When the machines outthink us, will they outmaneuver us? Barrat’s latest is a wake-up call we can’t afford to ignore. Having had the privilege of previewing James Barrat’s latest work, The Intelligence Explosion (Amazon link, Google Book link), I found it to be a compelling and thought-provoking exploration of the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial…
This post will be updated over the coming weeks. In his 2011 paper, Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures, Eliezer Yudkowsky posits that aligning artificial general intelligence (AGI) with human values necessitates embedding the complex intricacies of human ethics into AI systems. He warns against oversimplification, suggesting that without a comprehensive inheritance…
I just finished Mo Gawdat’s book Scarey Smart. The overview says: By 2049 AI will be a billion times more intelligent than humans. Scary Smart explains how to fix the current trajectory now, to make sure that the AI of the future can preserve our species. This book offers a blueprint, pointing the way to…
In short: Satiable values have diminishing returns with more resources, while insatiable values always want more, potentially leading to risky AI behaviour – it seems likely that AI with insatiable values could make existential trades, like gambling the world for a chance to double resources. Therefore potentially design AI with satiable values to ensure stability,…
Key Points Understanding UBI and Its Challenges Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a system where everyone gets regular cash payments, no strings attached. It’s seen as a way to help people in an AI-driven economy where jobs might disappear. But there are worries. For example, if landlords know everyone has extra money, they might raise…
About “I argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. That means that the prospect of AI welfare and moral patienthood, i.e. of AI systems with their own interests and moral significance, is no longer an issue only for sci-fi or the…
Nick Bostrom addresses concerns about biased influence on the extrapolation base in his discussions on indirect normativity (IN – i.e., an approach where the AI deduces ideal values or states of affairs rather than running with current values and states of affairs) esp. coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) and value alignment in his magnum opus Superintelligence….
About Robin Hanson will give a talk at Future Day 2025 on cultural drift. Abstract Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution. Which still goes great for behaviors that can easily vary locally, like most tech and business practices. But modernity has plausibly broken our evolution of shared norms and values, as that needs natural selection of…
Shun Yoshizawa and Ken Mogi will give a talk is part of the Future Day 2025 conference. Abstract The cognitive abilities of the Large Language Model (LLM) have been analysed and evaluated in comparison to humans, such as the Theory of Mind (Kosinski 2024), the Turing Test (Jones 2024), IQ (Wasilewski 2024), and so on….
A panel between James Hughes, James Newton-Thomas, Lev Lafayette and Adam Ford (chair) at Future Day 2025. About If AI drives human wages to the ground, should everything else crash too? Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen envisions a future where AI-induced wage collapse leads to abundance—but what about land prices, investor returns, corporate profits, and living…
