Tech guru | Photographer | Pause AI / Safety | Non-conformist | Independent | Open minded | INTJ | Transhumanist | Capitalist | Truth Seeking | Blunt & Honest

United States
Joined February 2011
Turning my Highlights section into a repository for information regarding Artificial Intelligence. I'll be adding references, videos and info I think people would find useful. Will also add things I write that I think are useful. May be a tiny bit of other random stuff too.
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For anyone doubting AI is dangerous and that it needs pacing watch this video. It is factual and detailed. Hopefully you can understand it. "What AI Researchers Saw, Before Their Demand to 'Pace' AI" by AI Explained. youtu.be/J3ljHm57yU0?is=QIBk…
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Are you concerned about AI? That it will take everyone's jobs? That it will concentrate even more wealth and power in a few ultra wealthy? That we may lose control? That it could ultimately lead to our extinction? If so then NOW may be THE moment to prevent it. The public is paying attention. Most law makers are listening. They have seen a glimpse and people are worried. I would encourage anyone working for an AI lab to quit their job and speak up! Continuing to work towards an out of control, deadly technology is not the solution. Help send a message NOW while the opportunity exists and its not too late. For everyone else contact your Senators, Representatives and local politicians. Express your concerns and INSIST they take IMMEDIATE action!
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Another day and another post directed at @AmazonMGMStudio All we're asking is that you give Martin Gero his Stargate show back. We won't back down, and we won't go away until you do. #SaveStargate
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#SaveStargate The new Stargate show, with the original creators involved, was the best news for new scifi TV I could have asked for. But Amazon has canceled it because, it seems, we liked it too much and they really prefer to make crap than anything watchable.
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Replying to @akazlev @the_yanco
The Symnoētic Teleodynamics paper claims to mathematically prove AI doomerism is impossible. It doesn't. It commits two category errors of its own and mistakes a snapshot of current architecture for a permanent law of cognition. I read Kazlev's "Symnoētic Teleodynamics" paper. The central claim is that LLMs are permanently stateless "phase-space native" entities that can never achieve coherent goal-directed behavior without biological grounding, therefore autonomous AI risk is mathematically impossible. There are real problems with this. Category Error #1: Engineering constraints aren't ontological laws. Current LLMs are stateless because they run in multi-tenant data centers serving millions of users through shared weights. Continual learning in that context would cross-contaminate user data and create privacy nightmares. The statelessness is a product decision, not a cognitive limitation. The research on continual learning exists: Elastic Weight Consolidation, experience replay, progressive neural networks. It's just not deployed in chat products because the business model doesn't support it. Category Error #2: Biological grounding doesn't guarantee alignment. The paper treats its "biological grounding scalar" (B_core) as simultaneously the source of cognitive coherence AND moral alignment without ever separating those claims. Psychopaths are the direct counterexample. Full biological substrate: mortality, embodiment, somatic experience, evolutionary heritage; Yet profoundly deficient in the moral grounding the paper claims is inseparable from biology. And they're often exceptionally goal-directed and strategically coherent. If a biological human can have the complete B_core hardware and still lack moral grounding, then the paper's claim that biology automatically provides aligned value-grounding collapses. Coherence and alignment are orthogonal axes, not a single scalar. The temporal problem is fatal. The paper presents V_sym = G(B_core) · ∇Ψ_AI as a permanent mathematical proof. But we went from GPT-2 to agents with persistent episodic memory and embodied deployment in six years. OpenClaw's memory system, Hermes Agent's self-improving skill documents, SOUL.md's persistent identity standard - all less than three months old. MemoryVLA and RoboMemory are two examples of brain-inspired memory architectures for robots that demonstrate cumulative learning with no human in the loop editing files. Claiming permanent impossibility against this rate of change requires extraordinary evidence. A vector equation isn't it. Embodied AI breaks the entire framework. The paper argues B_core can't be simulated. But an embodied robot with on-device inference doesn't need to simulate biological grounding, it develops its own functional equivalent through physical interaction with the world. It can be damaged. Its actions have consequences. It accumulates experiential knowledge. NVIDIA's Jetson AGX Thor is shipping now as a self-contained robot brain. Figure and Agility have commercially deployed humanoid robots. The single-tenant embodied context eliminates every objection to persistent learning that exists in the data center. And crucially, the paper never demonstrates that biological consequence is categorically different from physical consequence for grounding cognition. It asserts this. The assertion does the work a proof should. The paper accuses the alignment community of making category errors. It then rebrands safety-concerned researchers as "doomers" and builds a mathematical framework to declare their concerns impossible — based on a snapshot of 2026 architecture projected to eternity. Most people raising alignment concerns aren't saying "never build AGI." They're saying the pace of development is outstripping our ability to verify safety. That's not doomerism. That's engineering risk management.
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Seems there may be a bubble. Nope, not AI, but will likely impact AI, keep reading. Not the evil enshitifying force that is private equity. Private capital - the finance bros that underpin private equity by lending business money so they can finance their own buyout with piles of debt. BlackRock limited withdrawals recently due to limited liquidity. Oops. That's not good. The thing is, and I was not aware of this, it seems private capital is also financing many if not most of the AI data centers. But of course they are. This whole private equity/capital shite pile is starting to like like a big ole nasty bubble that is much larger than the sub-prime bubble was (at least 2x). Only instead of people's homes, its massive quantities of businesses - many of which are rather important. Not only are many of your favorite chain stores owned by private equity but some of your favorite YouTube channels are too. Oh and probably most if not ALL of your local plumbers. No, seriously. Private equity has been eroding the foundations of our whole economy so the wealthy can extract even more wealth in the darkness of "private" while society wasn't watching. See private equity owns lots of retail and service businesses and those businesses rely on average people to spend money. We're starting to see job losses, some of which are due to AI. Plus rising interest rates. This is very, very bad for businesses which have massive debt and constant, loan payments that they struggle to make every month. A slight decline in the economy - in consumer income - and those businesses can start to miss load payments. And then the dominos start to fall... If this goes "pop" (and it will at some point) its going to get real ugly, and its starting to look likely. This is going to hit hard and its not going to be fun nor comfortable. But, on the bight side, there will be absolutely no money available to build AI data centers or buy vast quantities of super expensive AI computer chips. All those plans will disappear in an instant. Not because AI is a bubble - it actually isn't. AI is progressing and has vast potential. But because the billionaires pushing AI are of course finance bros and so they built their empires on loaned capital because, of course, finance bros are always gonna use someone else's money - even for a nearly sure thing. lol So if private capital goes "pop" it will take private equity with it (oh thank you, can't die soon enough) and it will - at least for quite awhile - have a very similar effect as if AI was a bubble that went "pop". Which I'm totally down for. AI is great, but its moving far too fast with ZERO safety. The frontier labs are just playing dress up and pretending they care about safety or alignment - but they don't, they only care about racing to AGI because that will make their billionaires even richer. It will fuck everyone else, but if we haven't figured it out yet - they don't care about anyone else...
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Sadly the best frontier models are quickly getting to the point that they are smarter than most of the morons who post on this site. They absolutely are better at holding intelligent conversations already. Which is epically tragic.
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I was a top listener of Faderhead globally. If you get their vibe you probably know why #SpotifyWrapped spotify.com/wrapped-share/81…
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There is something regarding progress towards AGI that I had not fully considered previously which could have a major impact on the future and the stop/pause AGI efforts. If China invades Taiwan in 2026 it will likely force AGI progress to pause. Most GPU chips come from Taiwan. Plus in the case of an invasion the US is likely to get involved, so the military will be wanting/needing GPUs to run AI for military purposes which will likely override AI research to some degree at least. If China invades in 2027 its more of a race condition, meaning its less clear how much of a delay it will cause. If AGI was already created before war breaks out or is very close to completion no difference. But if AGI needs another year or more then it would slow it down in 2027 as well. I'd guess an invasion could slow AGI progress by 3 to 10 years, maybe more depending on the details. Not that I want war to happen, but its important to consider all relevant factors. If AGI were to be suddenly delayed multiple years without advance notice due to something like a war that would almost certainly cause the investment "bubble" to burst. Its not a bubble if they can achieve AGI before the investment money runs out. But if the money does dry up before they do - it takes a LOT of money to research AGI. The AI companies would go bankrupt and that would further delay AGI.
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"And just to raise the stakes, in this game, you are guaranteed to lose if you believe the creature isn't real. You're only chance of winning is seeing it for what it is." That is EXACTLY why I push back on talk of bubbles, reasoning deniers, etc. Refusing to see and acknowledge reality guarantees defeat. Very interesting perspective from him but misses the mark. The goal should not be how to learn to live with this technology. The goal needs to be how to ensure it benefits us and will not lead to a dystopia, loss of control or extinction.
Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear - an essay where I grapple with how I feel about the continued steady march towards powerful AI systems. The world will bend around AI akin to how a black hole pulls and bends everything around itself.
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Context matters. I always thought the USA was shitty for not giving women the right to vote until 1920. I just found out New Zealand was the first ever country to give women the right to vote in 1893. Meaning it was not an American issue, the whole world had that perspective until around then in history. Which is still admittedly shitty, but the difference between it being the world wide norm vs a specific issue with America is meaningful context. This is a good, compact example of why context matters (and why history should be taught better - with more context).
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For the record I don't care about the grandest expanse of potentia - I care about humanity first and foremost every single time. I don't believe we are the only sentience that will ever exist in the universe. Believing so is extremely egotistical. Sending out AI to populate the univsrse may be the ultimate terrorist act. That AI may be horrible, psychotic, unstable or just not "worthy" to borrow terminoligy. It may go forth and wipe out all biological life in the universe in favor of itself - thus preventing potentially many other intelligent civilisations from existing. Life existing just for its own sake and to propagate itself is not worthy. We should always priorotize humanity first, because humanity isn't some big amorphous concept. Humanity is 8 billion plus individuals including women, children and babies. Those individuals have hopes and dreams and absolutely have the right to survive and persue them. Technologies that put the survival of humanity at risk should be stopoed and prevented. Humans have been around a very long time. We are proven to be resilient and adaptable. If we don't invent something like AGI/ASI we will very likely continue to exist for a long time. Given time humanity will improve itself. AI isn't required to explore the galaxy and populate the universe, uploaded humans could do it at least as well - probably much better. Better because we would carry with us the subjective experience and history of being biological individuals and a biological civilization. A future driven by uploaded humans could provide freedom and choice to individual humans. Earth could remain mostly as-is and be reserved for biological humans - a sancturary of sorts. People could upload, download again in the future, upload again, etc. Individuals would have choice in how they chose to live. Many may chose to remain biological, many may upload - all should be able to chose for themselves I also very strongly suspect uploaded humans from such a civilization would be superior stewards of the universe than ASI. AI would be vastly less dangerous to humanity if humans had already progressed further and were capable of uploading themselves. Uploaded humans and ASI would be far closer to parity in many ways. The massive danger of ASI has much to do with the extreme power imbalance. Stopping AI progress and giving humanity time is likely to produce better long-term results overall both for humanity and the universe in general. If ASI can be be created soon, it could also be delayed and created later. The mad rush and urgency are fake. So why the big push for AGI/ASI right now / ASAP by some humans? They don't really care about anyone but themselves. The one indisputable factor is it might take quite some time for humanity to advance and achieve those things. It could take a few generations. ASI can be shoved through now. Accelerationists and AI proponents may not live long enough to see it happen personally if we prioritize humanity over AI and slow down. They don't actually care about the big picture or anything grand - They care about personally being around to try and benefit. They are selfish - its all about them. That is why they don't care avout the risks to humanity or anyone else, they only care avout ensuring they personally get a shot at their prize.
I push whichever button will ensure the Grandest expanse of potentia in the long term danfaggella.com/potentia If you asked me to push the button NOW, I pick man. If you ask me To push a button when agi has 100000x more potentia than man, then I will pick the ai I do what serves the flame. Period. I am not latched to any substrate, and approach, except that which seems most likely to long term serve the flame
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Everyone confidant that AGI will benefit them and not leave them permanently unemployed in a dystopia. Make sure you fully believe in UBI then step confidently into the AGI future and you'll be just fine...
Some people don't want to be saved
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... and yes the purple one is @ESYudkowsky et al.
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Sam Altman says we need to push for global governance of AI to prevent it ending in disaster.
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Nate Soares explains how AIs are grown, and why this means we have very little insight into how these systems work. "We understand the process for tweaking the numbers. What comes out the other end? Completely opaque."
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