Hello from a lot of places! :) I'm Chinese (Shanghai), studying in Brighton England, and lives in Vienna Austria (Moving to Prague Czech soon). How I discovered LW is not a very long story.
I have a great interest in artificial intelligence. I was reading James Barrat's 'Our Final Invention' and he mentioned AI-Box experiment which got me excited (because just that morning I was reading an article about the Turing Test and how it's very unreliable in measuring intelligence in machines; AI box experiment might be a better experiment in the future?). Before he elaborated the story in chapter 3 (which i found out later), I googled this experiment and led me to Yudkowsky's website. After reading through the thread on the experiment (some really interesting conversations between Yudkowsky and the challengers; I still disagree with James Higgins who denied most of the questions raised by Yudkowsky and giving ambiguous answers). Then I was curious about the link given to me by google which led me to a publicised log of a AI box experiment. It led me here and i had a look around. A whole website about rationality. It's like i found a gold mine.
I am currently studying ALevels - maths, further maths, computer science and physics. I wish to study computer science with artificial intelligence in the future in uni. My goal is computer science and philosophy at Oxford.
Anyways, in the future I wish to contribute more on this website. I believe that sharing thoughts is the best way to expand our knowledge, better than reading books. I am writing an EPQ on the safety of ASI so hopefully i can get some inspiration from the LW community. My interest in life is easy, just question everything, so please bear with them. :) A rational world should be everyone's goal. With the development of AGI/ASI, i hope our world will be a better place and rationality is the key. I am so happy I found this place and I hope I can help make a difference.
will the conference be available online?