The master algorithm: how the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake our world : Pedro Domingos. Basic Books. 2015. ISBN 978-0465065707

Nowadays, “machine learning” is present in several aspects of the current world, internet advisors, advertisements and “smart” devices that seem to know what we need in a given moment. These are some examples of the problems solved by machine learning. This book presents the past, the present and the future of the different types of machine learning algorithms. At the beginning of the book, the author takes us to the first years of the computing science, where a programmer had to do absolutely everything by himself to make an algorithm do a certain task. As time passes, there appeared the first algorithms that were capable of programming themselves learning from the available data. The author presents what he himself calls the five “tribes” of machine learning, the essence that defends each one and the kind of problems that are able to solve without problems. With a great amount of simple examples, the author depicts which advantages and disadvantages of the “master” algorithms of each “tribes” are, saying that the problem that a tribe solves perfectly well, another one cannot do it, and the other way about. The author suggests to get the best out of each “tribe” and make a unique learning algorithm able to learn without caring about the problem: the master algorithm.Facultad de Informátic

On the Concept of Creal: The Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle

A Case for Machine Ethics in Modeling Human-Level Intelligent Agents

This paper focuses on the research field of machine ethics and how it relates to a technological singularity—a hypothesized, futuristic event where artificial machines will have greater-than-human-level intelligence. One problem related to the singularity centers on the issue of whether human values and norms would survive such an event. To somehow ensure this, a number of artificial intelligence researchers have opted to focus on the development of artificial moral agents, which refers to machines capable of moral reasoning, judgment, and decision-making. To date, different frameworks on how to arrive at these agents have been put forward. However, there seems to be no hard consensus as to which framework would likely yield a positive result. With the body of work that they have contributed in the study of moral agency, philosophers may contribute to the growing literature on artificial moral agency. While doing so, they could also think about how the said concept could affect other important philosophical concepts

Questing for happiness: augmenting Aristotle with Davidson

Original article can be found at: http://www.ajol.info/journal_index.php?jid=211 Copyright Philosophical Society of Southern Africa (PSSA)Drawing heavily on Aristotle, Tabensky attempts to establish ‘an ethic that flows from the very structure of our being’, but he also calls on Davidson’s arguments about the essentially social character of rationality to shore up Aristotle’s claim that we are essentially social beings. This much of his project, I argue is successful. However Tabensky takes this a step further and proposes a pluralist ethic on the grounds that a ‘fully’ or ‘properly’ instantiated account of the ‘ideal’ conditions for rationality requires encountering innumerable other points of view. Firstly, while confronting alternatives is essential to truth-seeking it hardly follows that an unconstrained pluralism represents an ideal condition for this kind of inquiry, since such an approach risks falling into mere clash of perspectives on practical grounds. Secondly, it is unclear how confronting more and more perspectives is supposed to help in enabling us to lead our lives well. In conclusion, picking up on this theme and looking again at Aristotle, I give reasons for questioning that the kind of rational choice involved in leading the good life, for reasons in part highlighted by Tabensky, benefits from analogy with the modes of conceptual rational inquiry in other domains in any case.Peer reviewe

Robot Consciousness: Physics and Metaphysics Here and Abroad

Interest has been renewed in the study of consciousness, both theoretical and applied, following developments in 20th and early 21st-century logic, metamathematics, computer science, and the brain sciences. In this evolving narrative, I explore several theoretical questions about the types of artificial intelligence and offer several conjectures about how they affect possible future developments in this exceptionally transformative field of research. I also address the practical significance of the advances in artificial intelligence in view of the cautions issued by prominent scientists, politicians, and ethicists about the possible dangers of such sufficiently advanced general intelligence, including by implication the search for extraterrestrial intelligence