A what now?
At the moment I’m an amateur independent scientist and you’d be wrong to think that means I work in academia. What this means is I’m financially responsible for funding my own experiments. In other words my research is funded by my other sources of income. This may turn out to have many advantages. The reproducibility crisis and the growth of meta-science have demonstrated that much research is of low quality and often false. To what extent can my research make a difference? I suppose we’ll have to find out with time so I’ll document all my findings and procedures here at graphsociety.org/science.
Independent scientists were formerly known as “gentleman scientists” of whom many of which lived between the 14th and early 19th centuries when such responsibilities were more common. If you’re looking for current-day independents I’d suggest looking into Stephen Wolfram, Susan Blackmore, James Lovelock, and Julian Barbour.
Historically famous independents
I find these humans either inspiring or interesting in some way. Like all things from history it’d be wise of you to take whats good and leave the rest in the past where it belongs. Nobody’s perfect.
- Aristotle
- Nikola Tesla
- Isaac Newton
- Charles Babbage
- Ada Lovelace
- Albert Einstein
- Charles Darwin
- Thomas Young
- Henry Cavendish
- John Dalton
- Oliver Heaviside
- Robert Kraichnan
- Antoine Lavoisier
- Alfred Lee Loomis
- Antony Garret Lisi
- David Rittenhouse
- Alexander Shulgin
- Mary Somerville
- Henry Fox Talbot
- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
My research goals
I do believe it may be possible to create entities more “intelligent”, whatever that may mean, than human beings by a factor of a billion. What this would mean for human societies I can only speculate. Will they be friendly? Well, they’d need us to build them initially. Are there levels of understanding incomprehensible to humans? Will humans still control the world? I don’t know nor do I believe anyone can really know before we have created it. I’ve always tended more towards being an inventor than forecaster anyway. GPU-based AI is certainly a version of attempting what I’ll be researching but I don’t believe we’re approaching the concept of intelligence correctly by using GPUs.
I strongly suspect new forms of computing will needed of which such forms are starting to take shape in research labs around the world. That’s where I’m going to place my bet. I suspect when people look back at now in 100 years we’ll laugh at how quaint our GPU-based AI systems were. Or perhaps I’m wrong, I suppose only time will tell. C’est la vie.