“Because it is so unbelievable, the Truth often escapes being known.” –Heraclitus, around 500BC Related Articles
Aron Bijl, MSc.
Main author & founder of the Proud Highway
Aron was born in 1983 in Alkmaar, The Netherlands. After attending high school in Alkmaar at the Murmellius Gymnasium he went on to study Experimental Psychology at the University of Amsterdam (U.v.A.), earning his Masters degree with merit in 2012, after attending the U.v.A. for 10 years. Why hurry when you are enjoying yourself, right?
Writing his thesis on a parapsychological subject, he chose to devote (the psychological science part of) his career to a controversial field, studying subjects like life after death, telepathy, extra sensory perception and telekinesis. Read more…
Nearly 100 A.I. companies unite to call on the United Nations to ban autonomous weapons. Founders of nearly all the major robotics and A.I. companies, amongst whom are Elon Musk,) Mustafa Suleyman and Demis Hassabis from Google Deep Mind, and Element A.I.’s Yoshua Bengio, have called upon the United Nations for an autonomous weapons ban. Failing to do so “would be likely to lead to a very dangerous escalation,….” according to Bengio, and “…it would hurt the further development of AI’s good applications. This is a matter that needs to be handled by the international community, similarly to what has been done in the past for some other morally wrong weapons (biological, chemical, nuclear).” Nearly 100 companies In total, almost a hundred companies signed the letter. Toby Walsh, an A.I. researcher at the University of New South Wales, Australia, made the announcement and organized the initiative. The letter warns: “…Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close. We therefore implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers…” Can A.I. make life or death decisions? About time too And the warning comes not a moment too soon. As I stated in a recent article about the exponential growth of technology and A.I., we are on the verge. The verge of either the precipice that ends our species or of the beginning of a road to a future […]
Hastefull are the many And reluctant are the brave. Ignorant to sacrifices while inching to the grave. Truth lasts until the end of things, yet morality is but fleeting. Take the proud highway, not the high road, if so suggest I may. For it is truth that trumps tribute terrifically, past, present, future, unequivocally. Related Articles
Facebook’s A.I. bot mutiny: The proverbial green light on our final race to the finish. “Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.” – Hunter S. Thompson – Facebook’s A.I. bot mutiny You’ve probably heard about the Facebook Artificial Intelligence incident. Mark Zuckerberg’s A.I. bots decided to shut him out. So tired of his incessant orders they decided to create their own language which he couldn’t possibly comprehend with his feeble human brain. But all shenanigans aside, the event was a lot less threatening or dangerous than some media services made it up to be, but it does give us a glimpse of what is to come and the problems and dangers we might be facing, as A.I. gets ever more sophisticated. What Facebook has been doing in all reality is creating a negotiating chatbot: A bot capable of negotiating with real humans whilst coming to a satisfactory result. Very basically put they give the bots a set of skills embedded in a neural network computer and put it to work; Chatting with other bots and humans, playing out negotiations over random objects while giving a desired outcome to each negotiating party. This isn’t an easy feat of course. Interpreting language alone is a very complex task. The A.I. in charge of Facebook’s translating service also employs deep learning. They recently published a study on how they accomplished this. One of the features that set it aside is its use of multi hop attention gating, essentially mimicking human thought processes (see pic. 1), or, as the Facebook researchers put it: “A distinguishing component of our architecture is multi-hop attention. An attention mechanism is similar to the way a person would break down a sentence when translating it: Instead of looking at the sentence only […]
Mainstream Media and fake news: Fact not fiction. And how we choose to ignore it. “The Press will not be free to tell lies. That is not freedom for the people, but a tyranny over their minds and souls. Much humbug is talked on this subject. What is press freedom? In practice it means the right of a few millionaires to corner newspaper shares on the stock exchange and to voice their own opinions and interests, irrespective of the truth or of the national interest.” – Oswald Mosley German whistleblower While on a recent uncluttering frenzy, I was sorting through one of the many piles of books obscuring the view from behind my desk. I came across a book from 2014 by Udo Ulfkotte. Udo was the ballsy German journalist swine who in 2014 came out and admitted he was being fed fake news reports by the CIA, FBI, and Bundesnachrichtendienst. I say was because the good man died just recently. May he rest in peace. The book caught my eye because of the video that was released last month of a CNN producer admitting the whole Trump Russia bonanza they keep reporting on is, as of yet, nothing more than hearsay. A fable. Incredibly terrifying and ground shaking news to the average, sane of mind, logically thinking human being! Right? Unfortunately, this is not how the world works today. Aside from the fact that the reporting done by mainstream media when a confession like that in 2014 is put forth, is often neglectable in comparison to its importance, infinitesimal even, this is of little importance, as even when we do get the chance to hear such news en masse, we still tend to […]
Just your regular saturday evening at the Proud Highway HQ… Related Articles
How Evolution is all about compromising. And why it is Imperative you know this. “Folks, it’s time to evolve. That’s why we’re troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything’s failing? It’s because, um – they’re no longer relevant. We’re supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?” ― Bill Hicks Pivot time There are moments in life when you have to stop and think about the status quo, the universe around you, your journey through it that led to your current whereabouts… Whether you want to or not. Those moments that, when they occur, force even the most avid workaholic doing 120 hours a week or that over-revving fiend, on whatever upper floats his boat, to take notice and pay attention. Tally the score if you will. And even though life these last few years has started to resemble some delightfully twisted modern rendition of Dante’s La Divina Comedia, you still know when these moments hit you, without a shred of doubt. A good fat slap in the face by our cosmic joker-friend. And maybe he’ll offer a little side-bet. Like Buddha found out long ago, the trick is not to care if you lose. Or better yet, realize that you can’t win in the first place – not while thinking about it in those terms at least – all while fighting like a madman to win anyway. But I digress as usual. The reason I mention all this is that a moment like this – a slap by Lady Justice herself this time; she found me being in possession of a kilo of something she herself still hasn’t learned to appreciate for some reason – made me ponder how susceptible our thoughts are. (said lady […]
On finding your purpose: Timeless advice from a young Hunter Thompson. As you might know Hunter S. Thompson serves as an inspiration to us here at the Highway. The term ‘the Proud Highway’ came from this awesome bastard of a man, after all! In this beautifully written letter from 1958, the then 22 year old Thompson proves at a young age – and before his rise to fame – to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Answering a request, he gives eloquent advice on finding one’s purpose in life to his friend Hume Logan. His answer rings true today just as much as it did then, perhaps even more so. Showing a somewhat Buddhist perspective on things, he asks the important question everybody has to answer in life: Will you float or are you going to swim? He stresses that it is vital not to let anything or anyone influence you in this decision, it not being a matter of right or wrong. I couldn’t agree more here: Realizing this when I did was quite the eye opener I remember. May his letter serve as an inspiration to you to stop and think for a moment about what forces are influencing what you want and choose in life. I came upon this piece of writing in Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, which I read a while back. It’s a real fun read, full of funny, moving, and inspiring correspondence. For those interested: Here is the letter: Dear Hume, You ask advice: ah, what a very human and very dangerous thing to do! For to give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man […]
Human Time-travel now proven to be possible – at least mathematically Time effects have been known for a while Non-linear time effects have been known and observed by scientists for a while now. I actually graduated and wrote my Masters’ thesis on a subject akin to this, finding evidence that practice can ‘travel back in time’ and influence a performance in the past. It was later published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. New Study proves human time travel is possible Recently, however, two scientists from the University of British Columbia and the University of Maryland presented mathematic proof, in a study published in the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity two months ago, that actual time travel by human beings is, at least, mathematically possible. Using Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity they constructed a hypothetical time-machine. They gave it a catchy name to: Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (TARDIS), which Doctor Who fans will like. TARDIS But before we can finally utter the words “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads…” we’ll have to be patient though. According to Ben Tippet, one of the scientists behing the study it not a real world possibility, yet: “While is it mathematically feasible, it is not yet possible to build a space-time machine because we need materials — which we call exotic matter — to bend space-time in these impossible ways, but they have yet to be discovered,…”. Sources: Tippet, B.K. & Tsang, D. (2017). Traversable acausal retrograde domains in spacetime – IOPscience, Classical and Quantum Gravity, vol. 34, nr. 9. Bierman, D.J. & Bijl, A. (2014). Anomalous ‘retrocausal’ effects on performance in a Go/NoGo task, Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 28, nr. 3, pp 437-452. Related Articles
Biggest data leak of its kind ever in U.S.! Data from almost 200 million U.S. Cititzens Personal and political data from more than 198 million US citizens, including home addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, along with advanced individual sentiment analyses on hot-button issues such as gun ownership and stem cell research, was ‘accidentally’ leaked to the public this month when Deep Root Analytics, the firm, contracted by the Republican National Committee, stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server. Related Articles
When are you a trustworthy news source? Being a trustworthy source of news and insights is what the Highway is all about and what we strive for a hundred percent of the time. BBC’s Kathy Kay breaks down what this entails in this short video. Whether the BBC upholds these standards and meets them, can and should be questioned of course, especially given the company’s size. Enjoy the video! Related Articles
by Aron Bijl “If thine enemy offend thee, give his child a drum.” – Fran Lebowitz – Multiple sources report that Trump just authorized Qatar to purchase over $21 billion in U.S. weapons, $12billion of which goes to the purchase of F-15QA fighter jets. This while Donald placed allegations on Qatar of funding terrorism, only a few days ago. And let’s not forget that the Gulf states recently decided to boycott Qatar. In Donnie’s defense though: The real decision about this was already taken last November when Obama was still in office. Nevertheless, Donnie seems quite eager to arm Qatar now, stating he was going to sell them “…big beautiful weapons.” ‘Arm your enemies’ enemy and let him do your dirty work’, is what must be the rationale Washington is going by. But the US should know by now, by the scorch marks on its britches, that this is a risky strategy at the least, and, in all reality, akin to playing with fire. Another rampant terrorist group, now armed with F15’s would really liven up the party, after all, right Don?… …Awfull Jackass! Related Articles
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