Productivity
😐
The black hole of time swept back through last week. I’ll try time blocking again this week, a technique I experimented with earlier in the year, though my plans will be less ambitious this time.
Math
😐
I finished learning RemNote and transferring my notes. I was able to make more progress last week because more of my project time evaded the black hole. I’ve come up with a template for my notes on each topic, so I’ll probably fill in the gaps in my earlier notes at some point, but for now I’ll continue the prealgebra notes from where I left off. Then I can get back to algebra.
AI
🙂
David Vernon’s Artificial Cognitive Systems: A Primer is a helpful overview of the issues and options. I picked this one up a while back because it covered some of the cognitive architectures I’d just discovered. Deep learning has always seemed to me like only a piece of the cognitive puzzle, and I wanted to see what work had been done assembling more of the picture. The book is compact yet nuanced, and it gives me lots of directions for further research.
Rebooting AI by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis gives me still more directions for research. Most of the book is about the ways deep learning is a dead end for AGI, but I was already on board with that notion. I was more interested in the constructive part of the book toward the end. For example, I want to look into the idea that concepts are defined in terms of the theories they’re embedded in.
I was a little unsure of the book’s audience. It seemed to be written for the general public but also appealed to the AI community to change its focus. Maybe the authors were targeting newcomers to the field.
