I agree that being a self-aggrandizing dick is probably on the lower end of the harms Bostrom has inflicted upon the world, but I think it’s worth calling out, especially because it runs counter to the narrative that the people who are working to advance the bigger harms use to advance their agenda.

Minor point, but I do want to spotlight this footnote for how clearly it echoes the opposite (and superior) attitude to Bostrom’s:

3. Note that there is no such thing as a “supervolcano,” despite what Wikipedia says. There are, however, some volcanoes capable of producing supereruptions. I was corrected by one of the leading volcanologists in the world after he read portions of my 2024 book!

Not gonna lie: I have definitely taken advantage of various academic’s (including some of our regulars here) patience and willingness to write out elementary explanations of the stuff they do with a similar “omg senpai noticed me” kind of glee.

Ooh. I love these. I’m “I don’t think Sam Altman or most of his social circle are good people and I don’t want to give them more wealth and power.”

Vibe Construction

2027 was the original pitch for an imminent posthuman apocalypse. 2040 is an attempt to argue for policies that will slow down enough to avert said apocalypse. It’s all the dumb of AI 2027 but with some shockingly bad geopolitical analysis and promises that if we do what they say we can have what I can only describe as a neoliberal manifest destiny space program.

I feel like there’s a version of this that has a slider for how aggressively you’re willing to sacrifice readability, and you could probably get pretty decent results on the scale of 2x to 2.5x just using different encodings of the same basic glyph.

Secretly?

I know we’re all familiar with the metaphor of LLMs as roulette wheel, but I think there’s some real craft to turning that into Russian roulette.

I have definitely done this. Written half an essay in the awful.systems comment box, realized I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying anymore, and deleted it. I like to tell myself that forcing myself to realize I was being incoherent is enough to justify the costs. I guess if I acknowledge that I don’t rely on my online footprint to put food on the table the way the proper blogonauts (we’re still doing blogs, right?) do I can understand the incentives against doing that though.

I think this particular pattern is another consequence of long-termism in the water supply. It’s easy to disconnect yourself from humanity as a concept when you’re in a space that often assumes that you and everyone you could ever have a personal relationship with are already long dead. The fact that this makes it easy to ignore the problems that people today are having in front of your face is purely coincidental.

You know, somehow I had managed to avoid connecting the abhorrent views in that footnote with Robin Hanson specifically. The abyss never ends. Also I think it connects back to the biggest missing piece of this assessment. Their anti-authority authoritarianism, their anti-journalism but pro-transparency thing, etc. all come from the same place: they believe that there should be no limits on their own power and very little else.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen basic questions about functionality answered by “something something blockchain” but that appears to be the answer here.

You know, I think there’s an argument to be made for death threats against tech oligarchs being a crude form of direct action towards redistribution.

I can’t decide if it’s fitting or ironic that this group of men who spends collectively one week a year in spaces they don’t either literally own or otherwise totally control has such a hard time understanding concerns the rest of us have about privacy.

I should probably be grateful that this sent me down the road of learning about pet trusts, the actual legal vehicle for leaving large sums of money to an animal. But that’s less because it’s relevant to the point here and more because I’m a fucking nerd. Notably the money is controlled by a trustee who is empowered to pay for the animal’s food, healthcare, etc. I imagine that an enterprising trustee in the most famous cases could make some very compelling arguments about the necessity of maintaining, say, a big house for the cat to roam around in that they and their family would coincidentally live in as well, but I don’t care enough to look into it in-depth. If the animal dies before the trust runs out of money, then the remainder is distributed according to either the trust instructions or applicable state laws (in the US, at least). Of course the cases of people putting millions into pet trusts are usually less about the pet trust and more about spiting the other presumptive heirs, a sort of disinterestance with a more spiteful edge.

To the actual argument here, however, all I can say is that nobody without a large estate has ever made the allegedly absurd decision to dedicate their estate to the care and keeping of their pets. Every single case where that has happened has been because of a member of the supposedly-enlightened moneyed classes being fucking weird and having too much money.

I remember having a lot of fun with Roborosewater where they could generate something that matched the format of a Magic: the Gathering card perfectly and sometimes even something playable within the rules but it was always nonsensical in some ridiculous way. There’s a couple streams from the LoadingReadyRun gang drafting a cube from the resulting chaos that are a hoot.

Ed: Here’s a sampling in video form because I can’t find a “best of” article and they get into the “analysis” a bit.

If you look at literally page 1 you’ll find the first footnote pointing at another chapter of the same goddamn book and now I’m going to go weep tears of impotent rage.

Ed: sorry, it’s page 8, which is the first page after the self-congratulatory preface.

By forcing the question of whether to act before debating how, the signatories appear to be clearing ground for legislative and regulatory work that has not yet arrived.

So it’s a pointless attempt to send up a “take me seriously” flare?

Also I think this discourse as always misses the distinction between economic displacement caused by AI and economic displacement justified by AI. Hiring managers seem to be anticipating AI capabilities that do not exist yet, and the disruption to labor is well beyond what the current AI systems are actually able to replace. I think instead we’re seeing a combination of business rubes buying the hype and the consequences of bad incentives that make headcount reduction look really good on quarterly financials while in a lot of areas not having an immediate negative impact on capabilities or production. Especially when it comes to IT infrastructure, for example, the fact that you’re not paying someone goes immediately on the financial statements, but the fact that your infrastructure is less reliable and crashes more often has a huge experiential impact on your customers and employees but it takes time for that to cash out into something that impacts the numbers.

Honestly If we want to use the hallucinatron the same way we use hallucinogens (minus the “transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm” part) I have no real problem with that. Scrambling and remixing the contents of the world in ways that might prompt actual minds to create new connections and interesting art seems to fit.

I don’t think there’s enough of a market for that to support scaling to any meaningful degree and so have less problems from an enabling/infrastructure perspective. I mean the chemical alternatives let you transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm. AI can’t do that.

This is an important point. If we treat Scott in particular as though he’s speaking in good faith then his arguments are nonsensical. This is not because he’s a fool but because he isn’t speaking in good faith, and his actual worldview appears to be much more amenable to outright fascism and actual totalitarianism than he would suggest here.