Featured Articles – Page 2

Transmitting fibers in the brain: Total length and distribution of lengths

The human brain’s approximately 86 billion neurons are probably connected by something like 850,000 km of axons and dendrites. Of this total, roughly 80% is short-range, local connections (averaging 680 microns in length), and approximately

Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of AGI

We aren’t convinced by any of the arguments we’ve seen to expect large discontinuity in AI progress above the extremely low base rate for all technologies. However this topic is controversial, and many thinkers on

2017 trend in the cost of computing

The cheapest hardware prices (for single precision FLOPS/$) appear to be falling by around an order of magnitude every 10-16 years. This rate is slower than the trend of FLOPS/$ observed over the past quarter century,

Progress in general purpose factoring

The largest number factored to date grew by about 4.5 decimal digits per year over the past roughly half-century. Between 1988, when we first have good records, and 2009, when the largest number to date was factored, progress was

2016 Expert Survey on Progress in AI

The 2016 Expert Survey on Progress in AI is a survey of machine learning researchers that AI Impacts ran in collaboration with others in 2016. Details Some survey results are reported in When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?

Conversation with Tom Griffiths

Participants Professor Tom Griffiths, Director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Finan Adamson, AI Impacts. Note: These notes were

Examples of early action on risks

Details Discussion There are many current efforts to mitigate risks from artificial intelligence. We might learn something about the likelihood of these efforts influencing AI risk by looking at similar past efforts. To this end, we are interested here

Costs of extinction risk mitigation

We very roughly estimate that the annual cost of reducing the probability of human extinction by 0.01% is within the range of $1.1 billion to $3.5 trillion. Introduction This article is intended to be usable

Returns to scale in research

When universities or university departments produce research outputs—such as published papers—they sometimes experience increasing returns to scale, sometimes constant returns to scale, and sometimes decreasing returns to scale. At the level of nations however, R&D

Coordinated human action as example of superhuman intelligence

Collections of humans organized into groups and institutions provide many historical examples of the creation and attempted control of intelligences that routinely outperform individual humans. A preliminary look at the available evidence suggests that individuals