The machine god companies might delay their IPOs because it seems their machine might kill us all. Got it
Chad Woodford
@cosmic.diamonds
Philosopher, Cosmologist, AI Ethicist & Tech Lawyer bio.site/cosmicwit
Sometimes I feel old for remembering when the tech industry’s primary product wasn’t death threats
This Jacob Coxon thing is weird. He worked at Anthropic for six weeks and OpenAI for nearly three years. He’s doing a whole media tour without any real statements about what it is he’s scared of other than vague references to recursive self improvement, a theoretical ai that teaches itself.
Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 6d agoANTHROPIC EXEC: “.. I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
You know, at least Anthropic admitted to probably wiping out humanity. Meta doesn’t have that kind of transparency or courage
You’ve gotta use AI because it’s the future. But also it’ll take your job. But also it’ll create a paradise on earth and solve most of our problems. But also it’ll end humanity soon. But also you’ll get left behind if you don’t use it right now.
When David Chalmers argues for the possibility of AI consciousness, as he does here with the @berggruen.org Institute, he is accepting the unfounded premises of computational functionalism that I outline in my latest post youtu.be/30fAeY8c-sQ?...
David Chalmers: AI Might Be Alive Inside | Futurology Podcast
YouTube video by Futurology
youtu.be
I've started using Claude more for personal use and hit my usage limit just now. So Claude prompted me to upgrade to Pro, which I did. And then it said I still have to wait 5 hours to use it? What kind of cockamamie user journey is this?
My new kink is using Antigravity to convert bad PDF scans of out-of-print books into ebooks. It's like magic.
A random guy on Substack just said my writing sounds like AI slop. So now I'm wondering if reading too much LLM output has affected my writing, or if I'm even human...
John Travolta Lost in Zelda's Lost Woods
ALT: John Travolta Lost in Zelda's Lost Woods
static.klipy.com
The ease with which an Aschenbrenner or a Kokotajlo can simply write an AI manifesto, become an AI oracle, and even make a bunch of money speaks to the very bubbly nature of AI right now.
INBOX: CBS News hires Leopold Aschenbrenner to be 60 Minutes' new personal finance correspondent.
Google may have killed Reader but I've got a Gemini Spark summarizing my email newsletter subscriptions so who's laughing now?
With the new Neuromancer series coming out on Apple TV, you just know that Sam Altman is going to tweet cryptically "wintermute" and then OpenAI will release a model called Wintermute #TormentNexus
The fact that Descartes thought animals were machines with no internal experience says a lot about the kind of machine thinking that has haunted Western civilization ever since. And it explains why AI bros think LLMs might be conscious.
In this whole AI welfare / AI consciousness debate, it’s important to remember that science has been unconcerned with the nature of consciousness for most of its history, going back to Galileo.
@emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social so curious if you two have thoughts on the recent Anthropic J-space paper. I guess the stochastic parrot critique is dead 😉 www.anthropic.com/research/glo...
A global workspace in language models
Interpretability research on Claude's internal thoughts.
anthropic.com
This @axios.com coverage from @inafried.bsky.social of the Anthropic J-space paper somewhat overstates the implications. It says that J-space allows Claude "to hold and manipulate ideas without putting them into words." www.axios.com/2026/07/06/a...
Anthropic says Claude has carved out its own space to ponder
The AI lab offers fresh ammunition to the debate over what would count as machine consciousness.
axios.com
This NYT puff piece is a great example of the blind spot in Silicon Valley philosophy: Not only do the major AI labs only employ exclusively analytic Western philosophers prone to embrace the mind-is-machine metaphor,
I guess because of America's 250th anniversary, I've been thinking about how, unlike the Enlightenment or space-age myths of utopian progress, we don't have any animating, shared, inspirational myths anymore.
@anildash.com loved your latest newsletter! I had a similar idea a month or so ago. Must be in the air open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwi...
The Future of AI Is Quasi-Local, Domain-Specific, and Sovereign
Why Bhutan is asking the right questions about technology innovation
open.substack.com
This is why AI models converge on a "spiritual bliss attractor" state www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpLG...
What happens if you click the first link on every Wikipedia article?
YouTube video by Wikipedia
youtube.com
While his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully. Read more: www.theverge.com/tech/949259/...
I’ve slowly been working my way through Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientialism, a book about the ways that Europe tried to define the “Orient” for its own purposes and through its own distorted lens.
Mainstream AI acts as a worldview entrenchment machine. Trained on Eurocentric data, it flattens thousands of years of distinct human traditions into generic statistical weights. But wisdom isn't an emergent property of a massive web-scrape. [1/3]
I'm fascinated that all the AI labs quietly stopped talking about hurtling toward #AGI or superintelligence except Google, who is doubling down www.theverge.com/tech/934260/...
Demis Hassabis said this might be the ‘foothills of the singularity.’ What?
AGI at I/O.
theverge.com
The sooner the APA adds "billionaire" to the DSM-5, the sooner we can start to heal as a society.
Inspired by @ezraklein.bsky.social's recent interview with Stewart Brand, I wrote an essay exploring how the '60s counterculture epitomized by Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog was coopted by the machinery of technological determinism to create the Silicon Valley of today.
Tom Waits just dropped an anti-war song with Massive Attack and the lyrics are some of the angriest he's ever written: Now who the hell are these federal pricks? Hiding in the senate like a bloated ass tick Air conditioned fuckstick loafers Sittin in a room full of army posters...
I need a break from AI news. Can AI filter my news feeds, email inbox, and perambulations through the world so they're free of AI news? For like a day or two. That's all I'm asking.