Ouro

A Day at AFFINE[1] > “AFFINE was the best month of intellectual exploration I have had the opportunity to engage in, ever. Usually opportunities like this are limited to a day or a weekend, which both limits depth, forces a sprint-type mindset, and generally is quite limiting. At AFFINE I...

The number of people who deeply understand superintelligence risk is far too small. There's a growing pipeline of people entering AI Safety, but most of the available onboarding covers the field broadly, touching on many topics without going deep on the parts we think matter most. People come out having...

The notion of boxing –particularly failed boxing– is much more ubiquitous than people seem to give it credit for. It appears to me to be a common shape in systems which attempt to implement some sort of shape-agnostic competence-search at all. Intentionally or not. It is a relation between two...

There is some difference between despotic and cosmopolitan agents. A despotic agent builds a universe grabbing Singleton and makes it satisfy its own desires. A cosmopolitan agent builds a universe grabbing Singleton and makes it satisfy the desires of all the things which ought be granted some steering-power. The cosmopolitan...

When people think about street-fights and what they should do when they find themselves in the unfortunate position of being in one, they tend to stumble across a pretty concerning thought relatively early on: "What if my attacker has a knife?" . Then they will put loads of cognitive effort...

What is Agency? In a relatively intuitive way it’s a property of systems which have three things: Some –however rudimentary– way of modelling a slice of reality, a utility function over that slice of reality and a way of acting upon it. An agent can make better-than-chance guesses about how...

Most people have fences in their conversation tree. They have topics which they will not talk about or which they will only talk about under certain conditions. In some cases those policies are public, in others people have to learn the hard way, i.e. they find out by running into...