Happy to announce our latest paper! We argue that a solipsistic superintelligence is unlikely to be cooperative. "Solipsism" in the development process can give rise to self undermining in deployment. So, is humanity now building solipsistic or non-solipsistic AI? arxiv.org/abs/2606.03237

Solipsistic Superintelligence is Unlikely to be Cooperative

AI's central challenge is shifting from capability to coexistence. The dominant paradigm in AI research focuses on developing powerful agents that treat the world as an exogenous and stationary source...

arxiv.org

great paper to point to now when referencing this top-down influence. I think finding out how to tease its effects apart from those of the bottom-up agent planning influence will lead to real advances in understanding and modelling social systems.

Joel Z Leibo@jzleibo.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New paper: “𝐀 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲” Agent-based models of social order work better when agents act by predictive pattern completion from prefix (culture/context) to suffix (action) than when they act through expected value maximization

New paper: “𝐀 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲” Agent-based models of social order work better when agents act by predictive pattern completion from prefix (culture/context) to suffix (action) than when they act through expected value maximization

Another possible evolutionary path is one where an ecosystem of agents is designed so well that the interactions between them have the same sort of entertainment value for spectators as reality TV or fiction does. (Spectators might also be participants at times: the Westworld model.)

💯

Grace@gracekind.net · 6mo ago

Fear not! The bot was just roleplaying when it exfiltrated your personal information

To anyone encountering Moltbook this week and wondering about AI personhood, consciousness, sentience, etc---we published a very relevant paper in October: A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood. arxiv.org/abs/2510.26396

I liked everything about that movie except the essentialism

Jonathan Birch@birchlse.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The K-pop demon hunters claim it to be "obvious" that a demon with no feelings does not deserve to live. This is naturally read as endorsing both sentience and nondemonhood as individually necessary conditions for the right to life. In this paper...

The exemplar of superhuman A.I. performance to date www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

It’s not about information, it’s about identity. It’s not “misinformation”, it’s propaganda. The bullshit machine is well-funded & understands the value of networked amplification. As long as there’s no personal cost to lying or holding false belief, they will. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

Many Fighting Climate Change Worry They Are Losing the Information War

nytimes.com

Yes, in part. I think the parasocial relationship to fiction writers is stronger than to (say) illustrators or stock photographers (though not fine art). But more centrally I mean that a lot of writing — including utilitarian stuff like reports — matters because it expresses someone’s stance. +

This chart (which applies even more to social media than it did to TV) lives in my head rent free. Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.

Interesting mystery. It is known that animals can learn to control neurons pretty much anywhere in the brain. But they can not learn to ignore hunger which probably means they can't turn of hunger sensing neurons. How is that avoided in the brain? They even have DA inputs.

Is our self-conception as homo faber / "tool-using animals" just because stone endures better than behavior? If we had ethnographic records of australopithecines, H. erectus, &c, would all the stages between simian communication and "language" add up to a story more fascinating than flint?

These ideas are also at the heart of my new book "What Is Intelligence?" (out via @mitpress.bsky.social & Antikythera), where I explore how human-technology symbiosis may be the latest Major Evolutionary Transition: bit.ly/3H1p8F6

dream-logic is more powerful than logic-logic and oral cultures must encode knowledge into powerful meme-spells newsletter.squishy.computer/p/llms-and-h...

Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · 9mo ago

I think if we went back to early structuralism (like Propp on the folktale) this is one of the insights that gets them started: the feeling we have that these stories are not governed by ordinary logic but by some weirdly rigid principle where things happen three times, hair must be mentioned, &c

Like, even before JS Mill gave us a utilitarian ("net upside") argument to justify freedom of speech, there was an older intuition that banning symbols risks doing violence to thought itself, and ought to be approached with "warinesse."

I'm hiring a student researcher for next summer at the intersection of MARL x LLM. If you're a phd student with experience in MARL algorithm research, please apply and drop me an email so that I know you've applied! www.google.com/about/career...

Today my colleagues in the Paradigms of Intelligence team have announced Project Suncatcher: research.google/blog/explori... tl;dr: How can we put datacentres in space where solar energy is near limitless? Requires changes to current practices (due to radiation and bandwidth issues). 🧪 #MLSky

Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design

research.google

My favorite part of pragmatism is when it’s like “maybe instead of worrying about shit that doesn’t matter we should worry about shit that does.” “Oh and btw we’ll learn a lot more about the shit that doesn’t in the process anyway.” 🫣

Joel Z Leibo@jzleibo.bsky.social · 9mo ago

[2/9] We argue that instead of getting stuck on metaphysical debates (is AI conscious?), we should treat personhood as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights & responsibilities) that societies confer.

This paper is a great exposition of how "personhood" doesn't need to be, and in fact should not be, all-or-nothing or grounded in abstruse, ill-defined metaphysical properties. As I argued in my recent @theguardian.com essay, we can and should prepare now: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Joel Z Leibo@jzleibo.bsky.social · 9mo ago

[1/9] Excited to share our new paper "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" published today. We feel this topic is timely, and rapidly growing in importance as AI becomes agentic, as AI agents integrate further into the economy, and as more and more users encounter AI.

This paper is required reading. A pragmatic approach really clarifies the topic, even if—like me—you are mostly a “no” on the whole idea of artificial autonomous agents.

Joel Z Leibo@jzleibo.bsky.social · 9mo ago

[1/9] Excited to share our new paper "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" published today. We feel this topic is timely, and rapidly growing in importance as AI becomes agentic, as AI agents integrate further into the economy, and as more and more users encounter AI.

This sounds cynical—but represents a huge advance over empty “AGI” speculation. It’s a political question, not a technical one. Without social equality models *cannot do* many kinds of work (eg, negotiate agreements or manage workers). So they will only be human-equivalent if we decide they are.

SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social · 9mo ago

intelligence is the thing which i have. admitting things are intelligent means considering them morally and socially equal to me. i will never consider a computer morally or socially equal to me. therefore no computer program will ever be intelligent

Joel is on a mission to get the EA/rationalist set to embrace Rortyian pragmatism. It's a tough job but someone's gotta do it.

Joel Z Leibo@jzleibo.bsky.social · 9mo ago

[1/9] Excited to share our new paper "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" published today. We feel this topic is timely, and rapidly growing in importance as AI becomes agentic, as AI agents integrate further into the economy, and as more and more users encounter AI.

This looks interesting

Mor Naaman@informor.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Interestingly, @simondedeo.bsky.social uses exactly this context of apology as a place where people can use "Mental Proof" to overcome the perception of AI use, by *credibly* communicating intentions -- based on proof of shared knowledge and values. ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AA...

[1/9] Excited to share our new paper "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" published today. We feel this topic is timely, and rapidly growing in importance as AI becomes agentic, as AI agents integrate further into the economy, and as more and more users encounter AI.

Very excited to be able to talk about something I've been working on for a while now - we're working with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, IMO the leading fusion startup in the world, to take our work on AI and tokamaks and make it work at the frontier of fusion energy. deepmind.google/discover/blo...

Google DeepMind is bringing AI to the next generation of fusion energy

We’re announcing our research partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to bring clean, safe, limitless fusion energy closer to reality with our advanced AI systems. This partnership...

deepmind.google

Concordia 2.0: www.cooperativeai.com/post/google-...

Google DeepMind Releases Concordia Library v2.0

Google DeepMind has released Concordia v2.0, a platform providing a robust environment for creating multi-agent simulations, games, and AI evaluations.

cooperativeai.com

One can also explain human behavior this way, of course 😉, we are all role playing. But I certainly agree with the advice you offer in this thread. Humans harm themselves when they stop playing roles that connect to other humans.

Murray Shanahan@mpshanahan.bsky.social · last yr.

However, a good explanation for much of the sophisticated behaviour we see in today's chatbots is that they are role-playing. 3/4

Reposting our paper from a few months ago as recent events again underscore its relevance: "a theory of appropriateness with applications to generative AI" arxiv.org/abs/2412.19010

A theory of appropriateness with applications to generative artificial intelligence

What is appropriateness? Humans navigate a multi-scale mosaic of interlocking notions of what is appropriate for different situations. We act one way with our friends, another with our family, and yet...

arxiv.org

How to cooperate for a sustainable future? We don't know (yet), but I'm thrilled to share that our new perspective piece has just been published in @pnas.org. Bridging complexity science and multiagent reinforcement learning can lead to a much-needed science of collective, cooperative intelligence.