User:Krunchyman

About Me
I have a bachelor's degree in computer science. I intend to achieve a Ph.D in computer science and become a research scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. My particular interests include neural networks, unsupervised learning, natural language processing, cognitive architectures, and cognitive robotics.

Outside of computer science, I have interests in mathematics, physics, Chinese, Greek and Roman history, philosophy, political science, economics and chemistry, among other things.

What I Do
I previously worked as a healthcare application programmer, geoinformatics research assistant and intern in web application development and data science.

My Formative Years
When I was a child, I was radically curious. In elementary school, I spent a ridiculous amount of time smashing open rocks with hammers, just because I wanted to know what they looked like on the inside. I trapped and poisoned bugs so I could study them in detail and add them to my collection, and found freakishly weird creatures like amoebas and tardigrades with an 80 dollar microscope. I read everything--science fiction novels, texts on philosophy, theology, political science, computer programming, geology, botany, military history, chaos theory, robotics and field crickets, Wikipedia articles on cheeses, James Bond films and concurrency, and portions of the Encyclopædia Britannica. I read The Art of War and the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History both at least five times, and got over halfway through Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science before my renewal requests expired and I had to take it back to the public library. Before I reached middle school, I had read over 200 books. At that time, I decided that the most important thing in life is to be curious.

What I Want
When I was in high school, I discovered artificial intelligence and came to believe it could be an amazing gift for the world. I began to envision a future where benevolent AIs ruled the world and helped humans fix all their problems. I became obsessed with building such an AI. In college, I became particularly fascinated by the artificial neural network model, a discovery more beautiful than anything I had ever seen before or since. I self-studied self-organizing maps, recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, LSTMs and classical techniques such as adversarial search, and wrote my own implementations in Python and C++ so I could have a fuller understanding of how they worked. I became convinced that sub-symbolic AI could lead to strong AI, although I have kept my mind open to traditional and hybrid approaches. I began scheming about how to build a strong AI, picked up some ideas in systems theory, and filled up hundreds of notebook pages with notes on math, neuroscience, statistics and machine learning, drafts of crude AI architectures, drawings and various writings.

That is where I am now, and I will not stop until the whole earth is governed by machines of intelligence, grace, compassion, and fairness. I hope that our machines will give us immortality and fully immersive virtual reality. With our perfect health and beautiful, youthful bodies, we will all run around in the nude and frolic in lush parks on a terraformed Mars where every STD has been completely eradicated and free, legal LSD is handed out like candy on Halloween.

My main mission is to build an oracle and ask it how to build a strong AI. With this approach, we should be able to get some clear directions, or at least know what we don't know. Because oracles are disembodied and restricted to question-answering, we can avoid traditional issues of uninhibited growth that plague AI safety discussions.

My worldview is based around the idea that technology can solve all of our problems, and that if we play our cards right on AGI, the human race can achieve radical development unimaginable to us in our current state. Not only would the whole galaxy become accessible for exploration, we might also develop an enhanced capacity for sexual and spiritual experiences, and engineer new states of altered consciousness. As the handaxe provided leverage to early humans against lesser animals, artificial intelligence could provide a kind of intellectual leverage to reach those developments. The motivation is not so much to reach the highs but to banish the lows--the fact of our own biological mortality and bewilderment at a universe full of indifference and suffering. For an atheist, the existence of evil is a brute fact that cannot be explained away as a test from the divine, and must be accepted as it is. If we can change it, then we must take it upon ourselves to do so.

However, in recent times (2021-), I have drifted more towards the idea that mysticism is truly the ultimate pursuit of the human species, and that technology is just a tool for initiating these experiences (through brain-computer interfaces, neuroprosthetics, psychotropic drug design, etc). I adopted idealistic and panentheistic views after one such powerful experience. Yet I maintain a rigorous skepticism towards all religious phenomena and continue to repudiate organized religion, miracles and the paranormal. The logician Graham Priest called the problem of evil a "dealbreaker" in an interview, and I suspect this still might be the case even for more impersonal conceptions of God.

Having recently developed my political views by reading theory, I have moved away from the highly naive technocratic authoritarianism of my high school years and the washed-out centrism and liberalism of my college years, moving towards libertarian socialism, anarchism and leftism in general. Inspired by the Spanish Anarchists, I now mostly align with anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism. Based on my readings of the labor theory of value, I support post-capitalism, economic democracy and market abolitionism. I believe in ranked voting, progressive taxation and market socialism as intermediate measures.

Backburner
I want to learn music theory and start a music band and write a book on science fiction, John von Neumann or AI. I also think it would be cool to become fluent in Chinese, French, Latin and ancient Greek, and create a protocell from scratch at home. For grad school, I am considering pursuing a master's degree in philosophy or linguistics in addition to a Ph.D. In all likelihood, I'll probably be working in the industry for a while first.

How to Find My Projects
If you want to see my AI projects or contact me for some reason, my GitHub is github.com/wheelspawn. I am working on some projects that seem perpetually unfinished. I should probably finish those before moving on to annihilating the world's governments with freak AIs.

Wikipedia Contributions
My contributions are mostly minor. I've made at least 150 edits over the course of the last seven years (not related to my user page). My most major contribution was writing an article about Nick Bostrom's "Oracle AI", an idea he promotes in his book on superintelligence. The article was deleted, but fortunately the writing lives on because it was merged into Friendly artificial intelligence.

Other "Random Facts" About Me You Probably Don't Care About (Although If You've Come This Far, I Guess You Probably Do)
I was depressed for about three years in college, which would explain some of my, ahem, "performance" during classtime. I had fallen in love with a woman in elemetary school named Henrietta Humperdinck and she, well, didn't love me back. And she was there with me through middle school and high school. I tormented myself over it. For about three years, I would get up in the middle of the night to howl at the moon like a madman with a soul ravaged by unrequited love. It took me until my 2018 semester to fully get over it, forgive and forget. I had to pound cup after cup of coffee just to get anything done. Don't do drugs, kids. Also, I am stupid. Well, not really. Although I will fully admit--I have no natural talent for math and CS. I've always been better at things like philosophy and the humanities. The reason I've gotten as far as I have with math and CS is because of raw persistence, obsession, and curiosity. Also, (unless you happen to be Thales) philosophy doesn't pay the bills. Machine learning pays the bills. Do machine learning instead.

My most formative book had previously been Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. This book taught me that the best path to success was to be like Elon and work hard, don't whine, never give up, think for yourself, always look for new things to learn, and focus on the nontrivial issues. Nowadays, I strongly repudiate the book and its subject, as I consider capitalism and capitalists to be inherently exploitative. In its place, I hold Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels as the book that got me off the path of capitalism and the mistaken role I thought I had in it. Also, I really liked Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. It inspired me to be even more curious than I already am, take good notes, and notice the little details. But do not go to this guy for advice on time management or how to finish everything you start. He was horrible at it.

Thanks to being born in the 20th century, I am alive today. If I, among many other children alive today, were somehow born into any other past era, I most likely would have died. I have medical knowledge and amazing doctors to thank for fixing the atrial septal defect that began to cause me serious issues at 18 months old.

Chemistry is a breeze for me, but physics baffles me. I cannot do physics. At. All. Maybe one day I will sit down with Morin's classical mechanics textbook and hurt myself until I start to get it. Until then, I'm stuck not knowing why fally stuff falls and why speedy stuff go speedy in other direction when it touch other speedy stuff.

My favorite food is banana Laffy Taffys, with jelly beans a close second. I rarely indulge in desserts anymore because I try to keep a stable blood sugar level. I weigh 64.9 kilograms and have not deviated from it by any more than 0.9 kg over the last few years, despite numerous changes in diet and exercise habits.

Why Capitalism Isn't Cool and Elon Musk Sucks
Capitalism isn't cool. If you like capitalism, you shouldn't. You should be like the cool kids who trash talk it all the time. Even if they aren't aware of it it, there's some serious theory behind their opinions. Most people like capitalism because they think they can become capital owners, but simple reasoning proves this is impossible. Even if everyone successfully adopted the "CEO" mentality, CEOs are just organizers of labor. It doesn't make sense for everybody in a society to have that role, unless they directly own their own labor (like under socialism). What would happen under capitalism is exactly nothing: if everybody in a society linearly increased their own competitiveness, nobody would increase their competitiveness relative to each other. That's why the "society of entrepreneurs" some right-libertarians want is bullshit.

Elon Musk sucks too, even though the rocket technology behind his companies is extremely impressive. Why? Elon Musk likes to say he isn't in it for the money. Maybe that's true, but then he would have incorporated his industries as worker cooperatives at the very least. He's in it for the power. Yes, he doesn't want to give up control over his companies and try some radical experiments in worker self-organization and self-management. If he did, I think it would save him a lot of trouble. For one, managers would have to be transparent about the production problems that almost bankrupted SpaceX. If they weren't, they'd be fired by the workers who hired them. Furthermore, he doesn't pay taxes but receives your taxes as subsidies for his business, all for the purpose of sending a few rich people on a suicide trip to that frigid, hellish rock we all know and love.

I'm not opposed to space exploration. The way it should be done is through democratic allocation of resources, where we would vote on where to send our labor output. Under this system, Elon could reasonably expect that a good portion of people would consistently vote to allocate resources towards his management, as public support for space exploration has always been high. This would actually be a more stable solution than capitalism, because Elon wouldn't be dependent on making his operations profitable to shareholders just looking to cash out at some point. Indeed, this is already happening in some sense—minus the democratic input—because of the aforementioned lobbying for subsidies.

And I haven't even covered the shitcoin peddling, market manipulation tweets, COVID-19 misinformation, defamation lawsuits, bullshit technology predictions, sexual assault allegations and altogether cringeworthy persona. He might be seen as the savior that was supposed to rescue capitalism from stagnation and decline, but he's turned out to be no different than all those other insufferable planet-destroying assholes.

Bill Gates is maybe just ignorant and not a bad guy at heart, although all his philanthropic work seems to have done nothing to change the system and mostly only helps capitalists retain hegemonic control by making the poor dependent on them.

Now Jeff Bezos is an even more insufferable doofus. I mean, during his interview, he couldn't help but be barefaced in acknowledging that every Amazon employee helped pay for his ten minute carnival ride into space.