An AI approach to (public health) policy. When a pandemic strikes, policy-makers face a complex decision about what intervention(s) are best for society — both in terms of lives and dollars. The calculations are too complex and emotionally-fraught for human policy-makers to perform well. I propose a future where an…

If we want to solve the “big” problems (climate, poverty, pandemics, etc.), we need to solve some “smaller” problems first. By getting a handle on these smaller problems, we position ourselves to attack something bigger. I am in process of finding some smaller problems I care about and want to…

Truths to hang onto in a post-truth world. (1) There is such a thing as right and wrong. This sounds obvious — like something we’d all want to be true. Yet when it comes down to the details of messy real-world situations, we see that we often can’t agree on right vs wrong. Indeed, I’d argue most issues in our…

Some people blend in to whatever culture they land in. Others do the opposite. We can call these types chameleons and contrarians, respectively. Chameleons know how to change their colors to blend in. They get along with people easily, are highly agreeable and empathetic. They can assess the environment they’re…

I have long believed that the best things to do are the things that drive you internally, rather than those things that solely bring extrinsic rewards (e.g. payment, etc.). So when I recently came across the below lecture, “Behavior without Utility” (by Prof. …

We need ways of making collective decisions as a society and building consensus, if we’re going to solve our large challenges. We need it for this pandemic. How are we going to solve it? With a vaccine? With lock-downs? Not solve it at all, just let it take its natural…

If COVID-19 were 10 times as deadly, we would have eliminated it by now. It would have been so clearly dangerous, that we would be unwilling to accept its continued spread, and we would work harder to eliminate it. …

Biology One major influence on my view of AI, was spending 2 years in a synthetic biology lab. I came to appreciate how much intelligence is contained in living systems (even as simple as a cell). And attending Michael Levin’s NeurIPS 2018 keynote underscored that the key to intelligence is not…

If we want to talk about general intelligence, with agents that undergo life-long, open-ended learning, then we have to talk about agents existing in a continuous feedback loop with a changing environment. It’s not enough to design a “perfectly intelligent” agent, that we train just once and then put out…