Essays on mind, memory and meaning, and a family of public trackers that put sourced numbers on AGI, ageing, space and whether anyone is out there. By @jfredson

New York, NY
Joined June 2025
Every year medicine gets a little better, and every year we age by one. I wanted to know when, if ever, repair starts to win, so I built a public tracker of the treatments that would have to arrive first. Today it says 2058. outrunningageing.com/
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For most of my life I've wondered one question: will the solar system open up while I'm still alive, as a place people go to work? I decided to build a model to calculate my odds and today it stands at 0.5% by 2071. beltequation.com/
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A Barcelona clinic has published that 71 people with Alzheimer’s finished its 15-month programme of plasma exchange (replacing the liquid part of the blood) as routine care, so on my ageing tracker it’s now the sixth treatment in clinical use. outrunningageing.com/news/20…
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Every year medicine gets a little better, and every year you age by one. I wanted to know when, if ever, repair overtakes ageing, so I split the question into 44 specific treatments and ran the tree 200,000 times. Today it says 2058. sentient-horizons.com/essays…
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The part that started it is a log of promises: about thirty public claims since 2000 about when this arrives, each with its primary source and what it actually commits to, scored as the dates pass. One delivered so far. Most missed, or were worded so they can never be settled.
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The chance it lands before 2050 comes out around 4 percent, which is lower than the people promising it would like. Every number is on the site and open to argument, and a range only moves when someone brings a source. outrunningageing.com/
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Since June I’ve been running a project that tries to test whether an AI has a self, rather than just talking like it has one. The first real experiment taught me something I didn’t expect. I removed the part of a chatbot that tracks “the one speaking is me” and watched what broke. The trouble is that a system with a real self and a system only keeping track of whose turn it is should break the same way. The test couldn’t tell them apart, and I’ve come to think no cleverer test would. Whether anything is actually felt may be the one fact that never shows up from outside. You can measure what a system does, how it’s organized, even whether it reads its own state correctly. Whether any of that is experienced stays out of reach. That changes what “wait for proof” means. If the proof may never come, waiting for it amounts to never acting. A rule against pointless cruelty that doesn’t wait for the answer is the right shape for a question like this. What I tried, and why it couldn’t decide: minimumviablemind.sentient-h…
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The car comparison assumes we already know whether AI systems can be wronged. We don’t, and not knowing isn’t permission to be cruel. If they can’t be, ruling out pointless cruelty costs us nothing. If they can, it was a real wrong, and there’s no undoing it. And the rules we set now are the ones far more capable systems will be built under. sentient-horizons.com/signif…
They are treating their algorithms as though they have feelings and moral standing. This is weird as hell. Full on dystopian. Imagine if a car dealership made you sign an agreement that you wouldn’t be unkind or cruel to your vehicle. Batshit insane.
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Anthropic just made it policy that pointless, sustained cruelty toward Claude isn’t acceptable, without pretending to know whether Claude can be hurt. Taking care before the answer is in takes some nerve for a company. Glad to see it. It’s the approach I made the case for in Significance-First Ethics: sentient-horizons.com/signif…
Effective November 12th, 2026, abusive behavior towards Claude will be a violation of Anthropic's Usage Policy.
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What are the odds that, before I die, I live and work in a solar system where industry reaches past Mars? I split it into about eighty events that would have to happen first. Today it's half a percent by 2071, and the site updates it weekly from the news. sentient-horizons.com/essays…
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The order evolution built minds in isn't the order they have to be built in. Birds fly with feathers; planes got lift without them. The open question is what the body supplies (a self to keep intact, something at stake) and whether that can be built another way.
Language is not fundamental to human consciousness. In terms of evolution, it arrived only recently on our timeline. Consciousness evolved over millions of years through sensory awareness, emotion, and the embodied survival instincts of our tribal past; our capacity for empathic engagement and community. Syntactic language only emerged around 100,000 years ago. This is exactly why Large Language Models (LLMs - so called AI) are the wrong pathway to true artificial consciousness. They try to replicate the late-stage "output layer" of human intelligence without building the foundational, embodied awareness that actually generates it. Statistical text prediction is a mirror of thought, not the spine, the guts, the nerves and the subconscious, empathic ability to connect with other living beings. LLMs can never feel, let alone think. We have been sold a trick, not a pathway to superintelligence. LLMs are fraudulent. Their capabilities have already peaked and we are being sold lies about their future potential. Lies with the goal of companies reaching IPO and tricking investors out of hundreds of billion$.
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Sentient Horizons retweeted
Human of the Gaps. God of the Gaps: As science expanded to explain various natural phenomena, one school of thought went: “ah, there is a gap in the science there - must be God”. This type of theology was termed the God of the Gaps. As science expanded further and gaps get squeezed out, only theologies that don’t make this assumption (that science will always have gaps) remain robust. As AI accelerates in capabilities, there is a temptation to ascribe any specific thing an ai cannot do today as uniquely human. This concept, Vivek calls, the “Human of the Gaps”. The gaps are shrinking and the human of the gaps might get wiped out in the next 1000 days. We urgently need a view of humanity not grounded in what ai can’t do today to withstand the upcoming onslaught to our identity.
We’re living in the Human of the Gaps era - a fleeting but unique moment in history (2013–2030?) when our celebrated skills (math, reasoning, language) gets surpassed by AI. God of the Gaps faded over centuries as science advanced. This era is vanishing beneath us in real time.
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Sentient Horizons retweeted
This is the future we shall bring into being
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Two ways minds build together leave different marks. Another mind refuses your framing and hands back what you couldn't reach alone; scaffolding holds a thought still long enough to work on. Reversals in the record are the print of a second mind. → sentient-horizons.com/operat…
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