Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
I must confess that I had a hectic summer so far and haven’t found the time to write something new here. I’m still here working on new writings about all things Turing Church, and preparing new podcasts. But this newsletter mostly includes material that I’ve published elsewhere, with links, excerpts, and commentaries. Scroll down to take a look. But first:
The domain turingchurch.net of my older Turing Church website has stopped responding. The website itself is still there at medium.com/turing-church/. This has broken all internal links, but if you want to read an old article just replace turingchurch.net with medium.com/turing-church/ in the URL. I’ve now forwarded the domain turingchurch.net to my current Turing Church website (turingchurch.com).
Same for my personal website giulioprisco.com - I’ve now forwarded it to my X articles page.
This is a Medium issue. I stopped using Medium when they stopped allowing new independent domains (they want writers to use Medium’s own branding), and I’ve found Substack much better.
My late lamented friend Mike LaTorra left us a few days ago. Mike was a brave explorer of the land where technology meets spirituality. Read about him in Chapter 5 of my book “Tales of the Turing Church” (2020). As a tribute to Mike, I’ve reprocessed and republished the audio of a chat with Mike of a few years ago, about “Re-Engineering Re-Incarnation.”
Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:
Space expansion: Rick Tumlinson explains the hows and whys
I recommend Rick Tumlinson's book to all space enthusiasts - it will boost your enthusiasm and help you see this new exciting phase of human spaceflight from a cosmic perspective.
Tumlinson repeatedly insists that expanding into the solar system and then to the stars, protecting the natural environment of this planet, and building a fairer, nicer and much more inclusive society, are compatible goals that we should be pursuing at the same time. Actually, space expansion can directly help the other two goals - for example, moving heavy industry to outer space would help heal, restore and protect the Earth’s environment.
On the visionary side, Artificial intelligences (AI) will be our partners in space expansion, and eventually there will be a merging of man and machine. “You,” says Rick in a letter to our successors, “may be reading it through eyes that are sensors,connected to your central processing unit.” Meanwhile, we should “raise them as our children.”
At the end of the book, Rick says he hopes to upload himself into an AI or a machine and keep going. “Maybe I’ll be the first spacefaring mind,” he says defiantly, “riding the circuits of a lightship, watching over the great migration of humanity into the cosmos.
In memory of Ervin László, system thinker and visionary prophet
László's legacy is that of a rare figure who moved fluidly between hard systems science, global policy work, and speculative cosmology.
My last obituary published in Mindplex honored my late friend Ralph Abraham. This obituary honors the memory of Ervin László, of whose recent passing away I learned with great sadness. Ralph Abraham admired Ervin László: “When a great grand unified theory will appear it will very likely conform to the prophetic vision of Ervin Laszlo,” he said in his foreword to László’s “The Connectivity Hypothesis” (2003), “In this book, he points the way to an integral science of cosmos and consciousness, and provides the conceptual foundations for it: the hypothesis of connectivity. He puts before us the essential elements of the emerging paradigm of science in the twenty-first century.”
“A universal information- and memory-field could exist in nature, associated with the fundamental element of physical reality physicists call the unified field,” he said in “The Akashic Experience” (2009).
I was on track, more or less: Moravec speaks
A recent interview with Hans Moravec, published in The New York Magazine, and commentaries.
Dan Kagan-Kans has interviewed roboticist and futurist Hans Moravec (open copy) The interview is published in The New York Magazine. Moravec, a legendary prophet of weird singularities, rarely gives interviews these days.
I found very interesting Moravec’s comments on the neural network approach. While he got the game-changing importance of computing power right, he thought artificial intelligence (AI) would be “written like software” and used to be dismissive of neural networks. Today’s AI is centered on neural networks and, while the pure neural network approach must be augmented by all sorts of other tricks to get an AI that sort of works, it can be argued that neural networks do the bulk of the work. Neural networks are significantly more inscrutable than traditional software systems, but Moravec thinks we’ll have to live with that. “We’re going to have to make way for them anyway,” he says.
Another point that I found very interesting is Moravec’s sober but not hopeless attitude toward death. We know there’s much we don’t know about how things really work, and I can live with a 50% chance of a wild afterlife. Moravec doesn’t elaborate on what the wild afterlife could be like, but in light of his published works and interviews I suspect he might have in mind something like high-fidelity reconstructions of the past created by the mind fire of future superintelligence.
A thoughtful and definitely worth reading commentary by Daniel Arjona (in Spanish) frames the interview as the year’s strangest and most moving piece on AI: the story of a prophet who correctly timed the arrival of human-level intelligence and yet will not enter the promised land.
A 110-Minute AI Movie for $2 Million: The Making (and Open-Sourcing) of Cully Hill Boys
A full length film about three rappers who accidentally steal money from a crime boss and find themselves in deep troubles - entirely AI-generated.
“We made the first 110-minute AI feature film with a real cast, The Cully Hill Boys, on Higgsfield for $2,000,000,” Higgsfield AI posted on X on August 10. “Watch full film below.” Higgsfield has also posted the full film on YouTube.
Could I have told that the video and sound were AI-generated if I hadn’t known? My honest answer is, probably yes, but perhaps only if I watched with real attention. Meaning that, seeing some scenes on TV while thinking about other things, I guess I wouldn’t have asked myself the question. Therefore, and in view of the fact that this is still very new, kudos and five stars to Higgsfield.
What about the film itself? Well, I guess it is not Oscar material (but then, thinking of some films that have won Oscars, perhaps it is). Some scenes are evidently meant to showcase the capabilities of the AI tools used, but without exaggerating (and again, this is one of the things that I probably wouldn’t have even noticed as a casual viewer).
I could have watched the film for only 15 minutes to check the technical aspects, but I watched it all because it was interesting and fun enough, certainly on a par with most Netflix content.
ELI5: Hyperon for complete idiots (part 2)
Hyperon is the artificial intelligence (AI) framework developed by Ben Goertzel and his team. This continues part 1.
Hyperon is the artificial intelligence (AI) framework developed by Ben Goertzel and his team. This is my first followup to “ELI5: Hyperon for complete idiots (part 1),” written in December of last year. Here I say something about the Hyperon programming language MeTTa (to be continued) and a significant new development in Hyperon: OmegaClaw (also to be continued).
“OmegaClaw is the first thing out of our long-brewing Hyperon AGI research initiative that the average person can actually sit down and chat with in a simple way,” says Ben Goertzel. “It’s basically an attempt to take an OpenClaw-style cognitive architecture, re-implement the bones of it in MeTTa - which, recall, was designed for self-modification - and then bolt it onto the Hyperon AtomSpace as long-term and working memory, so the agent has a real symbolic substrate it can reflect on, revise, and reason over.”
All started with the launch of OpenClaw in late 2025 and the rapid rise of OpenClaw and Moltbook (a social network for bots) in early 2026. Peter Diamandis called it the Lobster revolution. “The lobsters (yes, that’s the mascot, inspired by Charles Stross’s Accelerando),” he said, “have arrived, and they’re not leaving.” In Stross’ novel, we first meet them when researchers are uploading Californian spiny lobsters into cyberspace, “one neuron at a time,” and then again and again as the Singularity unfolds on this planet and in the vast universe out there.
“Super fun!” posted Ramez Naam about OpenClaw, “Like a Charlie Stross novel!” Naam added “Not a sign of AGI.” But using this technology in the pursuit of AGI in the Hyperon framework is exactly what Goertzel and his team want to do.
I’m now the proud caretaker of an OmegaClaw bot. I called my bot Wunchy (full name WunchyBot) because I wanted a name out of Accelerando (the Wunch is a collective of nasty cybernetic aliens originating from the original digitized lobster minds). Installation and testing notes in the post.