The Atomic Human

Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI

Neil D. Lawrence

Bellairs Research Institute

E S A R I N T U L
O M D P C F B V
H G J Q Z Y X K W

bits/min billions 2,000
billion
calculations/s 		~100 a billion
embodiment 20 minutes 5 billion years

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

  • Compare with technical debt.
  • Highlighted by Sculley et al. (2015).

  • Technical debt is the inability to maintain your complex software system.

  • Intellectual debt is the inability to explain your software system.

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason.

  • LLMs are already being used for robot planning Huang et al. (2023)

  • Ambiguities are reduced when the machine has had large scale access to human cultural understanding.

  • book: The Atomic Human

  • twitter: @lawrennd

  • The Atomic Human pages atomic human, the 13 , Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) 10–12, Bauby, Jean Dominique 9–11, 18, 90, 99-101, 133, 186, 212–218, 234, 240, 251–257, 318, 368–369, Shannon, Claude 10, 30, 61, 74, 98, 126, 134, 140, 143, 149, 260, 264, 269, 277, 315, 358, 363, embodiment factor 13, 29, 35, 79, 87, 105, 197, 216-217, 249, 269, 353, 369, baby shoes 368, cuneiform 337, 360, 390, intellectual debt 84, 85, 349, 365, separation of concerns 84-85, 103, 109, 199, 284, 371, intellectual debt 84-85, 349, 365, 376, sorcerer’s apprentice 371-374, Popper, Karl The Open Society and its Enemies 371–374, MONIAC 232-233, 266, 343.

  • podcast: The Talking Machines

  • newspaper: Guardian Profile Page

  • blog posts:

    The Open Society and its AI

Huang, W., Xia, F., Xiao, T., Chan, H., Liang, J., Florence, P., Zeng, A., Tompson, J., Mordatch, I., Chebotar, Y., Sermanet, P., Jackson, T., Brown, N., Luu, L., Levine, S., Hausman, K., ichter, brian, 2023. Inner monologue: Embodied reasoning through planning with language models, in: Liu, K., Kulic, D., Ichnowski, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Robot Learning, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. PMLR, pp. 1769–1782.
Lawrence, N.D., 2017. Living together: Mind and machine intelligence. arXiv.
Sculley, D., Holt, G., Golovin, D., Davydov, E., Phillips, T., Ebner, D., Chaudhary, V., Young, M., Crespo, J.-F., Dennison, D., 2015. Hidden technical debt in machine learning systems, in: Cortes, C., Lawrence, N.D., Lee, D.D., Sugiyama, M., Garnett, R. (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28. Curran Associates, Inc., pp. 2503–2511.
Susskind, R.E., Susskind, D., 2015. The future of the professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts. Oxford University Press.