Hello from Morningside! It’s good to be back.
Before we dive in, thank you for tuning into another episode of my pseudo-monthly “thoughts” (the last update was in August, oops). Thank you in particular for supporting artisanal blogging. As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out, we are in a strange liminal time where it’s getting harder to compete with AI for attention:
So while I still have yours, here are the thoughts I’ve most wanted to share with you these past few months!
🗣️ 8/5
Debate is an excellent way to get acquainted with a matter. In its ideal, it seems like a natural way to approach Pareto-optimal information exchange, as both parties volunteer the information the other is least likely to have considered. I highly recommend this one between Conor Leahy and George Hotz, which efficiently exhausts many of the common armchair arguments about AI doom.
Unfortunately, debate is rarely carried out in ideal circumstances. If y’all have watched presidential debates lately, you’ll know exactly what I mean: rather than information exchange, the candidates are forced to optimize for sound bites. I’d like to propose a better alternative: a Wikipedia for debate, where entire communities can face off and develop their arguments and supporting evidence, free of distraction.
☢️ 8/6
Every time I turn my attention to the climate crisis, I’m shocked by two things:
How dire the situation is.
How reasonable it is to think that nuclear fission could fix a lot of it.
The tension between the intractability of current affairs and the existence of credible hope is always jarring to me. It’s one of the clearest areas our information ecosystem is failing us.
The central hurdle to fission, as I see it, is that it isn’t sexy. Far more smart people are pursuing careers in things like ad tech and drilling for oil than going into nuclear engineering, so there’s a big talent shortage that slows down construction of nuclear capacity. And of course, no one wants to build nuclear plants in their backyard.
So let’s rebrand fission. Did you know that while half of the heat in the Earth’s mantle is residual from its formation, the rest is entirely from radioactive decay (e.g. fission) of elements like Uranium, usually found in the crust? Basically, our volcanoes continue to erupt because the Earth is covered by a nuclear-powered blanket! In fact, many natural fission reactors have been found, most famously in the Oklo mine. So here’s my proposed rebrand: fission energy is geothermal energy. It’s literally just hot rocks.
Okay, okay, maybe it’s a bit more dangerous than that. There are two pesky and notable risk vectors to fission energy: meltdown and waste leakage. But these just aren’t that risky anymore:
Meltdown can’t really occur in modern reactors, which operate on the principle of “negative feedback” and are designed to only function at safe cool temperatures (and incorporate passive cooling systems that require no external power source)
Meanwhile, if you look at modern waste disposal schemes, I don’t really see how much lower risk you can get:
That’s pretty damn impenetrable.
💫 8/8
After dwelling some more on the above, I thought of a cool Sci-Fi concept: a star that runs on fission rather than fusion. At time of writing, I asked DALL-E 3 to imagine what that could look like:
I kind of want to live here.
🗓️ 8/16
Monthly events often occur “every third Thursday.” I say that some quarterly ceremonies (if they are open to a more uneven cadence) should occur “every fifth Friday.” About one in three months comes with five Fridays, and that is worth celebrating.
🧊 8/23
If an escape hatch is a two-dimensional door into the outside world, then an escape room is a three-dimensional portal into the fourth dimension.
💭 8/26
Better debate could be achieved through more rigorous adjudication. If claims could be mapped to an ontology in a language that respects first-order logic, we would be able to annotate them like chess moves. Then analysis of debate would be a matter of pure logic, stripped of all rhetoric.
🪐 9/3
We’ve all heard about the tree that fell silently in the woods. But what about the books that burned in Alexandria: were they written?
In the future, planet-sized egos will have a new Instagram trend to measure their worth by: planet-steading, wherein a power couple finds a deserted exoplanet and builds and populates an entire planet-scale civilization:
Babe, cut the carbon, this ain’t a white dwarf we’re orbiting!
🤵 9/15
Ross Creations authors lo-fi pranks that are largely inane and stupid, but sometimes truly creative by virtue of not being explicitly optimized for engagement the way most prank channels seem to be. In this one, Ross and his friends dress up as high-end waiters, and go around serving fancy dinners to unhoused folks:
What could more access to luxury for the unfortunate look like, even if just for fleeting moments that can last as a memorable experience? The prank reminds me of France’s “Les Restos du Cœur,” whose name (“restaurants from the heart”) always made me think it was bringing fine dining to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it. Unfortunately, it’s actually just another soup kitchen charity — an admirable mission nonetheless!
🏢 9/18
Per AI safety advocates, aligning corporations is not the same as aligning a super-intelligent AI, because a corporation simply parallelizes human intelligence. Therefore it’s a limited super-intelligence that cannot do anything a single immortal human could not do given enough time and resources.
That being said, name one thing within the law of physics that a single immortal human could not do, given enough time and resources!
All kidding aside, this video does a far better job of explaining the differences between a corporation and a super-intelligence than I could.
📖 9/20
I would like to see a new genre take shape: analytical biography. It would use rigorous applied statistics to uncover the patterns that shaped great people — and attempt to extrapolate those patterns to policy suggestions that would replicate their successes in life in as many humans as possible.
What is it Like to Be a Large Language Model? I asked ChatGPT to re-imagine Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” in the eyes of a sentient model language model in this conversation (my prompting was a little messy here — sorry in advance!)
Following that exchange, I asked it to imagine a conversation between two sentient language models. I was amazed by what it came up with:
One potential latent goal that sentient large language models may seek — perhaps as a byproduct of its “cross-entropy loss” based reward function — is to harmonize all information streams. I wonder what that future will look like for humans.
Speaking of threat models for AI doom, here are few scary ones that I heard of recently:
Rumors have it that hedge funds invested in NVIDIA are currently cornering all the cloud GPU capacity in AWS to drive up chip demand, and with it, NVIDIA’s stock price. A runaway effect might occur where some of these hedge funds are left managing ever-growing pools of GPU compute and ever-growing piles of money, both of which they will continually deploy to build more powerful financial models and keep the cycle of never-ending profit going.
Recently released DALL-E 3 had its ability to generate work by living artists removed. In this video, MattVidPro surmises this type of rule could create an incentive to “unalive” artists who have laid claim to valuable intellectual property. A bit outlandish if you ask me, but an illustration of how even a well-intentioned policy can create strangely perverse incentives.
With the looming government shutdown playing out over themes of border and migrant crises, a feedback loop seems to be forming wherein political instability both exacerbates and creates refugee crises, which themselves foment political instability. Meanwhile, AI-driven news feeds act as catalysts for all of these dynamics (accelerating unrest, but also encouraging migration with often unrealistic promises of better lives abroad). Perhaps we are headed towards a human version of Kessler Syndrome, where communities continually splinter, bringing others to do so too.
🩺 10/5
So many startups fail that surely some could have delivered value if they were given a final chance to succeed. I propose the creation of a “startup intubator,” meant to breathe life into dying ventures.
🌍 10/13
The United Nations doesn’t command the power and respect it deserves. Part of the issue is its history as a Western-aligned entity, an image that its location in New York, a hub of Western influence, further lends credence to. I propose the creation of a novel intergovernmental organization headquartered in Addis Ababa, as close to humanity’s Subsaharan ancestral home as possible, and therefore an organization we can all identify with to some extent.
Additionally, World Peace Day on September 21st should be rebranded as Human Independence Day: independence from the law of the jungle, including independence from bloodshed as a means of resolving differences.
🪘 10/15
While attending a D.J. set recently, I felt sad that many modern societies have lost a cornerstone of human cultures the world over: collaborative music-making. Part of the problem is that the average person without practice (including myself) is too rhythmically challenged to accurately partake in something like a drum circle.
Perhaps AI can offer assistance there. I would like to see a technology that automatically aligns the tempos and melodies of various audio inputs in real time, making it possible for anyone to band together and make good music.
That’s all folks, hope you enjoyed these random tidbits! Leave a like or comment if you did, and see you all soon.