The eBook "Singularity Hypothesis" is out

It includes my article with Roman Yampolskiy, which is available here.

The hardcover will come out at the end of the month.

H/T Amnon Eden, the editor.

Book page at Springer

חומרים מאכלים

לפני 4 שנים בדיוק כתבתי על  "חומר מאכל" טעים במתקן מים ליד צפרירים. סודיום היפוכלוריד. יאמממם! אבל עיון בלועזית גילתה שה-כ אמורה להיות דגושה: חומר מְאַכֵּל (corrosive).

חשבתי שצריך להוסיף דגש. אבל אנשי מקורות חבמים ממני. הרי דגש נראה כמו כתם אבק או שריטה בשלט. במקום זה, שינו את השלט ל"חומרים מאכלים" בפי שתראו למטה:

2009:

2013:

'

הטבות לתלמידי לשיבה בלבד!

מה קורה כשהטבות וסובסידיות ממשלטיות מגועות רק לבני הישיבות? מספרו של בנימין לאו "חכמים - ימי בית שני." ".

עד שרק מכבסה אחת משלמת את כל הארנונה

מה קורה שפוטרים את בני הישיבה מארנונה וממיסים שונים? מה חושבים כל יתר האזרחים?

מספרו של בנימין לאו "חכמים - ימי בית שני."
".

Who needs Dungeons and Dragons ?

Who needs Dungeons and Dragons when you've got your own maze of twisty tunnels designed to trap and defeat the invader?

Benjamin, Daniel, Abigail and I crawled through the tunnels at Hurvat Shua, 4 km from our house. The Jews dug the tunnels to prepare for the Roman legions in the Bar Kochba rebellion in 131 CE.

View Larger Map

Thanks to our neighbor, archeologist Dr Uzi Leibner, for introducing the neighborhood to these caves last week.

The tunnels twist from cave to cave. Each cave has several exits; some tunnels have other tunnels branching off in unexpected directions, like overhead.  It would be very easy to get lost. We only ventured in to the depth of three caves, but there is a lot more to explore.

The tunnels are just wide enough to crawl on your belly, maybe 50 cm in diameter. In  one place I had to force my shoulders through.

'
.

Read an article by Boaz Zissu and Amos Kloner (p. 41 ff) with cool photos and a discussion of these tunnels

Dio reports on the reinforcement of militarily advantageous sites with fortifications, passages and underground networks, and the rebels’ tactic of avoiding head-on clashes with the Romans: "To be sure, they [the Jews] did not dare try conclusions with the Romans in the open field, but they occupied the advantageous positions in the country and strengthened them with mines and walls, in order that they might have places of refuge whenever they should be hard pressed, and might meet togethere unobserved under ground; and they pierced these subterranean passages from above at intervals to let in air and light".

Dio’s account is consistent with the archaeological discoveries, especially with the "Hiding Complexes" phenomenon. Certain rock-cut features of the hideout complexes (as narrow tunnels – "burrows" (fig. 6), vertical shafts (figs. 7, 8), locking and blocking devices) constitute distinguishing marks of their function, and enable the identification of the phenomenon.

The burrows link external chambers used previously as cisterns (fig. 9), limestone quarries (fig. 10), ritual immersion baths, olive presses, storerooms and granaries, stables and rooms for raising animals, columbaria (fig. 11a,b), and so on; connecting them made the chambers unusable for their previous function and purposely impaired the local way of life and economy. 

The burrows are low, narrow and can only be traversed by walking on all fours, sliding on the knees, or crawling (fig. 12). The burrows bend from time to time at diverse angles and in some cases the level of the floor changes (fig. 13). Small side chambers were hewn in the walls of the burrows for various purposes. 

Shafts were cut out in the complexes for use as entrances or exits. The shafts had locks and their entrances were camouflaged - usually inside a room or courtyard of a house in the aboveground settlement. Shafts connecting burrows whose floors were at different levels were hewn vertically from the top down. 

The entrances to rooms and burrows were closed, blocked, or cut off with various kinds of devices, such as a stone slab the same size as the burrow, a large round stone the size of the average opening, beams, and bars. The people hiding would lock the entrance behind them from the inside. 

To prepare a hideout and light lamps inside, one needed ventilation. Vertical shafts were hewn in the ceilings of the rooms for the removal of rubble from the hewing; once the complex was completed, they served as air vents and were camouflaged on the surface. 

A regular supply of water was vital. Many hiding complexes incorporated earlier cisterns (fig. 14). A burrow opened into the upper portion of the cistern a few meters above its floor so that water could be stored up to that point; thus the people hiding in the complex had a steady supply of water that could be drawn clandestinely.

The architectural uniformity among many of the complexes seems to be evidence of orders from above, planning, and implementation in one short period of time, as a result of the military conception of the Bar Kokhba's revolt leadership. 

Perhaps preparing the hideouts was part of the civilian population’s role in getting ready for revolt, subversive activity, and hiding in various stages of the war. Creating the hiding complexes was a sophisticated way of overcoming the difficulty of a head-on clash with the Roman legions. 

The complexes were intended to serve as hideouts for weeks or even months and as bases for the rebels. Food, weapons, and other supplies could be stored there secretly. The small, narrow, winding burrows were meant to make it difficult for the enemy to infiltrate and advance in the underground maze. 

The burrows could be blocked and locked easily and efficiently, and parts of the complex could be cut off from the outside. An individual Roman soldier bearing weapons and an oillamp would have a hard time advancing on all fours or dragging himself along the ground in an unfamiliar burrow or moving through the vertical shafts, and he would be in an inferior, vulnerable position compared with the rebel lying in ambush for him. 

The shafts were designed to hinder or even stop movement along the burrows by changing the floor level, and they could easily be stopped up with rocks. Therefore an enemy would have to fight one on one, losing the advantage of the trained military unit formed with frontal combat in mind. 

More at the article.

And a story from  those times:

Another ancient tradition that has been reevaluated in the light of recent archeological discoveries has to do with an obscure law in the Mishnah that forbids the wearing of “nailed sandals” on the Sabbath. The Talmud traces the prohibition to a tragic occurrence that occurred “in the final days of the ‘persecution’ [sh'mad],” a standard rabbinic expression for the Bar Kokhba insurrection: A group of Jews who were hiding in a sealed off cave saw the tracks of a nailed sandal that inadvertently [or: as a trick? JF] been worn backwards, and assumed that enemy soldiers had entered their cave. In the ensuing panic, which took place on a Saturday, “more people were killed than were killed by the enemy.” 

A variant of the story had it that it was the familiar scratching sound of the sandals’ nail-heads on the ground outside the cave that had provoked to the hysteria, with its deadly consequences. 

Indeed, the dreaded nailed sandal was often equated in ancient sources with the might of the Roman legionary, and the word kalgas, from the Latin caliga, became a synonym for a fierce soldier. 

Nevertheless, the Talmudic rationale for the prohibition of wearing nailed sandals on the Sabbath was dismissed by most respectable scholars as too farfetched for serious consideration. 

Here again, archeology has altered our perspectives on the matter.

On a mountainous ridge overlooking Jericho, a cave was excavated in 1986, and it soon became clear that it was one of those caves that had served as a refuge for Jews during the Bar Kokhba uprising. The cave also contained the remains of a nailed sandal that had evidently belonged to a Jewish revolutionary. The owner of the sandals apparently perished in the cave, along with more than thirty men and women of diverse ages. 

This tragic episode, or one very much like it, might lie at the root of the halakhic prohibition against wearing the lethal footwear.

The Singularity Wars

(This is a introduction, for  those not immersed in the Singularity world, into the history of and relationships between SU, SIAI [SI, MIRI], SS, LW, CSER, FHI, and CfAR. It also has some opinions, which are strictly my own.)

The good news is that there were no Singularity Wars.

The Bay Area had a Singularity University and a Singularity Institute, each going in a very  different direction. You'd expect to see something like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front, destroying each other's food supplies as the Romans moved in.


The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence was founded first, in 2000, by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Singularity University was founded in 2008. Ray Kurzweil, the driving force behind SU, was also active in SIAI, serving on its board in varying capacities in the years up to  2010.

SIAI's two-part name was clunky, and their domain, singinst.org, unmemorable. I kept accidentally visiting siai.org for months, but it belonged to the Self Insurance Association of Illinois. (The cool new domain name singularity.org, recently acquired after a rather uninspired site appeared there for several years, arrived shortly before before it was no longer relevant.) All the better to confuse you with, SIAI has been going for the last few years by the shortened name Singularity Institute, abbreviated SI.

The annual Singularity Summit was launched by SI, together with Kurzweil, in 2006. SS was SI's premier PR mechanism, mustering geek heroes to give their tacit endorsement for SI's seriousness, if not its views, by agreeing to appear on-stage.

The Singularity Summit was always off-topic for SI: more SU-like than SI-like. Speakers spoke about whatever technologically-advanced ideas interested them. Occasional SI representatives spoke about the Intelligence Explosion, but they too would often stray into other areas like rationality and the scientific process. Yet SS remained firmly in SI's hands.

It became clear over the years that SU and SI  have almost nothing to do with each other except for the word  "Singularity."  The word has three major meanings, and of these, Yudkowsky favored the Intelligence Explosion while Kurzweil pushed Accelerating Change.

But actually, SU's activities have little to do with the Singularity, even under Kurzweil's definition. Kurzweil writes of a future, around the 2040s,  in which the human condition is altered beyond recognition. But SU mostly deals with whizzy next-gen technology.  They are doing something important, encouraging technological advancement with a focus on  helping humanity, but they spend little time on the end of our human existence as we know it.  Yudkowsky calls what they do "technoyay." And maybe that's what the Singularity means, nowadays. Time to stop using the word.

(I've also heard SU graduates saying "I was at Singularity last week," on the pattern of "I was at Harvard last week," eliding "University." I think that that counts as the end of Singularity as we know it.)

You might expect SU and SI to get in a stupid squabble about the name. People love fighting over words. But to everyone's credit, I didn't hear squabbling, just confusion from those who were  not in the know. Or you might expect SI to give up, change its name and close down the Singularity Summit. But lo and behold, SU and SI settled the matter sensibly, amicable, in fact ... rationally. SU bought the Summit and the entire "Singularity" brand from SI -- for money! Yes!

SI chose the new name Machine Intelligence Research Institute. I like it.

The term "Artificial Intelligence" got burned out in the AI Winter in the early 1990's. The term has been firmly taboo since then, even in the software industry, even in the  leading edge of the software industry. I did technical evangelism for Unicorn, a leading industrial ontology software startup, and the phrase "Artificial Intelligence" was most definitely out of bounds. The term was not used even inside the company. This was despite a founder with a CoSci PhD, and a co-founder with a masters in AI.
The rarely-used term "Machine Intelligence" throws off that baggage, and so, SI managed to ditch two taboo words at once.

The MIRI name is perhaps too broad. It could serve for any AI research group. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute focuses on decreasing the chances of a negative Intelligence Explosion and increasing the chances of a positive one, not on rushing to develop machine intelligence ASAP. But the name is accurate.

In 2005, the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University was founded, followed by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University in early 2013. FHI is doing good work, rivaling MIRI's and in some ways surpassing it. CSER's announced research area, and the reputations of its founders, suggest that we can expect good things. Competition for the sake of humanity! The more the merrier!

In late 2012, SI spun off the Center for Applied Rationality. Since 2008, much of SI's energies, and particularly those of Yudkowsky, had gone to LessWrong.com and the field of rationality. As a tactic to bring in smart, committed new researchers and organizers, this was highly successful, and who can argue with the importance of being more rational? But as a strategy for saving humanity from existential AI risk, this second focus was a distraction. SI got the point, and split off CfAR.

Way to go, MIRI! So many of the criticisms I had about SI's strategic direction and its administration in the  years I first encountered it in 2005 have been resolved recently.
Next step: A much much better human future.
The TL;DR, conveniently at the bottom of the article to encourage you to actually read it, is:

• MIRI (formerly SIAI, SI): Working to avoid existential risk from future machine intelligence, while increasing the chances of positive outcome
• CfAR: Training in applied rationality
• CSER: Research towards avoiding existential risk, with future machine intelligence as a strong focus
• FHI: Researching various transhumanist topics, but with a strong research program in existential risk  and future machine intelligence in particular
• SU: Teaching and encouraging the development of next-generation technologies
• SS: An annual forum for top geek heroes to speak  on whatever interests them. Favored topics include societal trends, next-gen science and technology, and transhumanism.

יום שלג בגוש עציון הנצור

המשימה: להגיע לגוש עציון המושלגת. לא הרחק מאלון השבות האגדי מחכה לנו שלג. שיחקנו שם בפאתי אלון שבות לפני שנה, והיה מדהים. שלג כזה רואים רק מדי כמה שנים. ויתר על כן, שניים מהילדים ואשתי היו בחגיגת בר מצווה באותה עת והחמיצו את החוויה. אם כן, ההגעה אל השלג היתה הכרחית.

יצאנו מעמק האלה מוקדם בבוקר (מוקדם למשפחה שילדיה אינם מורגלים לקום בשביל לימודים בבית ספר). אבל כשהגענו למחסום ג'בעה -- אוי לנו!  -- חייל חסם לנו את הדרך. ראינו שכמה נהגים עקפו אותו, אבל לא היה לנו אומץ לשים פס על כוחות הביטחון. פנינו לאחור. אנו מכירים היטב איך מכוניות בארץ, שנהגינן אינם מיומנים לתנאי קרח, מחליקות ופוקקות כל כביש ורחוב בימי שלג, אז ייתכן שהחסימה, לצערינו, מוצדקת.

ניסינו לעבור דרך צור הדסה. אבל בצומת רמת בית שמש   -- אוי ואבוי! -- חסמה המשטרה את הדרך.  גם בימי שלג קודמים ראינו את התופעה הזאת. כל הדרכים חסומות.

שבנו הביתה, פנינו נפולות.

כעת, היה צורך בתוכנית חלופית נועזת. לקראת הצהריים, יצאתי כסייר להקדים את המשפחה ולפתוח ציר לכיוון גוש עציון הנצורה, או לפחות למקומות מושלגים שבהם ניתן לשחק. האם נספיק להגיע לפני שהשלג ייעלם?

בצומת רמת בית שמש, עדיין חסמו שוטרים את הדרך. ברדיו שמעתי שאפילו כביש מספר 1 חסומה מלטרון ועד לירושלים. אם כן, רבצה עלינו הסכנה שהדרכים כולן תיחסמנה עד שיימס השלג, ולא נראה אותו בכלל!

אבל לו נואשתי. הכרתי דרך אחורית קטנה, כזאת שסיפקה את התקווה האחרונה לראות את השלג.

עברתי את מחסיה, וניגשתי לכביש העולה לנס הרים בדרך צדדית שעוקפת את הצומת. אבל לא היה צורך. לא היה שוטר שם והדרך היתה פתוחה לפניי! תוך שתי דקות ראיתי שכבה דקה של שלג על חלק מהסלעים. התקשרתי הביתה והמשפחה יצאה בעקבותיי, שהרי כדאי לצאת אפילו לראות כמה פתיתים, והלוואי שנראה עוד יותר.

ככל שעליתי להרים השלג התעבה. ליד נס הרים, השלג היה גבולי לצורך משחק בו. ליד בר גיורא, היה ללא ספק שחיק (זאת מילה?). בפארק בגין, היה ניתן לעצור כבר לשחק, כפי שעשו בני משפחתי לפני חמש שנים. השמש הקרינה את אורה על השלג, שנמס לפני עיניי. האם יספיקו להגיע אל השלג ולשחק בו?

כל הדרך עדכנתי אותם בטלפון, והם נוסעים 20 דקות אחריי.

אבל גם עתה לא אמרתי נואש. למרות שהנתיב בין ערימות השלג היה צר, ולמרות שביום שלג קודם הוא נחסם ליד חוסן, המשכתי מעבר לביתר עילית וחוסן ועד לדרך 60 הפונה דרומה אל הגוש. בנווה דניאל, השלג כבר נערם לגובה שוויצרי.

השומר בשער אמר שלא ניתן להיכנס ברכב, כי הדרכים הפנימיות חסומות, אז החלטתי להמשיך.  וטוב שכך. ליד אפרת, השמש התכסתה בענן, ועד לצומת גוש עציון שרר ערפל כבד. כבר לא היה חשש שהשלג יימס.

ובהיכנסי לאלון שבות -- הידד! החל לרדת עוד שלג! המשפחה בעקבותיי, נכנסנו ליישוב, ושם בפאתיו שיחקנו משחקים שרק עולי ארצות הכפור מכירים היטב מימי נעוריהם.