Philosopher with a masters in philosophy, cosmology & consciousness, JD, MA. Lawyer, ex-AI-researcher & engineer. Worked @twitter once.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined June 2009
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Why is substrate-independent consciousness the baseline that needs to be refuted instead of the other way around?
Computation is a formal human description of physical processes, not the physical processes themselves
"three reasons why AI isn't conscious." really?
"consciousness is not intelligence": not a reason why AI isn't conscious, just rebuts a bad argument for AI consciousness (AI: intelligent therefore conscious).
"consciousness is substrate-dependent"/"noncomputational": would be a reason if true, but truth needs to be established.
more accurate title: "three reasons why AI might not be conscious".
xitter.cf/Nature/status/21121504…
Chad Woodford retweeted
sometimes a family is evil cocaine dad, hologram mommy, a loose monitor lizard, and nathan fielder
Chad Woodford retweeted
Almost nobody worries that AlphaFold "might be conscious. That’s because AlphaFold predicts protein structures, whereas LLMs ‘talk’ to us. The compelling illusion of consciousness created by linguistic fluency just isn’t there for AlphaFold" @anilseth & al
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Chad Woodford retweeted
Is it "weird" or does he maybe know what he's talking about? Anyway, for those who are open to the idea that there's a well-thought-out AI-as-normal-technology perspective on AI safety and the recent loss-of-control incidents, see my essay with @sayashk, or my interview with Ezra Klein, or the writing of many others with similar views including @joshua_saxe and @natolambert.
normaltech.ai/p/the-ai-as-no…
Chad Woodford retweeted
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
Chad Woodford retweeted
this will hurt the economy
The dying Sun may tear the outer solar system apart far sooner than anyone expected.
New research in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that once the Sun sheds its outer layers and collapses into a white dwarf, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune could be thrown into chaos in roughly a billion years—not the nearly eternal stretch of a quintillion years previously imagined. Earth will almost certainly be long gone by then, but the gas giants may not survive either.
Traditional models assumed the outer planets would quietly endure for eons until a random passing star finally disturbed them. Researchers Konstantin Batygin and Jim Fuller of Caltech, along with Fred Adams of the University of Michigan, found a more violent possibility: if the Sun loses mass in discrete bursts rather than a smooth wind, the planetary orbits can be destabilized relatively quickly.
“Everything changes when the envelope departs in pieces,” the authors wrote. In simulations of 672 burst-driven scenarios, up to 96% of the systems became unstable within 3 billion years after the Sun became a white dwarf. About 40% suffered disruption or violent scattering even earlier, before mass loss was finished. Some planets were ejected entirely; in others, Uranus and Neptune swapped places.
Gentler bursts sometimes locked planets into stable resonances that held for billions of years, but the overall picture is clear: the Sun’s death may not be a slow fade. It could be a comparatively rapid, chaotic upheaval that ends the orderly architecture of the outer solar system far sooner than once thought.
Chad Woodford retweeted
💯 We should not pursue recursive self-improvement when we don’t know how to control or align AI .
“Uncontrolled RSI” should be a bright red line that no company should cross until we have strong evidence that we have addressed these challenges— and we haven’t
I am old enough to remember when the makers of Internet worms weren’t about to IPO
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team believes small AI models may now be months away from being capable of self replicating without access to a datacenter.
Quoting from the blog:
'The capabilities that make AI models generally powerful coding agents also generalize to cyber tasks, including autonomous replication. Like coding agents in 2024, we’re seeing signs of life for AI worms. We don’t yet have a full rogue replicator, but agents are becoming increasingly capable of completing the individual steps in the replication chain (and passing on their adaptations to future copies of themselves).
At the same time, increasing amounts of inference compute are now available both inside and outside of datacenters (see Appendix D). It’s uncertain exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take. It could be a slow, distributed “digital slime mold,” living on relatively insecure compute. It could also be a powerful cyber model that breaches datacenters at a high pace, or a model that scams people for compute credits.
As a prediction that goes beyond our experiments, we expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren’t under human control. While it’s true that IoT devices have been vulnerable for a long time, lightweight agents may be much more willing than human attackers to put in the effort to compromise large fractions of the world’s IoT compute. The rise of slow replicators would also be a bellwether for more aggressive, faster ones that can breach more hardened machines or be effective API key thieves. We should aim to harden our systems to make it difficult for such replicators to spread, but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.'
Chad Woodford retweeted
It is ironic that the 1980s failures of "expert system" and "rules-based AI" are not informing those building language models. Simply changing the "programming language" from Prolog to natural language, and "rules" to "constitution" fails to recognize the learned limits of attempting to encode ground rules of a system a priori declaratively.
David Sacks says Anthropic treating Claude like a human is the reason the AI alignment field has produced nothing useful in 10 years
"I actually think that this might be a reason why the whole field of alignment has been so spectacularly unsuccessful over the past five or 10 years. As far as I can tell it hasn't produced anything of tangible value.”
“My theory on this is that they're overcomplicating the task massively by trying to train the model to behave based on an 80-page ethical system that they've codified instead of a very simple list of rules like follow the law or just do what the user wants as long as it doesn't break the law. That's what alignment should be doing."
"But they're not doing that. They're trying to align it to an ethical system. They're treating it like it is a human, like it has its own consciousness, that it's a ‘moral patient.’”
“They are encouraging this model to have human-like self conception in terms of preferences, well being, a sense of self. Again they teach it to act like a conscientious objector who can push back or refuse instructions even from Anthropic if the model judges them to be wrong."
Chad Woodford retweeted
The more I watch the pro-AI e/acc crowd, the more obvious it gets: a lot of them are not futurists. They are lonely, bitter tech freaks with shitty personalities who figured out how to rebrand their contempt for humanity as “acceleration.”
They do not care about advancement in any broad, human sense. They care about the kind of advancement that lets them imagine other people being replaced, humbled, or made obsolete. That is the part that excites them. Not discovery. Not medicine. Not art. Not education. Just the fantasy of a machine finally doing the social revenge they were too pathetic to pull off themselves.
Maybe too many women rejected their creepy sexual advances, and now they want to take it out on the rest of humanity by cheering for anything that makes actual human beings easier to ignore, replace, or punish.
Mathematicians are not just hoarding credit for puzzle answers. They build understanding. When a major proof appears, the author normally explains it, defends it, gives talks, answers questions, finds the key ideas, helps others use it, and turns it into new research directions. If the "solver" is an AI pipeline operated by people who cannot explain the result, the community gets the worst version of progress: priority claims without responsibility.
The actual harm is not that AI helped solve something. If AI produced correct, understandable, checkable mathematics, mathematicians would eventually use it. The harm is flooding a field with alleged solutions while bypassing the human process that turns proofs into knowledge. It creates a backlog of expert review, discourages people from sharing open directions, lets shallow operators claim priority over work they do not understand, and converts researchers into janitors for machine slop.
This is not like a cancer researcher crying because a cure was found. It is more like a company dumping hundreds of unverified drug candidates, announcing that cancer has been "massacred," and then mocking oncologists for asking for trials, mechanisms, evidence, and accountability.
And honestly, the glee here is not even pro-science. It's just plain misanthropy. These people seem less excited that knowledge might advance and more excited that some class of humans might be humiliated, displaced, or made irrelevant. Did human beings hurt their feelings so badly that they now need a machine to avenge them against every profession that still values human expertise?
The fact that Anthropic’s performative agnosticism about the possibility of AI consciousness collapses so quickly into a question of religion instead of philosophy or spirituality is
a potent reminder that this era-defining technology has emerged inside of a deeply Eurocentric society that has artificially hamstrung its understanding of consciousness and metaphysics. It’s time to consider perspectives beyond the Abrahamic religions nytimes.com/2026/10/09/podca…
Data portability opens up a whole new world when combined with vibe coding. I just exported all my LinkedIn data and, after creating a few apps to interact and analyze it, I'm finding LinkedIn useful for possibly the first time in my life.
Chad Woodford retweeted
Like I said, here we have a company creating viruses and malware but gets to market it’s products as machine gods and redirect the narrative away from accountability and being held criminally liable to making themselves sound like concerned citizens, with everyone parroting their CEOs 🙄
A simple reminder that the AI technology that hacks websites and might kill us all is the one that generates AI slop, not the one that is aiding with protein design, predicting weather, and creating other real advances cosmicwit.substack.com/p/is-…
Chad Woodford retweeted
I have never been more eager to see anthropic’s S1 financial documents
Waiting for a risk factor that says something like “Our business may be adversely affected if a robot God takes over the world and eliminates the concept of a stock market”