Many posts here are things I wrote long ago, some of which have aged… uh… awkwardly. I considered starting my blog from a clean slate with the relaunch of this website, but it’s fun to remember those days. A few recent posts are ‘reprints’ from my Substack, Armchair Pundit. I’ll write new pieces here or…
on agi and the alignment problem He is intelligent who reasons from truths; he is wise who lives according to them.—Emanuel Swedenborg, from Divine Love and Wisdom Today, of course, the Nazis are considered to be dunces, because they lost the war, but it has to be said that they managed to accomplish a great deal…
In 1942 Isaac Asimov wrote the three enduring rules of robotics: Asimov recognized philosophical and practical problems with the first law especially, and he put these problems at the center of many of his stories. He often explored the idea of allowing harm through inaction, and he sometimes created dilemmas where a robot could not…
I’ve been using ChatGPT quite a bit over the last few weeks to help me with some research and writing, and I’ve settled on a metaphor to describe the experience. In terms of both output and general demeanor, ChatGPT reminds me of times I have had a college intern at my disposal. In both cases…
AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, who made news last year when he resigned from his role at OpenAI, recently put out a report called AI 2027 that predicts alarming impacts of Artificial Intelligence to happen alarmingly soon. It’s the product of a collaboration among a small group of AI experts calling themselves the AI Futures Project, presented as a compelling…
On art and efficiency at the dawn of generative AI It feels like a weird and perhaps frightening time to be an artist, or to have artistic aspirations. Not long ago, it was common to imagine that the next wave of jobs to be made obsolete by machines might be so-called menial and repetitive ones…
On things we don’t talk about Cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person’s actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one…
Today at work I had one of those lengthy, impassioned discussions with the senior leadership of my company – the sort of discussion that makes me love working at a startup. We talked about our wishes for the product and our worries about where it is now, and we ended up with a list of…
I received a rejection email the other day from a man who had interviewed me for a job. I haven’t been rejected many times in my interview history, and I don’t think I’ve ever received a personal rejection email from the hiring manager directly. So I find myself reflecting on it. I’m not sure if…
Spotify has arrived in the US! Twitter was all abuzz when the announcement came, and lots of my friends jumped on board as soon as they could scrounge up invites. I was excited to sign up too, but then I procrastinated. And then procrastinated some more. For one thing, I have a pretty big collection…