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
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
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
I seem to be unusually resilient to heartbreak. I once had the following conversation with someone I seriously considered marrying (paraphrased, but as honestly as memory allows): Her: I don’t think this is going to work out. I think we need to break up. I’m sorry.Me: That sucks. But if you really think so, thanks … Read more
A senior Pentagon official was quoted yesterday saying “We’re going to invest in autonomous killer robots.” That is, perhaps, an alarming sentence to hear. The real threat is not the robots, however, but the autonomy. Quote in full: This administration cares about weapon systems and business systems and not ‘technologies.’ We’re not going to be … Read more
Richard Hanania wrote an excellent post today covering the fear that AI will take human jobs. I found it intriguing enough that it prompted me to write up my own thoughts. This post, however…is not about jobs. In a way, neither was Hanania’s. I like his section headings, though, so I’m just going to keep … Read more
In a recent bonus episode of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast, Eneasz Brodski shared a thought experiment that caused no small amount of anguish. In the hypothetical, some eccentric but trustworthy entity is offering to give you an escalating amount of money for your fingers, starting at $10,000 for the first one and increasing 10x per … Read more
Recently someone asked me: “If you build a automaton, and it goes out and kills someone by following your preloaded inputs, is it put on trial for murder, or are you?” Good question. Disclaimer: In all the EXTREMELY FICTIONAL cases below, the judge is following Joe’s ethical framework rather than any actual legal precedent. Any … Read more