Schlaraffenland (1567), the land of milk and honey Say we achieve abundance—what becomes of our souls? Transformative AI may soon lift us from the material constraints that have long shaped civilisation. In this essay, I explore how a species forged in struggle might fare in a world without it. I....
Introduction Why hasn't AI automated away more professions? One way of investigating this question is to compare the skills that real jobs require with current AI systems' capabilities. As long as there's a gap between these two, full automation is unfeasible. One important limitation is that AI systems cannot yet...
In this blog post, we analyse how the recent AI 2027 forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean has been discussed across Chinese language platforms. We present: 1. Our research methodology and synthesis of key findings across media artefacts 2. A proposal for how...
Schlaraffenland (1567), the land of milk and honey
Say we achieve abundance—what becomes of our souls?
Transformative AI may soon lift us from the material constraints that have long shaped civilisation. In this essay, I explore how a species forged in struggle might fare in a world without it.
I. The Utopia That Didn't Work
‘The excuse of a private school in a democracy is that it shall be a laboratory, a place for the demonstration of old experiments and the trying of new. It is a place of freedom.’ –Lucy Madeira
Every school must be conceived as a kind of utopia: a headteacher's dream of what the world could be, shrunk down to fit between dormitories and... (read 3579 more words →)
Why hasn't AI automated away more professions? One way of investigating this question is to compare the skills that real jobs require with current AI systems' capabilities. As long as there's a gap between these two, full automation is unfeasible.
One important limitation is that AI systems cannot yet act coherently over long periods of time. While AI has demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving concrete, isolated problems, maintaining consistent goals, reasoning, and plans over extended time frames has proven more challenging.
We know AI systems are getting better at completing tasks over longer time horizons, as METR’s recent work shows. But how much better will they need to get to start having real economic impact,... (read 3109 more words →)
In this blog post, we analyse how the recent AI 2027 forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean has been discussed across Chinese language platforms. We present:
We conducted a comprehensive search across major Chinese-language platforms–including news outlets, video platforms, forums, microblogging sites, and personal blogs–to collect the media featured in this report. We supplemented this with... (read 3201 more words →)
Hi! Very quickly, yes, I use LLMs quite a bit to iterate on my writing. That said, sections 2 and 3 were more AI-assisted than section 1. The details in section 1 come from a particular experience of girlhood. I appreciate the curiosity!
I think Aria is a very pretty name--it reminds me of pretty music. I say we keep Aria for ourselves. The AIs can have Elara and Voss.
I would love to hear your other thoughts if you feel like sharing them!