Steff

Last month, Claude tangled me into a web it weaved, obeying the letter of my command while yet practicing to deceive, in a way that was strikingly resemblant of how a human might behave when exhausted, lethargic, or jaded. Not long after that, I noticed yet another behavior that was...

It was January 27, 1986, the night before the Space Shuttle Challenger was scheduled for launch. The goal was to have a shuttle that could land back on Earth and be reused for future missions; its first-planned priorities were satellite deployment, comet observation, and science education. The last of these...

In AI catastrophe, KatjaGrace writes about how difficult it can be for some people to take X-risk seriously: > My guess is that an important thing going on here is that the ‘everyone dying at once’ image seems kind of like a thought experiment—abstract, hypothetical, neat, not very sinister. Also,...

Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man's father is my father's son. Who am I? — ancient riddle In Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post this week, he writes: “Our current experience -- your own experience, at this very moment, of seeing ordered letters on a screen -- therefore seems to...

There's a question that's held my fascination for months. At times, it's had me spinning in circles, caught up in seemingly impossible contradictions. And it's not the famous Sleeping Beauty problem... or at least, not exactly. There is a certain Vincent Conitzer, of Duke University, who presents what he calls...

Epistemic status: Highly uncertain. This whole thing might be a terrible idea. But maybe it's worth something, and I think that chance is worth exploring. In his Prologue to Terrified Comments on Claude's Constitution, Zack_M_Davis writes: > You can't give people a technology this fantastically helpful and harmless and expect...

The is a slimmed down version which omits some extra examples but includes my theorizing about ChatGPT, my investigations of it, and my findings. Epistemic status: Pretty uncertain. I think my conclusions are probably more right than wrong, more useful than harmful, and would especially benefit people with only an...