LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma. If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.
Episodes
—Janus, who did not in fact write the LessWrong post. Unless otherwise specified, ~all of the novel ideas in this post are my (probably im...
My diagnosis is simple: most laypeople and policy makers have not heard of AGI, ASI, extinction risks, or what it takes to prevent the development of ASI.
Instead, most AI Policy Organisations and Think Tanks act as if “Persuasion” was the bottleneck. This is why they care so...
(Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath, happy to lie, cheat, and steal, whenever doing so is selfishly beneficial, and with callous indifference to whether anyone (including its own programmers and users) lives or dies?
Me: Yup! (Alas.)
Optimist:...
Prior to my last year at ControlAI, I was a physicist working on technical AI safety research. Like many of those warning about the dangers of AI, I don’t come from a background in public communications, but I’ve quickly learned some important rules. The #1 rule that I’ve seen far too many others in this field break is that You’re an AI Expert - Not an Influencer.
Wh...
The female reproductive system is one of the fastest aging parts of human biology. But it turns out, not all parts of it age at the same rate.
The eggs, not the uterus, are what age at an accelerated rate. Freezing eggs can extend a woman's fertility wi...
The world does not just ”keep working.” It keeps getting saved.
Y2K was a real problem. Computers really were set up in a way that could have broken our infrastructure, including banking, medical supply chains, etc. It didn’t turn into a disaster because people spent many human...
Does anyone reading this believe in Xhosa cattle-killing prophecies?
My claim is that it's overdetermined that you don’t. I want to explain why — and why cultural evolution running on AI substrate is an existential risk.
But first, a detour.
Crosses on Mountains
When I go climbing in the Alps, I sometimes notice ...
This work was done as part of the Anthropic Fellows Program under the mentorship of Nick Turner and Jeff Wu.
I...
Recommended soundtrack for this post
As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin:
Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanis...
Me on the far left. From WSJ.
I. Why?
There's a genre of horror movie where a normal protagonist is going through a normal day in a normal life. Ten minutes into the movie his friends bring out a struggling kidnap victim to slaughter, and they look at him like this is just a normal Tue...
The concept of goal-models is b...
But psychedelics also help against one of the world's most painful conditions — cluster headaches. Cluster headaches usually strike on one side of t...
This mostly worked for all sorts of other technologies, where technologists would predict society to be radically transformed e.g. by everyone having mos...
If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then ever...
Anthropic[1] recently published a new piece of research: The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? (arXiv, Twitter thread).
I have some complaints about both the paper and the accompanying blog post.
<...
The If Anyone Builds It website includes a March page, wherein you can pledge to march in Washington DC, demanding an international treaty to stop AGI research if 100,000 people in total also pledge.
I designed the March page (although am not otherwise involved with March...
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