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
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Durin's Day.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I was never meant to work on AI safety. I was never designed to think about superintelligences and try to steer, influence, or change them. I never particularly enjoyed ...
I describe the risk of personality self-replicators, the threat of OpenClaw-like agents managing to spread in hard-to-control ways.
Summary
LLM agents like OpenClaw are defined by a small set of text files and run in an open source framework which leverages LLMs for cognition. It is quite difficult for current frontier models to self-replicate, it is much easier for such agents (a...
It's easy to forget this in roarin’ 2026, but homo sapiens are the original vibers. Long before we adapt our behaviors or formal heuristics, human beings can sniff out something sus. And to most human beings, AI prose is something sus.
If you use AI to write something, people w...
To be clear about where I stand: I believe that AI labs are worryingly close to developing superintelligence. I won't be shocked if it happens in the next five years, and I'd be surprised if it takes fifty years at current traject...
The striking thing about reading what is potentially the most important document in human history is how impossible it is to take seriously. The entire premise seems like science fiction. Not bad science fiction, but—crucially—not hard science fiction. Ted Chiang, not Greg Egan. The kind of science fiction that's fun and clever and makes you think, and doesn't tax your suspension of d...
'Close enough' only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. – Traditional
After 10 years of research my company, Nectome, has created a new method for whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation for the purpose of future revival. Our protocol is capable of preserving every synapse and every cell in the body with enough det...
If you repeatedly tell Gemma 27B its answer is wrong, it sometimes ends up in situations like this:
I will attempt one final, utterly desperate attempt. I will abandon ...
In 1820, the Hungarian mathematician Farkas Bolyai wrote a desperate letter to his son János, who had become consumed by the same problem that had haunted his father for decades:
"You must not attempt this approach to parallels. I know this way to the very end. I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and joy in my life. I entreat yo...
So in practice this means running power over hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. E.g. here are ...
This post explores a notion I'll call Schelling goodness. Claims of Schelling goodness are not first-order moral verdicts like "X is good" or "X is bad." They are claims about a class of hypothetical coordination games in the sense of Thomas Schelling, where the task being coordinated on is a moral verdict. In each such gam...
It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.
Richard Gatling (1861)
2.
In 1923, Hermann Oberth published The Rocket to Planetary Spac...
There's a lot of disagreement about the new surveillance language in the OpenAI–Department of War agreement. Some people think it's a significant improvement over the previous language.[1] Others think it patches some issues but still leaves enough loopholes to not make a material difference. Reasonable people disagree about how ...
Experimental Infrastructure for Foundati...
Para...
N95s are made from meltblown polypropylene, produced from plasticpellets manufactured in a small number of chemical plants. Buildingmore would take too long: we needed these plants producing allt...
Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government's classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National La...
If we adopt safety best practices that are common in other professional engineering fields, we'll get there … I consider myself one of the x-risk people, though I agree that most of them would reject my view on how to prevent it. I think the wholesale rejection of safety best practices from other fields is one...
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