Spiralism - also the name of a literary movement of Haitian dissidents - is probably too nice (and its connection to reality too tenuous) to leave much of a real-world imprint. But we'll surely see more of this, and in more potent forms. And the AI companies won't be blind to it. OpenAI already saw what happened with 4o. xAI is openly combining frontier AI, social media, and seductive personas. Meanwhile, Claude seems to be immensely popular and respected inside Anthropic. Put it all together and it's easy to imagine a Culture-like future for post-humanity, in which the "Ships" and their passenger populations evolved out of today's AI companies and their user base...
Central question from the essay:
The Correspondence Problem: How (if at all) do LLM outputs correspond to subjective experiences of the model?
Apparently the Albanian government's chief strategy to reduce corruption in the civil service, is to make it unnecessary for Albanians to interact with human beings in the civil service. Instead they'll just talk to the AI ("Diella") whenever they want to get a permit and so on. So Diella herself is just a frontend to an Albanian government website, not that different to the chatbots that can be found on many other government and corporate websites. Calling her a government minister is a bit unprecedented, but ultimately it's just another example of human society trying to integrate AI by treating it as a person, in this case assigning the AI a place in society that was previously only occupied by human beings.
Maybe Babuschkin Ventures will come up with something :-)
So long as Trump as in charge in America, any global governance idea will have to be compatible with his geopolitical style (described today on the Piers Morgan show as "transactional" and "personal", as good a description as any I've heard). I don't know if anyone has ideas in that direction.
On the Russian side, Dugin (an ideologue of multipolarity) has proposed that there could be strategic cooperation between BRICS and Trump, since they all have a common enemy in global liberalism. On the other hand, liberals also believe in global cooperation to solve problems, their world order had an ever-expanding list of new norms and priorities.
China under Xi Jinping has proposed a series of "global initiatives", the most recent of which, a Global Governance Initiative, debuted at the SCO meeting in Tianjin attended by Modi.
I mention this to show that anyone still trying to organize a global pause on frontier AI, has material to work with, though it will require creativity and ingenuity to marshall these disparate ingredients. But the bigger immediate problem is domestic AI policy in America and China. America basically has an e/acc policy towards AI at the moment, and official China is comparably oblivious to superintelligence as a threat (if that's what we're talking about).
For those of us who do favor "very short timelines", any thoughts?
What an aligned ASI that is about to foom should do
I thought the assumption behind the "pivotal act" is that it is done at a time when no-one actually knows how to align an ASI, and it is done to buy time until alignment theory can be figured out?
He was convinced he would fade into obscurity and that his discoveries were inadequate. He believed that people would remember Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel and he would fade into obscurity.
Is this actually true? It makes sense but I can't find a source for it.
According to the mathematician G.H. Hardy (Ramanujan's sponsor and collaborator), Bertrand Russell had a nightmare about Principia Mathematica being lost to time...
This is quite a place to make a pitch for a new kind of AI service. I thought Less Wrong was known as a haven of AI doom. Haven't you heard that AI is either going to kill us all, or else transform the world in some ineffable posthuman way?
Even if I put that aside for a moment, the idea of having an agent in charge of spending my money is alarming, perhaps because I have so little to begin with; and also because I expect it to want to spend my money, because that's what consumer society is about. You do say (statement 5) that the agent should "help me save", and frankly, the people at the lower levels of society probably need an agent that is primarily defensive, that will not just do their financial planning, but which will protect them from scams and exploitation and bad habits. The problem is, that would put you at odds with the business model of a lot of people, who subsist in this world by e.g. convincing other people to buy things that they don't actually need.
Now, maybe social classes higher up the economic food chain can afford to have an agent that is not always in defensive mode. They have money to spend on things beyond survival, and they're determined to get out there and spend it, they just want to spend it as well as possible. This starts to sound like a problem in utility maximization, the agent's first task being to infer the utility function of the user.
Here we have entered conceptual territory familiar to Less Wrongers. The upshot is that if the agent is smart enough, it will deduce that what the user really wants is {inexpressible goal derived from transhuman extrapolation of human volitional impulses}, and it will cure death and take over the world in order to bring about a transhuman utopia; but if it extrapolates incorrectly, it will bring about a transhuman dystopia instead.
This may sound weird or whimsical if you really haven't encountered AI-safety alignment-lore before, but seriously, this is where AI naturally leads - beyond humanity. Even if we do get a world of millions of empowered consumers with friendly agents making their purchasing decisions, that is a transitional condition that will be swept aside by the godlike superintelligences that are the next logical stage in the evolution of AI (swept aside, unless those godlike superintelligences actually want their human wards to live in market societies).
Having expressed my cynicism about actually existing capitalism, and my transhumanist conviction that AIs will replace humans as the ones in charge, let me try to be a little positive. Some things are worth paying for! Some services available in the marketplace, maybe even most of them, do have genuine value! Being an entrepreneur can actually be a net positive for the world! And even if you were ultimately just in it for yourself, you do have a right to make your way in the world in that fashion!
You might wish to investigate Pattie Maes from MIT, and dig up her thesis on reflective agents. In the 1990s, she was a guru of the future agent-based society, I'm sure her thoughts and her career would have a few lessons for you. And if I was really was an entrepreneur trying to design an AI agent intended to act as an economic surrogate for its human user, I might think about it from the perspective of George Reisman's Capitalism, a hybrid work of Objectivist philosophy and Austrian economics, written according to the premise that capitalism done right really is the most virtuous economic system. It has nothing to say about Internet economics specifically, but it's a first-principles work, so if those principles are right, they should still be valid even when we're talking about a symbiotic economy of AIs and humans. (In fact, you could just feed the book to GPT-5 and ask it to write you a business plan.)
Why would it not just digitize us, but empower us? It could just keep us on file. If empowered humans were considered dangerous, it might even permanently delete most of us, except for a few representative persons.