A good first (fiction) Robert Anton Wilson book to read. Funny yet mind-bending. ISBN:0440500702 (more)

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI (ASI) over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes. by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean. https://ai-2027.com/ Published Apr'2025. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: On (Not) Feeling the AGI. Ben Thompson interviewed Sam Altman recently about building a consumer tech company, and about the history of OpenAI. Mostly it is a retelling of the story we’ve heard before, and if anything Altman is very good about pushing back on Thompson when Thompson tries to turn OpenAI’s future into the next Facebook, complete with an advertising revenue model. It is such a strange perspective to witness. They do not feel the AGI, let alone the ASI. The downside risks of AI, let alone existential risks, are flat out not discussed, this is a world where that’s not even a problem for Future Earth (more)

odds of human extinction (existential risk) (or at least really bad/deep collapse), most often because of hostile ASI

Zvi Mowshowitz: Introduction for and Reactions to Plan A. The folks who brought you AI 2027, a so far remarkably accurate set of predictions despite those predictions having seemed freaky to many at the time, now bring you their positive vision that involves more freaky predictions: Plan A. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Crime and Punishment #1. This seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional series. There’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding crime. What I don’t include here, the same way I excluded it from the monthly, are the various crimes and other related activities that may or may not be taking place by the Trump administration or its allies. As I’ve said elsewhere, all of that is important, but I’ve made a decision not to cover it. This is about Ordinary Decent Crime. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz on AI 2027: Responses. Yesterday I covered Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent podcast coverage of AI 2027 with Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander. Today covers the reactions of others. (more)

see AI 2040: Plan A

Scott Alexander: Introducing AI 2027. In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “What 2026 Looks Like”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years. (more)

Kevin Roose: How Do You Measure an A.I. Boom? Behind every technological revolution is a chart with an exponential curve. (more)

Profile of the Brown University Semiotics program that Steven Johnson was in. Ferdinand De Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906-11... "I was dazzled by this hope," wrote Roland Barthes, author of the ground-breaking book "Mythologies" (1957), "to give my denunciation of the self-proclaimed petit-bourgeois myths the means of developing scientifically; this means was semiology."... And though the works of semioticians were only part of a larger syllabus of recent literary and film theory, the phrase "Brown semiotics" began to take on a larger signification, one that involved expensive black clothes and European cigarettes and a certain kind of hyper-intelligent ideological refusenik." Semiotics . . . was like a Conspiracy Theory to beat all conspiracy theories," Ira Glass remembers. "It wasn't just that authority figures of various sorts did things that were questionable . . .. It's that language itself was actually a system designed to keep you in your place, which when, you know, you're 19 or 20 is pretty much exactly what you're ready to hear.".. The "problematic" with semiotics was that by becoming a means of interrogating the ideological assumptions of bourgeois pleasure, semiotics itself became a form of bourgeois pleasure. "It was like an exclusive, self-contained puzzle for super-smart, super-rich kids," recalls novelist Samantha Gillison, a Brown Classics concentrator in the 1980s... Recalling those heady days, Scholes smiles and quotes the philosopher John Wisdom: "Every day, and in every way, we're getting meta and meta.".. Steven Johnson found he had developed a prose style that sounded like he was translating himself "from the French." Meanwhile Glass, was in anguish about how to convert the theoretical "open text" he had postulated in his undergraduate thesis into something that could actually make it on the radio. "I have to say it took years to wash it away," says Glass...

Bradley Joseph Horowitz is an American entrepreneur and internet executive. He was a vice president at Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Horowitz (more)

Rival Voices: You Can’t Judge Memes. The ‘Existential Hope’ arm of the Foresight Institute is presently running a Meme Contest with a $10,000 prize. A panel of judges will evaluate entries based on things like their “virality potential.” (more)

Artificial Intelligence as fork from Cybernetics: In 1955, a summer study project at Dartmouth College was proposed by John McCarthy (with Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon, who is said to have proposed it)... The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it... Attendees at the Dartmouth summer project included: W. Ross Ashby, Alex Bernstein, Julian Bigelow, Tom Etter, John Holland, Donald Mackay, John McCarthy, W.S. McCulloch, Marvin Minsky, Trenchard More, John Nash, Allen Newell, Abraham Robinson, Nathanial Rochester, Arthur Samuel, David Sayre, Oliver Selfridge, Claude Shannon, Kenneth R. Shoulders, Herbert Simon, and Ray Solomonoff, who gave us the most complete record of the workshop proceedings. The absence at the Dartmouth Summer Project of the pioneer of cybernetics, MIT's Norbert Wiener, was most conspicuous. The conference proposal deliberately did not mention cybernetics. That was the basis of the famous Macy Conferences, which ran from the mid 1940's to around 1960, and included several of the AI pioneers mentioned above. McCarthy wanted to avoid discussions of simple automata theory. By avoiding cybernetics, which focused on analog feedback, it meant he also avoided debates with the powerful Wiener... McCarthy thought mathematical logic should be the basis for the new field. His slogan was "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." (more)

Artificial Intelligence (more)

Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Calgary. He is currently emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology. He has a number of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as discussed in his book Origins of Order (1993). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman (more)

Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902 – May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century.[17] After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department.[18] Later, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons

Systems theory is a transdisciplinary approach that abstracts and considers a system as a set of independent and interacting parts. The main goal is to study general principles of system functioning to be applied to all types of systems in all fields of research. As a technical and general academic area of study it predominantly refers to the science of systems that resulted from Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory (GST), among others, in initiating what became a project of systems research and practice. Systems theoretical approaches were later appropriated in other fields, such as in the structural functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory (more)

Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (19 September 1901 – 12 June 1972) was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934,[1] is still in use today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Bertalanffy

Management cybernetics is concerned with the application of cybernetics to management and organizations. "Management cybernetics" was first introduced by Stafford Beer in the late 1950s and introduces the various mechanisms of self-regulation applied by and to organizational settings, as seen through a cybernetics perspective. Beer developed the theory through a combination of practical applications and a series of influential books. The practical applications involved steel production, publishing and operations research in a large variety of different industries. (more)