidentally (a few days before you said that), I thought of building something that delves into such issues and aims to solve them indirectly by emulating human behavior. I thought it'd be a good way for me to learn more about the mind (I usually give myself a big, challenging project when I want to learn something new), while also helping people. 

Here's a screenshot of my very brief notes on the thoughts I had:

I thought "Social Cohesion" was a fitting name, given the implications. Anyway. 

The idea is to basically create an AI mind that models your own behavior. Once that model is captured, it would be able to do computations on certain scenarios and see how the model would react. Sort of like Mathematica in terms of creating higher level abstractions that do computations, but specifically geared towards modeling and predicting human behavior. 

I figured understanding Briggs-Myers personality tests (as non-scientific as they may be) would be a good start because in my experience they do a great job of understanding my own personality when I take the tests. Using that AI mind, I would then give it test scenarios and see what the outcome is. It would act as a tool for humans to 'make mistakes and learn from them' in an intent to help one go through life more effectively on a personal level. Moreover, if a pool of those AI minds were to be put together, the idea is that it could then model society, which could potentially be used to predict how humans might react in situations on a societal level; this may also be useful for solving systemic problems by testing out solutions in an AI world where the stakes are much lower. 

The inspiration comes from patterns I noticed while playing an MMORPG. I made a lot of mistakes in that game. Thankfully, mistakes in a game are non-permanent and don't adversely affect one's life. However, as a result of those mistakes, I also got a lot of valuable insights and lessons. Those insights and lessons transferred over into my real life and helped me get to where I am today (e.g. financial literacy is something I picked up from the economy in the game, which is something that is missing in K-12 education in the US). I think that's an extremely powerful technology.

The idea probably sounds really stupid to anyone who knows more than I do on the topic of building an artificial mind that emulates human behavior, so I would love to hear the "don't know that you don't know that you don't know" bits in response to the above, if there are any such bits. But if there is no verifiable doubt yet, I'd like to find out for myself :)

However, things don't stop with the human brain. John  Vervaeke has 60 hours of youtube college lectures entitled "waking up from the meaning crisis" and in episode 2 or 3 he explains the invention of the alphabet as a "psycho-technology" -- instead of being taught hieroglyphics from the age of 6, all you had to do was to learn 20-30 shapes and the corresponding sounds (if you are ethiopian, you are NOT so lucky...) and ordinary people could do that .. sailors, traders... and so this psycho-technology spread, virus-like, from human brain to human brain...
"Above" us, as individuals,  are memes, temes, corporations, political and social structures. So, "temes", for example: I quote:
"temes are the technological equivalent of genes or memes, a kind of replicator that can have a life of its own."
"Most manufactured goods enter in this category, like the cigarette being a kind of replicator that uses smokers to replicate; once they start replicating, they can't be stopped so easily. Temes tend to grow as much as they can to fill the market, regardless of "people's intentions". Seen like that, those kind of problems appear much more complex to manage..."
Above from a book I have  not read: Nicolas M. Kirchberger "The Evolving Self"
The cigarette is a good example, because it couples biochemistry, neurotransmitters, reinforcement feed-back loops in the brain, (half a dozen of these have been mapped out in the brain, acting on various different timescales, from seconds to minutes to weeks/years, which is why quitting smoking is so hard -- all these feedback/reinforcement loops interlock.) (all involving complex interplay between neural circuits, neurotransmitters, DNA expression up/down-regulation...) It's a good example, because the feedback loops don't stop with just one single brain addicted to cigarettes, but extend upwards into society and economic commerce.  Our political/capitalistic systems interact with these neurons and neurotransmitters... this is why political reform is so hard. If you are an executive or a politician, you are trying to manipulate these blobby messes of people and organizations and their instinctual reactions and learned behaviors. 

This reminds me a lot of the phrase "as above, so below", the esoteric notion that the patterns or systems on one level of reality are the result of patterns or systems on other levels, and vice versa. I first heard it described by Terence McKenna. During a time when we had people like Ray Kurzweil talking about the future of computers, Terence McKenna was talking about memes 😂 He talked a lot about memes back in the 90s and made projections as to their impact on society. A lot of those projections are evident today with meme culture. It does indeed seem to be the case that memes are like a higher dimensional form of language constructed "above us". They're a great way to communicate complicated abstract notions almost instantaneously; that's much harder to do with human languages like English, or even Amharic. 

As for temes, I have never even heard of the word. Same goes for Kirchberger and his book, and some of those other ideas. Time for me to do some deep-diving. Thanks for more thought juice!

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