testingthewaters

Reposted from shortform because I think this is important enough to be a post. A few ways staying in a technology development race still makes things worse, even when there are less responsible actors around: * Creating a sense of artificial urgency, which causes people who are competitive and results...

Note: Trying out a serial fiction thing. > we know that restraint is the existence of multiple attractors > > and we observe that physics is the origin of all meaning > > which imply that life is reacting counterfactually in accordance with your genuine character - Machine-poem no. 24601,...

How can we say that an AI system is scheming? How can we say that a friend is kind? How can we say that the boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius? How can we say that a function is L-Lipschitz? This is a short post covering my intuitions...

His hands are shaking. They’ve been shaking since five hours ago, when the silent policemen showed up at his door wearing black tactical vests on top of black sleeves. He lived alone—there was no one to call for, no one to beg to call his lawyer as they took him...

Part One Our scene is set in a biofilm, long before the origin of the first multicellular organisms, so long ago that time itself has not yet really been invented except in the cycles of energy production that characterise the activity of each cell. Many bacteria live here, tied together...

> “Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) > > Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God Introduction In the tradition of fun and uplifting April Fool's day...

Introduction Previously I wrote about what it would mean for AI to “go well”. I would like to elaborate on this and propose some details towards a “scale-free” definition of alignment. Here “scale-free alignment” means a version of alignment that does not feature sudden and rapid “phase shifts”, so as...