1. Playing Go with Darwin by David Krakauer at Nautilus.  Krakauer explores the connection between games and evolution. Game patterns are apparent in the shaping of matter, the organization of matter into living structures, and in the social behaviour of human beings.
  2. 2020: A Year Full of Amazing AI Papers — A Review by Louis Bouchard. A list of the best AI papers of 2020  — including video explanations, links to in-depth articles, and code.
  3. How Claude Shannon Invented The Future by David Tse at Quanta Magazine. How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future. With his theory of communication,  a theory of how information is produced and transferred , Shannon advanced the work of scientists, mathematicians and engineers alike.
  4. MuZero: Mastering Go, Chess, Shogi and Atari Without Rules at Deepmind. A step on the long road towards general purpose algorithms.  Instead of trying to model the entire environment, MuZero just models aspects that are important to the agent’s decision-making process. 
  5. European Unicorns Software by Ben Evans. Company creation is spreading from the Valley across the world, but Europe is still lagging behind. Evans argues in a data-packed presentation that this gap is closing as Europe’s tech flywheel becomes stronger.
  6. The Problem of Now by John Martin Fisher for Aeon. Philosophy of time includes two main views: Presentism and eternalism. Fisher explores what this means in relation to the guidance of spiritual teachers to “be here now”.
  7. Medicine’s Machine Learning Problem by Rachel Thomas at Boston Review. While machine learning undoubtedly brings great benefits to medicine, we need dedicated effort to reduce the errors they may cause. Eradicating errors is a high-effort activity requiring sophisticated skills — a time, cost, and reflection commitment that many players are not willing to take.
  8. AI Update: Late 2020 Dumpster Fire by Filip Piekniewski. A somber look at the state of AI, showing the gap between proclaimed and actual results of well-known companies. “I think the real AI winter will come once everyone will finally realize that self driving cars are not coming anytime soon.”
  9. Natural Language Generation: The Commercial State Of The Art In 2020 by Robert Dale at Cambridge University Press.  Commercial NLG turning data into text is well established. Neural NLG such as GPT-3 is more experimental, but “[…] set to redefine our notion of authorship”.
  10. Identical Twins Are Not So Identical, Study Suggests at The Guardian. Identical twins might not be as “identical” as previously thought. Mutations during embryonic growth differed on average by 5.2 mutations.