This is a podcast primarily about the work of philosopher and physicist David Deutsch and related matters (such as Popperian epistemology). I read from and comment upon the books ”The Beginning of Infinity” & ”The Fabric of Reality” (both by Deutsch), ”The Science of Can & Can’t” (by Deutsch’s collegue Marletto) and ”Rationality” by Pinker (so far). In addition I make stand alone episodes about topics like resources, environmentalism, economics, science, philosophy, epistemology (especially explanations) and reason broadly.
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This is a podcast primarily about the work of philosopher and physicist David Deutsch and related matters (such as Popperian epistemology). I read from and comment upon the books ”The Beginning of Infinity” & ”The Fabric of Reality” (both by Deutsch), ”The Science of Can & Can’t” (by Deutsch’s collegue Marletto) and ”Rationality” by Pinker (so far). In addition I make stand alone episodes about topics like resources, environmentalism, economics, science, philosophy, epistemology (especially explanations) and reason broadly.
This is the extended "director's cut" of a talk delivered for "RatFest 2025" (next year to be "Conjecture Con"). This also serves as a supplement to my "Doom Debates" interview which can be found here: https://youtu.be/koubXR0YL4A?si=483M6SPOKwbQYmzb
It is simply assumed some version of "Bayesian reasoning" is how AI will "create" knowledge. This misconception permeates the https://ai-2027.com paper, as well as Bostrom and Yudkowsky's work on this, as well as that of every other AI "Doomer" and even on the other extreme the so-called "AI-Accelerationists". All of that indicates a deep misconception about how new explanations are generated which comes from a deep misconception about how science works because almost no one in the field of AI seems to think the *philosophy of* science is even relevant. I explain what has gone wrong:
00:00 Introduction
09:14 The Big Questions and the new Priesthoods
18:40 Nick Bostrom and Superintelligence
25:10 If anyone builds it, everyone dies and Yudkowsky.
33:32 Prophecy, Inevitability, Induction and Bayesianism.
41:42 Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos.
49:40 AI researchers ignore The Philosophy of Science.
58:46 A new test for AGI from Sam Altman and David Deutsch?
1:03:35 Accelerationists, Doomers and “Everyone dies”.
1:10:21 Conclusions
1:15:35 Audience Questions
ToKCast
This is a podcast primarily about the work of philosopher and physicist David Deutsch and related matters (such as Popperian epistemology). I read from and comment upon the books ”The Beginning of Infinity” & ”The Fabric of Reality” (both by Deutsch), ”The Science of Can & Can’t” (by Deutsch’s collegue Marletto) and ”Rationality” by Pinker (so far). In addition I make stand alone episodes about topics like resources, environmentalism, economics, science, philosophy, epistemology (especially explanations) and reason broadly.
