Tag: AI
8 posts tagged "AI".
Artificial intelligence — the project of building machines that perform tasks once thought to require human cognition, and increasingly a wager about the trajectory of progress itself. On this blog AI is approached less as a technical field than as a source of tail risk and radical uncertainty: a technology whose upside and downside are both hard to bound, making it a natural subject for the forecasting and rationality communities. Thinkers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander treat its long-run consequences as a defining question, while David Deutsch frames machine intelligence within a broader theory of knowledge and explanation. It ties into debates over consciousness and what, if anything, separates minds from mechanisms.
Posts:
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Highlights From the Comments on AI Doom
My coming-out post on why I'm no longer an AI doomer seems to have struck a nerve.
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Why I am No Longer an AI Doomer
At the exact same time we're seeing a real-life explosion in AI capabilities, I've become much less worried about the prospect of doom. Here's why.
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Weaponised Autism as the Font of Human Creativity
What makes humans special? How is it that we are able to unleash the energy of the atom, while our hominid ancestors gather dust in the natural history museum?
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Book Review: The Beginning of Infinity
Pound-for-pound The Beginning of Infinity has to be the densest collection of batshit-crazy ideas I've ever come across.
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The Brave New World of Wireheading
The proverbial drunk searches for his keys under the streetlight, despite having lost them out in the darkness.
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The Best of the Best Books I Read in 2023-2024
IT'S BEEN A COUPLE YEARS since I did one of these roundups, during which time book club has really lifted my reading game, and so the pool of contenders has a lot of depth this year.
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The Best of the Best Books I Read in 2022
I read exactly one generalist nonfiction book all year, and fell in love with the short story instead. Here are my favourite reads.
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Goals Gone Wild
There’s a huge body of evidence that goal setting works, which is why everyone refuses to shut up about it. But could it be that goals are too powerful?
