1. Overfitting: A Guided Tour by Alex Hayes. An in-depth summary of overfitting across prediction and inference problems, supervised and unsupervised learning, and in the context of training and test errors.
  2. Moloch Hasn’t Won by Zvi Mowshowitz. In his seminal essay Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander painted a rather bleak picture of the forces that shape our world. Five years later, Mowshowitz argued for the counterforce Elua, wich retains freedom and value in the cracks of perfect competition, optimization, and evolutionary forces.
  3. Human Body-On-Chip Platform Enables In Vitro Prediction of Drug Behaviors in Humans at Wyss Institute. In 2012, DARPA created a challenge for a functional human Body-on-Chips platform connecting different high-fidelity Organs-on-a-Chip to predict human behaviour to drugs. Now, a Harvard team has won the challenge.
  4. Alien Nations: Why Life on Other Planets Will Resemble Ours by Steve LeVine for OneZero. As the same laws of physics, biology, and geophysics apply to other habitable planets, there are certain characteristics that likely apply to alien civilizations as much as to us.
  5. On the Ontological Development of Consciousness by Jessicata at LessWrong. “[…] the world-perception ontology has conscious experience as a component. For, how else can what were originally perceptual patterns be explained, except by positing that there is a camera-like entity in the world […] that generates such percepts?”
  6. Technologies to Watch in 2020 by Esther Landhuis for Nature. Biotech is an exciting industry promising rapid advancements in the coming years – from cryogenic freezing to analyse macromolecules to RNA sequencing. 
  7. AI-Powered Robot Warehouse Pickers are Now Ready to go to Work by Karen Hao for MIT Technology Review. Covariant The robotics firm Covariant developed a robot arm – trained by a neural net – to handle different types of objects, therefore expanding the use case from very standardized processes. 
  8. Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot by Adiwardana et al. (2020). “AI will never be able to tell jokes.” After the release of Meena, a Google Brain chatbot with a 2.6B parameter neural net, we can cross that statement off our lists. 
  9. If Brains are Computers, What Kind of Computers are They? 2013 Daniel Dennett Transcript by Ben Pace at LessWrong. “Brains aren’t like commercial software, the kind that they use. Brains aren’t made of Silicon. They’re not Von-Neumann machine architectures. But there are other kinds of computers.”
  10. First AI-Designed Drug Enters Phase I to Treat OCD by Jonathan Smith for Labiotech. Exscientia applied automated drug discovery to find a promising medicine for OCD. They used databases of DNA sequences, protein structures, and drug actions as well as scientific literature and patent databases to generate molecules likely to stimulate the serotonin-producing machinery. The drug is now approved for testing.