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General Intelligence :

YKY (Yan King Yin)'s Home Page

Bio

I studied a number of subjects: computer science, neuroscience, biochemistry, business, etc, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1989-1993) and at Hofstra University, NY, USA (1996-2004). I had wanted to become an academic researcher but since 2004 I gradually changed my mind to become an AI entrepreneur instead.

Originally I was (and still am) interested in mind uploading — see my other web site: Soft Uploading. My vision is to develop a practical approach to indefinite life extension and to make it available to the broadest population possible within the shortest time. Prior to 2003, this is where I put most of my energy.

In 2004 I decided that, if the "transhumanist" vision is to happen at all, artificial intelligence would be indispensible. Therefore I turned my attention to the development of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

2009 April, update: I am now working with 2-3 partners on an AGI prototype in Lisp. It will be opensource. Contact me to join the project!

My AI web pages are about 1 year out of date. I am currently writing a book to replace the web contents. You can download this book draft (pdf) to preview.

What I look for in a candidate for collaboration

I try to be as open-minded as possible, but somehow we need to find some common grounds:

  1. The AGI project is going to be opensource, but we will make some money by offering tech support, add-ons, and other niceties.
  2. Your AI approach is essentially logic-based, (eg, first-order logic, or Bayesian network lifted to first-order, etc)
  3. Your AI theory is concerned with the following areas:
  4. You are not strongly opposed to probabilities and fuzziness for approximate reasoning

If your ideas are in this neighborhood, there is a high chance we can work on something.

Political stance

I'm trying to form a (hopefully more coherent) political view, but it's been rather difficult. So I'll just list some of my views for now:

  1. I am basically for capitalism because it seems to be a sensible and civilized way to resolve human conflicts.
  2. I'm atheist but I'm friendly to religious people as long as they don't nag me about it.
  3. I used to be vegetarian but gave up because it was too tough for me. Everyone of us is killing animals — my brother is a vegetarian, but he drives a car and travels often by air, which causes environmental change that drives many species extinct.
  4. The reason why we can (usually) kill animals but not humans is simply that killing humans often has bad consequences due to retaliation.
  5. I'm basically for the one-child policy in China because overpopulation is a tragedy-of-commons type of situation that (probably) needs some form of regulation.
  6. I'm for the death penalty because otherwise people would exploit that to commit hideous crimes.
  7. I don't completely agree to democracy and the notion of "basic human rights", for the same reason as above — people will take them for granted and start to exploit them (for example, being lazy or backwards, or keep breeding irresponsibly).
  8. I am socially liberal which means I think people should be free to do whatever they want as long as they don't disturb others.
  9. Economically, I'm still undecided, and I'm not good at economics. On the one hand I think big government tends to be beareaucratic and inefficient, but I guess there should be some ways to regulate the economy, re-distribute wealth , and to take care of poor people. I believe in the longer term, the world economy would tend towards highly libertarian as that seems to be the most efficient form.
  10. I try to optimize for staying alive as long as possible, and that includes making moral choices etc. Though it's not always clear what those optimal choices are.
  11. I deeply care about the environment but I don't think conserving it is always the top priority.
  12. I envision AI to be a tool for human beings, not as sentient entities although that's a possibility that someone else may be interested in.

In my business I plan to create an environment in which people can work together without discrimination (be it race, sex, age, nationality, etc), and not just paying lip-service to that — the web-based collaborative platform is designed precisely with this purpose in mind. The platform operates by weighted peer voting and is completely transparent to members. Anything more democratic would not be making money!

Trivia

I got my first computer at age 11, which was a TRS-80 with a Z-80 CPU, a clone of Intel's 8080. Thus I grew up being more familiar with the WinTel architecture more than others. My favorite programming languages are: English!, C, x86 Assembly, and Lisp (still learning). For my AI project I'm using Lisp for the prototype and will probably use C++/C#/Java for development.

I use Windows as well as Linux. Issues like operating systems and programming languages should not be impediments to collaboration.

I'm currently living in Hong Kong. If you come here and you're interested in AI, we should meet and have a chat! =)

I don't have any hobbies except for throwing boomerangs once a while (some of my boomerangs). I'm also addicted to chatting on IRC.

My guestbook: sign / view.

Other things I'm curious about:

  1. I'm very interested in the problem of why ancient civilizations decline and why some societies (such as modern China) are somehow more backwards compared with Western ones. I have been greatly inspired by Jared Diamond's books Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005). Is the decline of civilizations related to thermodynamic entropy? or chaos theory? etc.
  2. I'm also very interested in the scientific basis of morality. Why is it not right to kill people (under normal circumstances) but eating animals is acceptable by many?

email: General_Intelligence(at)hotmail(dot)com


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