We've been told by VCs and founders in the AI space that Human-level Artificial Intelligence (formerly AGI), followed by Superintelligence, will bring about a techno-utopia, if it doesn't kill us all first.
In order to fulfill that dream, AI must be sentient, and that requires it have consciousness. Today, AI is neither of those things so how do we get there from here?
Questions about AI consciousness and sentience have been discussed and debated by serious researchers, philosophers, and scientists for years; going back as far as the early sixties at RAND Corporation when MIT Professor Hubert Dreyfus turned in his report on the work of AI pioneers Herbert Simon and Allan Newell entitled "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence."
Dreyfus believed that they spent too much time pursuing AGI and not enough time pursuing what we would call "narrow AI". This quote comes from the conclusion of his paper...
Vernor Vinge is a legendary and recently deceased sci-fi author. I’ve just finished listening to the first two books in the Zone of Thought trilogy. Both books are entertaining and culturally influential. The audio versions are high-quality.
A Deepness in the Sky is about two spacefaring human civilizations with clashing societal structures converging on a mysterious solar system where a third, alien spider civilization is undergoing an industrial revolution. This combination of high-tech spacefaring and low-tech steampunk or fantasy shows up in both books and is one of the most compelling and unique parts of Vinge’s work. It allows him to focus on depicting rapid technological change. This is surprisingly rare in sci-fi which mostly takes the Star Wars or Trek route of depicting advanced but static technology.
Vinge also introduces the idea of “programmer archaeology” in this book. After ...
The last ten years have witnessed rapid advances in the science of animal cognition and behavior. Striking results have hinted at surprisingly rich inner lives in a wide range of animals, driving renewed debate about animal consciousness.
To highlight these advances...
Per the discussion in my last advertising post, I'm currently aiming to write a post every 3 months advertising EA infrastructure projects that would otherwise struggle to get and maintain awareness.
Please let me know if there's a project I should add (see inclusion criteria...
I've put them all in a sequence, whose link is at the very top, but I guess they need something more visible?
This post is easily the weirdest thing I've ever written. I also consider it the best I've ever written - I hope you give it a chance. If you're not sold by the first section, you can safely skip the rest.
Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement,...
My definition of “capitalism” is:
An economy with capital markets (in addition to markets in goods and services).
Most of my friends and acquaintances generally don’t have a precise definition of “capitalism”, but use the word to mean something like:
...The
I think of publicly traded firms as "publicly" (collectively) owned in the sense that many members of the public own shares of them directly or indirectly through things like ETFs and mutual funds. It gets complicated by the fact that ownership of most publicly traded companies is concentrated among a few stockholders.
The Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) is an EA organization working on cause prioritization research as well as grantmaking and donor advisory. This project was commissioned by the leadership of the Meta Charity Funders (MCF) – also known as the Meta Charity...
The 2020 EA survey link says "More than half (50.7%) of respondents cited 80,000 Hours as important for them getting involved in EA". (2022 says something similar)
I would also add these results, which I think are, if anything, even more relevant to assessing impact:
I wanted to reflect on my first year as a full-time community builder at EA Switzerland. The lessons I share here might be more useful for people who are more or less involved in community building or field building / coordination, but I think some of them are not only work-useful but also life-useful (at least to me). I don't think they are specific to the Swiss context either.
So here is a pile of things I (re)learned:
I tend to prepare meetings and think about the best ways to make the conversation time as useful as possible. Most of the time, it is also what's expected of me, especially when the person I'm meeting with is very busy and their time is more valuable than mine. And I might project that need for time optimization for all my meetings.
This involves a lot of guesswork and anticipation about...
Written by Claude, and very lightly edited.
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, guest Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and the Blueprint project, laid out a thought-provoking perspective on what he sees as the most important challenge and opportunity of our...
I thought this summary by TracingWoodgrains was good (in terms of being a summary. I don't know enough about the object-level to know if it was true). If roughly accurate, it paints an extremely unflattering picture of Johnson.
Could someone please explain how much extra value this adds given that we already have the Cambridge declaration?