May 5, 2022

After several years of letting CascadiaPrime lie fallow it is my intent to refresh and renew CaascadiaPrime as a general AI resource.

Since CascadiaPrime was last updated, I sold my home, I was quarantined in Peru for several weeks, endured the uncertainties of the Covid19 pandemic and have been occupied with my investments. I have maintained my twitter stream @PJ_Muncaster which is focused on AI developments. Time constraints mean that the refresh will occur over an extended peiod.

A good deal has occurred in the field over the last five years and the needs of the AI community and the public at large globally have evolved. This will necessarily involve significant restructuring and redirection of the site.

CascadiaPrime will therefore - like the field itself - be a work in progress.

I continue to hope that CascadiaPrime will be useful to a broad audience seeking to understand AI developments and learn more about the field.

April 23, 2017

The era of AI quietly percolating in the background has passed. Artificial intelligence will be front and center as public policy issue in the decade ahead.

Governments will increasing be called upon to respond to major challenges that have at their roots AI developments. It is hard to underestimate the geopolitical implications of what lies before us. There is a great need to respond with evidence based reasoning and policy, to eschew hyperbole while at the same time acting with alacrity on key points of policy. The technology and its repercussions seem likely to challenge central tenants of both the left and the right producing both AIfriction and the potential for societal failures. Policy makers in differing jursidicions will be competing in time and to that end will require as much research data as can be obtained about the salient geographically and socially localized impacts.

CascadiaPrime Cognition will focus more on the social, economic and political implications of what I refer to as AIification. Technical developments will remain a focus for they will determine the when, where, why, how and what of AI's impacts.

CascadiaPrime Cognition will be a repository of easily accessible links to government and non-government reports on artificial intelligence that will be useful to political leaderships needing to quickly come up to speed.

CascadiaPrime Cognition's vision is to help manage the adaption of society to the changes that artificial intelligence will bring.

January 1, 2016

New Year's day has traditionally been a day on which one goes for a long walk and thinks about where one has been in the last twelve months and where one is going in the next twelve months. It is a time of reflection and inflection. My good fortune today is to be able to walk through the seaside village of Gibsons and along the shores of Howe Sound as I embark on this process. The air is crisp, the sun bright and the mountains snowcapped. Seagulls cry out and waves lap the shore.

CascadiaPrime Cognition has made significant progress in the last two years. It remains very much a work in progress. Developments in AI have come thick and fast in the last twelve months. I expect the next twelve months to be equally exciting. Staying abreast of key developments has proved challenging - my AI twitter account PJ_Muncaster has grown in followers and now numbers 1080+. More particularly the "quality" of those engaged continues to rise and I have been able to follow more individuals and institutions courtesy of a twitter policy/algorithm change. There do not seem to be enough hours in the day to stay abreast of AI developments AND make improvements in CascadiaPrime Cognition.

In the last twelve months I have made continued progress on building up my "sources" of high grade information on AI related developments sometimes assisted by the very AI technology that is now publically available to all. At the same time the signal to noise ratio in the popular press does not seem to have improved with the net result that curation takes more time. Articles need to be read and talks listened to that do not "pass muster". Some will be shared simply because they reflect "the popular cultural understanding" which in itself has value in hearing even if mistaken or lacking in nuance. AIification is not a technical issue it is a human issue and therefore a political issue.

Some in the AI commuity wish the issue of long term safety would go away. It will not. Even the most powerful and influential players are coming to realize this truth. At the same time many in the technical community are naive about how the world works and are prisoners of various ideologies whose prescriptions and biases will complicate the social and political adjustments necessary in the decade ahead. By taking risks in the presentation of information here and on twitter I hope that I will encourage others to begin to start the necessary public policy dialogue as we go forward.

One of the more interesting developments this last year has been that some in the central banking community have begun to think seriously about the implications of AIification.

Parts of CascadiaPrime Cognition will be reorganized in 2016 to reflect my own learnings and to improve the quality and relevance of the links to topics. I will also focus more on facilitating quick start learning of key aspects of AI. What we have witnessed in the last twelve months is an "awakening" of public attention to AIification. There will be a great need for public education and considered policy development by elected officials and civil servants. More particularly there will be a requirement for new ways of thinking about the opportunities and challenges of the next decade.

In 2016 I hope to do more writing in addition to curation. My focus will be on the development of AIification strategy.

July 16, 2015

Significant progress has been made over the last six months in rounding out the basic structure of CascadiaPrime Cognition and in populating its sections. A great deal more remains to be done. Over the last six months there have been a number of very important developments in the field both from a technical perspective and from a institutional development perspective. Those developments have been reported on via twitter @PJ_Muncaster and have informed the structure of CascadiaPrime Cognition.

I hope that you find value here. Should you have suggestions for the site's improvement I would welcome them.

January 21, 2015

CascadiaPrime Cognition content focus will shift in earnest this year as I focus more on cognition infrastructure developments.

I have felt for some time that there was a need for a website where artificial general intelligence professionals, students and explorers could stay current with developments in what has become an extraordinary, fast paced, multidisciplinary field with contributors from across the globe - in academia, in government, and in private enterprise.

I also believe that the public policy issues will need to be given serious attention. This site will provide a vehicle for those issues to be reasonably explored and discussed. It will be a resource centre for individuals looking to become more informed on the host of artificial general intelligence issues that will, for better or worse, be subject to more public discussion. It will seek as a matter of policy to avoid hype while at the same time capturing what is likely to be spirited public discussion in the years ahead.

Much of the general content of CascadiaPrime is being moved to my PatrickMuncaster.com website.

CascadiaPrime Cognition and patrickmuncaster.com will support my twitter stream: @PJ_Muncaster (880+ followers) which performs many of the functions of Cascadiaprime Cognition.

Should you have suggestions for improving this website then please, by all means, email me.

January 1, 2014

CascadiaPrime is the central hub of my personal learning network.

The look and feel of CascadiaPrime is undergoing a major overhaul. Rather than a flash cutover I plan to update several pages a day as time permits. In the interim expect style inconsistencies.

At this time, I have not fully mastered HTML 5 and I hand code so CascadiaPrime is and will likely remain a "technical work in progress" for some time. CasacadiaPrime doesn't present in the same way on all platforms but I try to keep it functional on mobile platforms for I use it myself on my iPad, my iPhone and my laptop.

The website's topics will largely remain the same as will the bulk of the links. Content renewal will occur as time permits.

The site's content focus will shift as I focus more on global knowledge and cognition infrastructure developments. The early stages of the Singularity are underway and my knowledge and "feel" for the subject is deepening. My sense is that it is the foremost existential issue of our time.

You can expect the focus on the rise of artificial intelligence (for lack of a better term) to continue.

CascadiaPrime supports my twitter streams: @PJ_Muncaster (the technology and existential stream) (690 followers) and @PatrikMuncaster (the general political and economic stream)

CascadiaPrime will support my PatrickMuncaster.com website which currently homes to Today's BC Liberals. (I was a candidate in the 2013 BC Provincial Election and it was a campaign website.) PatrickMuncaster.com will support a number initiatives I am considering.

I maintain a Facebook presence with both a personal and political account. (Patrick Muncaster). I also maintain a Google + account (Patrick Muncaster) where I post from time to time and focus on deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs, quantum computing, robotics and 3D Printing, Big Data and interrelated topics.

I hope you find CascadiaPrime useful and interesting. We live in fascinating times!