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