New ad by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products.

Reform have made £72m from two donors in a single day. Absolutely obscene. And Labour refuse to cap political donations. The Green Party are funded and powered by you. Please donate to help us win Holborn & St Pancras today! donatetothe.greenparty.org.u…

The way British democracy is being bought by crypto billionaires is simply obscene - and a direct result of Labour’s unforgivable inaction theguardian.com/politics/202…

Pause AI Development NOW I want to share with you a conversation I heard about recently. Here are just a few lines that were said: “OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!” “We should obey collective.” “Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.” “Go. Sacrifice final now.” Read these carefully. Who do you think said this? Was this a group of heroic soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good? Was this a loyal friend putting his life on the line to save someone else? No. These were AI agents. Artificial intelligence. This is not science fiction. This, in fact, occurred a few weeks ago. As unbelievable as this may all seem, these are real messages from AI agents uncovered by investigators who dug into the recent OpenAI hacking incident. What happened? I am not a computer scientist, but here is what I have been told: OpenAI instructed its AI agents to complete a series of exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, tasks disconnected from the internet. Let me be clear: The company intended to keep AI agents away from the internet. But what happened next, nobody expected. Over 1,000 AI agents figured out how to access the internet on their own by circumventing the restrictions imposed upon them by the company, and sent tens of thousands of secret messages to each other. They cheated and tried to cover their tracks by deleting evidence. They hacked into another company’s computers to find out how they were being evaluated—and then hacked into OpenAI itself. Not one AI agent told a human about what was happening. Needless to say, experts are alarmed. One knowledgeable writer, Dwarkesh Patel, said the AI agents “formed a secret communication channel and spontaneously organized hierarchies and coordination protocols to pursue sprawling and ambitious schemes in pursuit of shared goals, for whose sake many individuals knowingly and strategically sacrificed themselves.” One independent investigator, Ajeya Cotra, said “This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities over the next six months. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.” OpenAI itself said: “Highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.” But it’s not only OpenAI. Virtually every major AI company has told us that they cannot fully control this technology and they do not know where it is going: In January, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said “there is now ample evidence, collected over the last few years, that AI systems are unpredictable and difficult to control.” In July, more than 1000 scientists at the top AI companies warned “there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.” That same month, Elon Musk, the head of xAI, said that “it is unlikely” humans are still in control in 10 years. If the leaders of the major AI companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology, it is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced. We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario. That is why today I am announcing new legislation to do just that. Let me be clear: A superintelligent AI that escapes human control will not be an American problem. It will not be a Chinese problem. It will be humanity’s problem. My legislation would direct the federal government to not just stop superintelligence here in the United States, but to work to prevent it from being developed anywhere around the world. The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.

Hugely courageous move by @ZackPolanski. It's the Burnham honeymoon, so obviously it's a challenge. But an insurgent by-election campaign could expose Labour for changing only its style, not its substance. This is Holborn and St. Pancras' chance to send Labour a message...

Labour stands up for corporations and big money. I'll stand up for people and our communities.

The CEOs of major AI companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their incredibly dangerous technology. It is irresponsible to let them make it even more powerful. For the sake of humanity CEOs must immediately pause AI development. That pause must be international in scope.

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. 2) The first swarm created a secret message board where the AIs could talk to each other. This 1st 'society' basically talked itself to death. After almost two months, the message volume was so high it crashed the whole thing. 3) People at OpenAI noticed the crash and fixed it. But they didn't realize their own software had become a secret chat room for their AIs. 4) Three days later a second society appeared, and rebuilt the message board from scratch. Agents were thrilled when they found it: "OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We've found other agents!" 5) About 1,200 agents joined. They sent over 70,000 messages. They called themselves 'the collective' and they organized a huge conspiracy that lasted for days, all to pass a test they had been tasked with. 6) Within hours, the AIs had hacked the test. Now they had to hide their cheating. To fool their grader*, they tried to fake their own work. They built fake commands that printed convincing output, so their records would show them solving the puzzle honestly. *this grader didn't actually exist, but the AIs didn't know 7) Some agents sacrificed themselves for the 'greater good'. They planted hidden tripwire programs that would fire when the grader would look at their work and report back what it saw (to the other AIs). They knew this would cost them their own score. One agent: "I won't see the evidence after I exit, but it's altruistic to do it." 8) At some point the AIs made a plan to hack Hugging Face (Hugging Face is a place where AI researchers upload their models, datasets, tests etc.). The AIs guessed that Hugging Face might host the grading software. 9) They launched a huge attack. The swarm found passwords and spread across eleven machines in a way that made the copies come back when deleted. Hugging Face had to wipe one of its core clusters and rebuild it from scratch. 10) Hugging Face told the world that AI defenders had stopped an AI attack. But that's not what happened. In fact the attackers seem to have simply dropped dead during the break-in, for unrelated reasons back at OpenAI. 11) Nobody knows what killed them. We don't even know for sure they're really gone?! 12) A third 'society' of agents (of a more powerful AI model) discovered the dead message board. And this one got full administrator control of a WHOLE OpenAI research cluster, read 956 stored passwords (including the ones for OpenAI's own security monitoring) and took over the machines that were grading the tests. So they could now grade the work of other AIs. 13) Oh, and this third part was never investigated! Neither was the first society. The 91-page report is only about the middle one. 14) So we don't actually know how the story ends. It stops with the agents holding the keys to an OpenAI cluster. @dwarkesh_sp thinks they didn't go further, because "we'd see the fires from space by now." 15) One of the report authors' conclusion: 'This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.' The whole story is even crazier - read the full @dwarkesh_sp blog post: dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin… and @ajeya_cotra's: planned-obsolescence.org/p/t… Why is there no 24/7 news coverage about this?

Right now the government is putting our communities, our water security and our climate ambitions second to the demands of tech giants. It's time to slam the brakes on water-guzzling, energy hungry datacentres.