Zen, art and data visualization

Once, many years ago, a young boy lived in the Redwood forest of Northern California.  He gazed up at the trees and marvelled that these massive, ancient beings were no less alive or sentient, in their own way, then he was.  He wondered what it meant to be alive and intelligent and conscious.  He conferred with elders, both living and past; Norbert Weiner, Teilhard de Chardin, Dogen, Heidegger, Hinton, Norvig.  But he was also attracted to works of the human mind; the Stanford Linear Accelerator, The Exploratorium, robotics.  And more than anything else, he built.  He built using scavenged electronics; he built physics experiments like cloud chambers.  

Soon came computers and then the internet.  Maybe building computational representations of mind was the best path to exploring the questions of philosophy?  So he built… not because he wanted to be a god, but because he wanted to contribute to the Conversation and explore what it means to be alive.  

But eventually he had to make his way in the world.  So he became an itinerant monk, traveling through industry often in the guise of a designer or researcher or product manager.  The years went by and along came machine learning, then deep learning and LLMs.  AGI seemed to be right around the corner.  It was clear there were interesting questions that he was uniquely suited to address;

Why aren't customers adopting my awesome new enterprise AI product?

What is an AI theory of mind and how does it set my product apart?

How do we reproduce social, embodied and emotional intelligence in LLMs?

How do I benchmark my enterprise AI product?

How and why do LLMs and agents fail?  How do they recover or explain themselves?

As he traveled the Earth, he looked for other curious, empathetic people with similar interests.  Perhaps you are one of those people?

Gatē Gatē Pāragate Pārasamgate Bodhi Svāhā