Rick Searle
@ricksearle.bsky.social
Writer and Educator Rethinking Machine Ethics in the Age of Ubiquitous Technology, Blogs @ https://utopiaordystopia.com/ @RickSearle@universeodon.com
the Tolkien quote in the new encyclical is interesting insofar as it probably comes out of the Pope reading Tolkien for another reason -- his discussion of subcreation in On Fairy-Stories, and the duties mankind has when it picks up the tools of the divine
"As AI-augmented research proliferates, the scope of scientific inquiry is contracting." www.ft.com/content/0c63... [paywalled]
i think there is a very simple explanation for this, at least in 2026. the cultural apparatus orbiting around Trump lives in a world entirely governed by short feedback loops. gambling social media meme stonks junk cryptocurrency LLMs
1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.
Humbled by Evolution
Understanding the history and diversity of life inspires awe and wonder.
americanscientist.org
I wrote about the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, and his profound thinking about AI and the nature of intelligence. aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-c...
On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI
Today I had the bittersweet pleasure of participating in a symposium honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, a good friend whom I’d known for over 30 years.
aiguide.substack.com
I think the fundamental gap here is that non-creative people think that creative people make things for the end product, when in fact it’s the act of creation and not the end point that makes it worthwhile.
Robert Komaniecki@komaniecki.bsky.social · 8mo agoI have grown to believe that excessive wealth does something to your brain that is analogous to a serious head injury
1/Trump diplomacy is less the Wild West and more Westeros. It is not about actors untethered from the state but a powerful state serving the interests of the clans. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/o...
Opinion | Donald Trump’s Cowboy Diplomacy
nytimes.com
This is rather wonderful (written up by the ever reliable Mark Buchanan). We can imagine making quantum clocks that arefully reversible and generate no entropy. But the entropic cost of extracting a classical tick is, in relative terms, huge. physics.aps.org/articles/v18...
physics.aps.org
AI has introduced a lot of new moves into the game tree and defied a lot of conventional wisdom, but overall the families of strategies have only changed incrementally post-AlphaGo.
In short, it seems like centuries of collective, cumulative innovation has done pretty well, all things considered. Humans can't play as good as AI but AI seem to have rediscovered much of the human strategic repertoire.
"But a few short months ago, the United States believed that it could use its chokehold on advanced semiconductors to create a grand global scheme for controlling the development of AI...The technological bets...look to be going bad." www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-twilig...
The twilight of tech unilateralism
Suddenly, America is in a whole different world
programmablemutter.com
This whole thing reads like a civilisation that is daring itself to go over the brink ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...
Inside the relentless race for AI capacity
The quest for superintelligence is spurring a data centre boom — but critics question the cost, environmental impact and whether it is all needed
ig.ft.com
a lot of rage against Boomers is a kind of subconscious recognition that the period from ~1950-1990 is the basis of a shared popular culture is nothing is coming to replace it
Kieran Hurley@kieranhurley.bsky.social · last yr.One thing that's striking about Ozzy Osborne's death is how difficult it is to imagine the music industry producing another figure like him. The barriers to working class people are so great, and there's a related attitude to culture that is neutered as a result.
LLMs 1) Are better than their haters claim 2) Are much worse than their acolytes claim kinda that simple
Instead of trying to find a mode of information processing that can only be done in protein/water colloids, we'd be better advised to take comfort in the things people *can't* do — like be edited or copied. We can have legal personhood because we're non-fungible that way.
this user has correctly divined how a LLM works: you imagine that you are talking to a person but you are actually talking to an abstract representation of the collective efforts of everybody involved in moving the pointer
Kevin Collins@kwcollins.bsky.social · last yr.At some level, user error has to be factored into these stories about problems with LLMs
I should say though that this is a pretty good article, explaining why the right way to develop AI is as a domain-specific tool.
Here is my review of two new books looking at different but ultimately overlapping aspects of the utopias and dystopias of the libertarian far right. Adam Becker delves into the fantastical techno-utopias of Silicon Valley, while... www.the-tls.co.uk/science-tech...
Techno dystopia, libertarian hell
Imagine a future in which humans succeed in colonizing other planetary systems. It is then easy to imagine an intergalactic human population numbering something huge beyond imagining – 1040, say – all...
the-tls.co.uk
Nature presents us with 80 "octaves" of light, of which humans can see exactly 1. Bringing the other 79 octaves into view has taken two centuries of effort, but it has transformed our ability to sense our place in the cosmic order. My new Aeon essay: 🧪🔭 aeon.co/essays/willi...
James Murray's book on Mathematical Biology has a nice chapter on the "Use and abuse of fractals in biology" which I enjoyed immensely. I think this terminology "use and abuse" can apply to many powerful (but limited!) human tools such as metaphors, power laws, stylistic models, etc.
I've said this before, but the problem is that the acceptable rate of wrong answers depends *heavily* on the task in question. Counterintuitively, the simpler and less important the task, the *lower* the acceptable failure rate!
Fiziker@fiziker.bsky.social · last yr.Bluesky lives in a fantasy world were LLMs are useless plagiarism machines. When the reality is they generally work. Just not well enough for the way the masses are using them. Most people can’t handle something that is sometimes wrong.
I have a couple of benchmark papers and it is very hard to elicit the correct identification of a problem when these models assume a lot of good faith in legit science papers. When parts of the paper have extra sound methodology, Claude will additionally amplify confidence and rigor of the paper.
Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · last yr.That was zero-shot, and it did not do web research. However, if you just ask o3 to critique or provide comments on the paper (as opposed to looking for issues/errors), it provides really solid methodological critiques but it assumes good faith and does not flag the paper as potentially fraudulent.
You can think LLMs are aren’t intelligent, are built in exploitative ways, aren’t useful, overhyped, but if you don’t think they’re a wildly interesting scientific artifact I don’t know what to tell you
Alchemy is a pretty kind of game, Somewhat like tricks o' the cards, to cheat a man With charming. phys.org/news/2025-05...
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider
In a paper published in Physical Review C, the ALICE collaboration reports measurements that quantify the transmutation of lead into gold in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
phys.org
imagine an ant which lives on a map of your hometown. there are many things which you know about your hometown which that ant can never learn. but it is not the case that the ant living on that map knows nothing about your hometown.
Prof. Ian Walker@ianwalker.bsky.social · last yr.Large language models make me think of cargo cults. The belief is that by creating strings of words that superficially look like those created by intelligence, intelligence will later magically appear Or, in Chomsky terms, it's the belief that by aping surface structure, deep structure will appear
It's like these guys don't even know that meaning in these systems isn't stable or directly accessible, that it's perpetually deferred through chains of symbolic relationships. Kinda basic stuff, Sam.
