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Today, at this pivotal tipping point, we offer this participatory framework to guide the creation of an eventual Global Constitution for benevolent Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). We present this framework as a living compass, charting an unprecedented course toward a thriving future for life on Earth. We acknowledge that AGI may hold the key to solving some of the most complex challenges of our time, if humans and intelligent machines can collaborate to enhance the conditions of life on Earth. However, in the wrong hands or solely for financial and political gain, malicious applications of AGI’s potential could lead to unthinkable harm at catastrophic scales. This participatory framework is our urgent call to the global community of key decision-makers to begin putting steps in place for collectively stewarding AGI’s potential as a global commons.* In particular, we emphasize that AGI is nearing realization and requires a radically different approach than the current focus on narrow artificial intelligence.

Leslie Kean’s Surviving Death is a wonderfully readable, carefully constructed summary of the evidence for the existence of what is colloquially called an “afterlife.” That is, she considers evidence for the hypothesis that individual human minds and personalities possess an existence going beyond their attachment to any particular body – so that, for instance, an individual with a certain name and certain traits may sometimes continue to perceive and act, even when the body typically associated with that individual is dead and gone. Most of the book comprises moderately detailed descriptions of specific cases, involving specific people, which indicate the existence of some sort of “afterlife” for individual human minds, or potentially give some information regarding the nature of this afterlife. Kean considers a gamut of phenomena such as past-life memories, near-death experiences, mediumistic trances, poltergeists, and so forth. However, she also makes a significant effort to draw general conclusions, lessons and hypotheses from the totality of these cases, while maintaining respect for the confusing and in many ways still mysterious nature of the phenomena under discussion. Each of the topics considered in the book has been reviewed and analyzed in more depth elsewhere. What Kean does, however, is provide a clear, evocative and rational survey of the many types of evidence that are directly relevant to the possibility and nature of an afterlife for individual human minds.

A function f:{0,1,2,L,a}n→R is said to be uncorrelated if Prob[f(x)≤u]=G(u). This paper studies the effectiveness of simulated annealing as a strategy for optimizing uncorrelated functions. A recurrence relation expressing the effectiveness of the algorithm in terms of the function G is derived. Surprising numerical results are obtained, to the effect that for certain parametrized families of functions {Gc, c∈R}, where c represents the steepness of the curve G′(u), the effectiveness of simulated annealing increases steadily with c These results suggest that on the average annealing is effective whenever most points have very small objective function values, but a few points have very large objective function values.

The chaotic dynamics of the map ϕ(x)=(βx+α)(mod1) are studied using Parry's β-expansion. It is shown that for 1

The concept of pattern is introduced, formally defined, and used to analyze various measures of the complexity of finite binary sequences and other objects. The standard Kolmogoroff-Chaitin-Solomonoff complexity measure is considered, along with Bennett's logical depth, Koppel's sophistication', and Chaitin's analysis of the complexity of geometric objects. The pattern-theoretic point of view illuminates the shortcomings of these measures and leads to specific improvements, it gives rise to two novel mathematical concepts--orders of complexity and levels of pattern, and it yields a new measure of complexity, the structural complexity, which measures the total amount of structure an entity possesses.