Into the Rabbit Hole with George Strakhov

George has been thinking deeply about the AI/ intelligence space for a couple of decades, back when it was wintertime in AI Land ❄️🥶☃️⛸️... when there was a little less cultural heat and hype than today ☀️🥵🍉🍦

In the conversation we cover:

• George’s shift from corporate strategy to “robot midwifery”

• Letting go of control in creative work with AI

• The theory-action gap in LLMs and what it means for alignment

• Building agents that reflect human values

• Citizen science returning through better AI tools

• Consciousness, conflicting goals, and multi-agent systems

• The real OS-level battle beneath today’s AGI hype

Some awesome areas of exploration from George can be found below, things mentioned in the conversation as well as additional goodness:

• Newell, Shaw, Simon - The Process of Creative Thinking (1958)
  https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1320.pdf

• J.C.R. Licklider - Man–Computer Symbiosis (1960)
  http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

• Douglas Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
  http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engelbart-AugmentingHumanIntellect.pdf

• Herbert Simon & Allen Newell - Human Problem Solving: State of the Theory (1970)
  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/18ce/82b07ac84aaf30b502c93076cec2accbfcaa.pdf

• Marvin Minsky - Why People Think Computers Can’t (1982)
  https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/ComputersCantThink.txt

• Mark Pesce - Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace (1993)
  http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/fa.html

• Bret Victor - Stop Drawing Dead Fish (2013)

• Kevin Slavin - Design as Participation (2016)
  https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/design-as-participation

• Joichi Ito - Extended Intelligence (2016)
  http://v2.pubpub.org/pub/extended-intelligence

• Joichi Ito - Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto (2017)
  https://pubpub.ito.com/pub/resisting-reduction

• Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt - Oblique Strategies (1975)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

• Norbert Wiener - Cybernetics (1948)

• Norbert Wiener - Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

• W. Ross Ashby - Introduction to Cybernetics (1956)

• Herbert Simon & Allen Newell - Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving (1958)

• Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

• Herbert Simon - Sciences of the Artificial (1969)

• Seymour Papert - Mindstorms (1980)

• Robert Axelrod - The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

• Valentino Braitenberg - Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984)

• Frederick Brooks - The Design of Design (2010)

• Mitch Resnick - All I Really Need to Know About Creative Thinking I Learned in Kindergarten (2007)

• Ted Chiang - The Lifecycle of Software Objects

• Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano

• Yuri Lotman - Inside Thinking Worlds

• Mark Solms - The Hidden Spring

• Marvin Minsky - Society of Mind

• Lev Vygotsky - Works on play, socio-cultural development, ZPD

• Blaise Agüera y Arcas - What Is Intelligence?