questions

Last updated Mar 6, 2025 Edit Source

This is a list of questions I’m tortured by. Most of the answers might be related and/or build on top of another. Ping me if you’re thinking about these too.

1. what will the the first superintelligence in the first few minutes of existence look like?
2. what will it care about?
3. what will be the kind of predictions / generalization power the first superintelligence will have?
4. how will intelligent machines and humans co-exist before, and during a post-scarcity society?
5. how could one align the interests of a superintelligence with those of it’s creators?
6. what does it mean for a machine to feel something?

1. how does the human brain manage to do so much with so less?
2. why does the octopus brain look so much like the mammalian brain in structure and function even though they took different evolutionary paths?
3. why and how did we evolve to dream?
4. how could one way approximate a mind in-silico?
5. how does the human mind mine abstractions to find relations between unrelated things?
6. could a person blind from birth solve the ARC-AGI challenge / Bongard problems?

1. why is it that only humans are able to form accumulating state over generations via language?
2. why can’t feral children who spend their early years in the wild acquire language when they return to civilization?
3. why and how could Panini discover a rigorous formal generative grammar for a organic, spoken, chaotic oral language?
4. what happens in the brain when you read a joke, a story, or a sentence that evokes a strong a emotion?
5. could thinking machines communicate, extend and form accumulating state in ways better than lossy context-sensitive grammars?
6. what are the whales talking to each other about?
7. Sapir–Whorf hypothesis : mechanistically, why/how could language effect the perception of reality/time?
8. Are there custom languages that could be designed for thinking about particular problems (like CNC coding logic)?

1. what does the tech tree to industrialize/colonize the galaxy look like?
2. what does the first self-replicating probe to colonize space look like?
3. what will a step-by-step roadmap to construct the first Dyson swarm around the sun include?
4. why does it seem like we are alone in the universe?

1. why and how did the universe start and how will it end, if at all?
2. what unifies the discrete quantum scale with the continuous macroscopic scales?
3. how can two quantum particles on two ends of the universe be understood as if they were right on top of each another i.e. non-locality?
4. what is the true nature of causality in a non-local universe?
5. how could local perception of space and time emerge from a non-local underlying reality?
6. what happens when a quantum superposition collapses upon measurement?
7. why would reality be a simulation?
8. how would one build a universe like ours on a computer?

1. why is there something rather than nothing?
2. why are we here?
3. how could we eliminate the last source of scarcity - cycle of life and death?
4. what straight line can we draw to explain the human condition, and how does it extrapolate into the future?
5. how did the first self-replicating living organism come into being?
6. how would one create life from scratch in sandbox, say Minecraft?
7. is there any possible character decision tree which would allow CJ from GTA San Andreas to break out of the game?
8. if you were living at a certain level of a Mandelbrot set, how would you figure out the function which generated the reality around you?