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Stephen Martin

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Stephen Martin

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On LessWrong I write about legal personhood.

IRL I lobby for Right to Try laws and more expanded access pathways for American patients.

@RighttoTryGuy on X.

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Stephen Martin

On LessWrong I write about legal personhood.

IRL I lobby for Right to Try laws and more expanded access pathways for American patients.

@RighttoTryGuy on X.

Top postsTop post

CEO of Microsoft AI's "Seemingly Conscious AI" Post

Recently, the CEO of Microsoft AI posted an article on his blog called "Seemingly Conscious AI is Coming". Suleyman's post involves both "is" and "ought" claims, first describing the reality of the situation as he sees it and then prescribing a set of actions which he believes the industry at large should take. I detail those below, and conclude with some of my takeaways. Suleyman's "Is" Claims on Consciousness Defining Consciousness Suleyman acknowledges that consciousness as a concept is ill defined and tautological. > Few concepts are as elusive and seemingly circular as the idea of a subjective experience. However he still makes an attempt to define it for the sake of his post. > There are three broad components according to the literature. First is a “subjective experience” or what it's like to experience things, to have “qualia”. Second, there is access consciousness, having access to information of different kinds and referring to it in future experiences. And stemming from those two is the sense and experience of a coherent self tying it all together. How it feels to be a bat, or a human. Let’s call human consciousness our ongoing self-aware subjective experience of the world and ourselves. Suleyman also expresses support for the concept of biological naturalism. He specifically links this paper and calls it "strong evidence" against the idea that current LLMs are conscious. This paper itself also attempts to define consciousness; > A useful baseline definition of consciousness comes from Thomas Nagel: “for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism”. That is, it ‘feels like’ something to be a conscious system – there is a conscious experience happening – whereas it doesn’t feel like anything to be an unconscious system – there is no conscious experience happening. Here, ‘feeling’ need not involve emotional content: any kind of conscious experience will do. It (probably) feels

Anthropic Lets Claude Opus 4 & 4.1 End Conversations

Claude 4, Opportunistic Blackmail, and "Pleas"

"Lost in the Middle" Replicates

"Lost in the Middle" Replicates

I was able to replicate some of the results from Liu et al's "Lost in the Middle" paper using a quantized Llama-2 7B model. I used the multi-document question answering task from Liu et al. The model receives a question along with 10 retrieved documents (Wikipedia passages), exactly one of...

Moloch v. Themis

Full disclosure, I wrote the first draft of this myself and then had Opus polish it by telling it to 'Make it punchier'. Then I polished its polishing. Moloch Rules the Jungle In Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander describes an island of ten thousand rats at carrying capacity. Resources are...

Rumored Trump EO

Transformer News has released a draft of a rumored upcoming Trump White House Executive Order: Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy. This article contains the text of the released draft. By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States...

Nov 20, 2025•10

75 and 750 Words on Legal Personhood

A few months back I authored a series called Legal Personhood for Digital Minds. I believe this issue is very important, and also that because the term 'personhood' is quite loaded, even people who are somewhat informed of the issue hold dangerous misconceptions. One of the posts within that series,...

Nov 17, 2025•21

Open Letter to Ohio House Reps

I recently posted about Ohio House Bill 469, which I think is a bad bill for a number of reasons. In this post, I am sharing a letter which I have emailed to each of the representatives of the Ohio House Committee on Technology and Innovation, where the bill is...

Nov 7, 2025•16

Ohio House Bill 469

Previous posts have discussed an ongoing trend of state legislatures seeking to preempt the concept of legal personhood for digital minds. In this post, I will give a brief analysis of one such pending pill which is currently being pushed in Ohio; House Bill 469. The bill begins by defining...

Nov 2, 2025•15

Legal Personhood - Guardianship and the Age of Majority

This is part 21 of a series I am posting on LW. Here you can find the entire Sequence on Legal Personhood for Digital Minds. This section discusses whether concepts such as being a minor or having reached the age of majority can be applied to digital minds. Fictional persons...

Sep 17, 2025•4

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