Argonauts: Organizations of Similar Interest

Over the next few years, the nascent Argonaut Council for Responsible Science recruited heavily from organizations with similar interests such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Institute for a Transhuman Future, the Lifeboat Institute, and the Singularity Foundation. Researchers at government organizations such as the UK’s Bletchley Park and the Chinese Machine Intelligence Directorate quietly subscribed as well. In most cases, these new argonauts kept their original affiliation, gi...

 Turing's Two Great Insights

Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, began by thinking about the highly conscious and deliberate step-by-step calculations performed by human “computers” like the women decoding German ciphers at Bletchley Park. His first great insight was that the same processes could be instantiated in an entirely unconscious machine, with the same results. A machine could rationally decode the German ciphers using the same steps that the conscious “computers” went through. And the uncons...