Is consciousness not an outcome of material existence but the initial enabler for it? That’s the premise of a really cool paper I just read: space-time is an emergent phenomenon from some deeper underlying order. The author is a serious scientist who suggests actual equations that could be used to describe it. Of course, they’re […]

Thanks to spotty service by the USPS, I have started to migrate our snail mail services to digital-only. I’m doing so belatedly, perhaps, but certainly with a little bit of anger and a lot of sadness. We don’t like in some far-flung rural area; rather, we’re smack dab in the middle of downtown Chicago, so […]

Mozilla has announced that it’s forming a “rebel alliance” of AI startups to combat Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other backers of deathstar AI. It’s a cool idea that’s misguided and will ultimately fail. What’s cool about it is that Mozilla is standing up for, well, everyone who doesn’t stand to make a killing automating everyone […]

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum just screams for counter-programming. The get-together, colloquially called “Davos” because it happens in a quaint little town in Switzerland, is billed as a place where “the foremost leaders from government, business, and civil society” can “confront shared challenges and drive innovations driving the future.” Considering all of […]

OpenAI is recruiting for a “Head of Preparedness.” I applied earlier today. The company describes the role as being “directly responsible leader for building and coordinating capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigations that form a coherent, rigorous, and operationally scalable safety pipeline.” Of course, that’s mostly nonsense, or at best happy but unenforceable ethics, since […]