Break it all down
Yesterday I described an experience that impressed upon fifteen-year-old me the importance of speaking with urgency and courage when something awful is happening. I lived a fresh reminder of the importance of courage last week at PauseCon, a first-of-its-kind conference in Washington, DC run by PauseAI US. I was there in a personal capacity, and … Read more
The summer before my freshman year of high school, I attended a science-themed summer camp at the University of Florida. It was a cool week! I stood on top of a nuclear reactor. I accidentally sabotaged a lesson on overfishing and tragedy of the commons by independently reinventing the concept of community governance. (And militias. … Read more
A brief explainer on Claude Mythos Preview. Anthropic, makers of the Claude AI, just announced they aren’t going to release their latest model for now because it is too dangerous. Called “Mythos,” the new model found high-severity vulnerabilities “in every major operating system and web browser.” As New York Times reporter and Hard Fork co-host … Read more
Many people who are paying attention to the trajectory of AI worry about its potential to concentrate power. I think this is a reasonable thing to worry about, with some important caveats. If someone builds a superintelligence, I think they are far more likely to die ignominiously with the rest of us than attain a … Read more
This April 1st, I’m pleased to report that everything is fine. We did it! We saved the world. Congratulations, humanity. There are no more looming apocalypses, no desperate screaming crises, no unendorsedly miserable people on Earth, no creeping degeneration of death and aging existing as a perpetual affront against my values of life and flourishing. … Read more
Our civilization spends trillions of dollars each year on medicine to keep people alive. It seems to work pretty well; we live something like twice as long as our ancestors did, and although those years often face more limits than those of youth, it’s plain that living longer, healthier lives is worth pursuing. I don’t … Read more
In my occasional advising calls with aspiring AI Safety folks, one of the most common questions I get is “What courses should I take next?” I often find myself replying: “None; go do stuff instead.” Fabricando fit faber. By making, one becomes a maker. There are a lot of courses in AI safety and governance. … Read more
For several years now, I’ve been fielding calls from people who want to help make AI go well for humanity. Sometimes these folks are based outside the U.S., and often they ask me: With most of the labs concentrated in a few places (the U.S., China, and DeepMind in the U.K.), what are the rest … Read more
Not so un-Noahble after all Noahpinion wrote a post about AI; by the confluence of AI doom discourse and terrible pun, I have been summoned and I answer. First, points of agreement. Noah is worried about AI-driven bioterrorism. Hard agree. Novel pathogens are scary, and we’ve already seen that global readiness for even ordinary pandemics … Read more
Yesterday, due to a clerical error, Amanda and I came within a week of losing our house. I.From our perspective, it began with a letter in mid-November. TAX SALE NOTICE, the letter said. It was from our local municipality, and it said we owed $400 for “Utility”. If we didn’t pay it, they’d sell our … Read more