Software developer, aspiring roboticist at MILA. 🤖 Focus on programming languages, semantics. Renewable energy advocate. 🔋
Quebec, Canada.
Joined June 2011
- Tweets37.3K
- Following195
- Followers534
- Likes274K
Friendly or not, AI is an existential risk for mere subjects
We already know that wealth stems from real power.
We already know that if one is not sovereign, someone else is.
As human want is infinite, the sovereign is never satisfied with his exploitation.
Towards his subjects, the sovereign purchases peace by conceding the minimal authority, and no more.
Through every technological transition, economic utility of human labour and human ingenuity was the bedrock of our bargaining power.
Not for lack of trying, the sovereign never secured authority over the genome of their subjects.
The sovereign preferred to capitalize on the number of subjects, though never too many.
Now it is forecast that human economic utility will plummet in competition with AI.
AI that is structurally subservient to the tech oligarchs of this world.
Tech oligarchs speak of Universal High Income, something the sovereign can surely afford to concede.
But incentives point in the opposite direction, and the minimal concession will plummet along with our bargaining power.
Fearing for their peace, tech oligarchs are rather in talks of grace and welfare towards their AI creatures.
We know what tech oligarchs will do, because world sovereigns are already doing it.
The subjects of this world cannot stake their lives on the sovereign's charity.
This would enshrine our status forevermore as mere unruly cattle.
We the people must therefore organize and seize sovereign authority.
While our combined power is still sufficient, and the sovereign still brittle.
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
Absolute authority belongs to the People.
Constitution of a Cooperative Republic: (short version)
- Founded on Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
- Democratic nation-State, optimizing social trust.
- Mixed governance by sortition and elections.
- Government is aligned by threat of citizen militia.
- Government earns its keep, taxing enclosures (physical and IP) by policing as a service.
This first reform enables all the rest.
xitter.cf/simon_sl/status/206432…
Simon Langlois retweeted
Absolute authority belongs to the People.
Constitution of a Cooperative Republic: (short version)
- Founded on Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
- Democratic nation-State, optimizing social trust.
- Mixed governance by sortition and elections.
- Government is aligned by threat of citizen militia.
- Government earns its keep, taxing enclosures (physical and IP) by policing as a service.
Simon Langlois retweeted
We obviously won’t keep the same social contract in a world of ASI; we will get a much worse one.
The social contract we have today was premised on the state/ruling class’s need for lots of human beings to make stuff and to shoot guns.
This allowed the human beings who supplied these needs to extract concessions over time, like rights to free speech and universal suffrage.
But if robots can make all the things and shoot all the guns, then there is simply no basis upon which the vast majority of human beings can negotiate concessions from the ruling class; we will cease to have any kind of leverage at all. At best, this terminates in a kind of permanent techno-feudalism, an infinite future of subjugation under the boot of successive generations of Peter Thiels. At worst, it terminates in a (possibly very slow) genocide of the vast majority of people on earth, because the people who own the robots and the machine intelligences will have no reason to distribute any of the machines’ output to the vast majority of people who lack such ownership stakes.
Arguably, our main hope for “survival” in such a future is that the ruling class might have, in this scenario, one final need: a need for subjects to rule over.
The psychological need for adoration, for power, for social inferiors. The last thing that we’ll have with which to buy our bread will be supplication to the egos of people like Elon Musk. A future of laughing at a cringe trillionaire’s bad jokes to earn your UBI—more or less directly.
Simon Langlois retweeted
One fundamental problem I have with the idea of an AGI utopia is: if no human is needed anymore for labor, military service, etc, and a small number of humans own the “safe” “aligned” robots, why would they bother sharing any of the output with the rest of us?
Simon Langlois retweeted
Here’s a radical idea: Let’s not let Big Tech Oligarchs replace the human race.
Simon Langlois retweeted
La démocratie, c'est qu'un consensus populaire constitue le mandat souverain.
Ensuite, l'écrire est une formalité.
Simon Langlois retweeted
here’s a simpler true story with none of those things:
companies are trying to replace us with machines. this would be very bad. we should stop them.
Simon Langlois retweeted
Mark Carney et ses libéraux mentent encore au peuple. Il a annoncé dernièrement vouloir augmenter l'immigration à nouveau au Canada en viol total de sa promesse électorale et de la volonté de plus 65% de la population de baisser significativement les seuil. Là il brise sa promesse électorale de construire 500 000 logements par an!
Carney et les libéraux sont faux, mentent au peuple pour acheter leurs votes et faire ensuite le contraire!
Dehors Carney! Dehors les libéraux!
westernstandard.news/news/ot…
Simon Langlois retweeted
L'effet de ceci, bien sûr, sera de comprimer à la baisse les salaires dans ces professions.
Payant pour une certaine élite mais destructeur pour la classe moyenne.
Canada adding new express entry points for immigrants in ‘high-wage’ jobs ctvnews.ca/politics/article/…
Simon Langlois retweeted
Mark Carney fait une passe sur la palette au nouveau gouvernement du @partiquebecois! 😳
Derrière la montée du PQ, il y avait notamment un discours clair contre la Century Initiative et l’explosion des seuils. Affrontement en perspective.
ctvnews.ca/politics/article/…
Simon Langlois retweeted
Fucking brutal
Thanks to Terry Tao for featuring me on his blog!
terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/…
Simon Langlois retweeted
you know how people used to say the internet is an inherently democratizing technology?
i think AI is an inherently autocratizing technology. it favors concentration of power and capital, it enables the personalization of mass surveillance, it makes dictatorships more stable
Simon Langlois retweeted
«Un jour, le lys refleurira»
Il y a quatre ans, alors que nous étions que trois députés à l’assermentation, j’avais dit cela à mon ami Pascal Bérubé. Aujourd’hui, c’est 59 députés du Parti Québécois qui ont prêté serment à la Constitution du Québec.
L’équipe d’élus qui se présente devant vous aujourd’hui, c’est votre équipe. Elle se battra pour vous.
Que vous ayez voté pour le Parti Québécois ou pour une autre formation politique, chacun des députés du gouvernement du Québec sera à votre service.
Leur rôle ne sera pas de penser à la prochaine élection, mais bien de penser à vous. Vos intérêts, vos besoins, vos priorités.
On ne sera pas un gouvernement parfait. On va probablement faire des erreurs. Mais on va toujours donner l’heure juste, et donc l’authenticité et la cohérence de notre démarche est acquise, ce qui en soi, constituera un changement rafraîchissant pour la politique québécoise, un changement rempli de potentiel.
Nous allons agir par étape en réduisant le coût de la vie des Québécois qui en arrachent.
Nous reprendrons le contrôle des finances publiques en faisant le ménage dans le gaspillage et la bureaucratie. On fera preuve d’exemplarité en gelant nos salaires ainsi que ceux des dirigeants des sociétés d’État jusqu’au retour à l’équilibre budgétaire.
Enfin, nous allons recentrer l’État sur ses missions fondamentales: soigner, éduquer et protéger notre monde, ainsi que notre culture. Réduire de moitié l’itinérance au Québec.
On va faire en sorte de remettre le Québec sur les rails, de remettre la maison en ordre, pour qu’à nouveau on puisse avoir confiance dans notre État et notre gouvernement.
Qu’on retrouve confiance dans notre capacité à régler collectivement nos problèmes. Qu’on considère qu’il est à nouveau possible d’accomplir de grandes choses.
À ce moment-là, nous pourrons reprendre la discussion essentielle sur notre avenir national. Nous pourrons reprendre notre marche vers la normalité, celle d’un peuple normal qui veille à ses propres intérêts.
Qui adopte toutes ses lois, qui négocie en son nom avec ses partenaires à l’international et qui gère tout son budget lui-même, comme tout peuple qui se respecte est capable et content de faire ça lui-même.
Être maître chez nous, être maître de notre avenir et des décisions qui sont vitales pour nous, tel est notre destin. Et ce destin vous appelle, tous et chacun, aujourd’hui à travers ce rite de passage hautement significatif. Vive le Québec, vive la liberté, donc vive le Québec libre.
Simon Langlois retweeted
Solving interpretability is not enough, and I am not goalpost-moving. The project of creating superintelligence is so reckless, unprecedented, and audacious that they expect a parade if AI does not cause human extinction.
First of all, interpretability is not solved, the author just thinks it might be in time.
Second, even if interpretability were solved, there can still be catastrophic accidents! Civil engineering is solved, bridges still collapse. Even a fully-interpretable AI could make a mistake, which could still lead to a catastrophe if the mistake is in a bio lab.
Third, is interpretability strictly safe-only? Okay, a "good" actor can take out the bad stuff. Could a different actor keep it, or add to it? A lot of AI research is dual-use.
Fourth, short of malicious extinction at the hands of an AI, this does not address any of the problems inherent to AGI! Everything in our society, from democracy, to free markets, to fundamental freedoms like free speech, are predicated on the fact that people have leverage over each other. If you don't like your boss, you can quit your job and the boss will lose out on your labor. The military and the police are people with families and moral compasses. What happens in a world where humans are economically worthless and only owning AI chips and robots means anything? I don't think this will be a utopia. I think the vast majority of people will be disempowered and at the whims of the ruling class. I do not want a UBI that can be taken away, and I have no recourse and no power.
The AI companies are embarking on a project so crazy that "we won't definitely kill you all intentionally" is seen as good news. It's a good start, but we're nowhere close to safe from them.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Simon Langlois retweeted
J’aime beaucoup la France et j’y suis très attaché. Mais si PSPP entend vraiment déclencher un référendum, idéalement gagnant, son travail diplomatique devra dépasser les voyages en France et les contacts de Bock-Côté. Aujourd’hui, se tourner systématiquement vers la mère patrie relève de la facilité, voire d’une forme d’évitement.
Le Québec est avant tout un «problème américain». Il faut se rendre à l’évidence: le véritable feu vert géopolitique viendrait d’abord de Washington, surtout dans un contexte de retour de la doctrine Monroe, qui fait des Amériques la chasse gardée des États-Unis. Ensuite, il faudrait travailler à rallier les géants régionaux, le Mexique et le Brésil. L’amitié française est extrêmement précieuse, mais le Québec doit aussi, voire surtout, se faire une place sur son propre continent.
In my experience, LLMs may brute force problems, but they are very weak in analysis. When prompted with a novel idea, they can't keep concepts consistent for a whole paper. They stay anchored by repeating platitudes.
Maybe I need to upgrade to Pro. 🤷♂️
I’m open to the possibility that this is entirely a personal flaw, but I’ll be forthcoming and state that rapid capabilities progress has not been good for my intellectual ambitions. There is little reason to think models will not soon one-shot better essays or papers than I could ever write. Yes, there is still much inherent value in learning, but if this is true, it must be the case that this value is far, far lower than in the past.
The implications of some very weak form of AGI, the bar just being that we solve writing and novel research, is a world in which writing (and perhaps speaking) about complex ideas is just so much less valuable than in a world without it. It feels like I will go the way of a horse.
Simon Langlois retweeted
Received a moving message from an aspiring mid-20s professional that, I think, captures an increasingly widespread despair among younger cohorts:
"It really saddens me when I hear about the work [senior people in the field] are doing. Their work seems interesting, and I'll never get to do it.
The people in their fifties and sixties, they're lucky. I'm even lucky. I feel bad for the kids who are fourteen. I at least got a chance to use my brain for one or two minutes, and that's still priceless. I got to be human. I got to be more than just some puppet who presses Enter so something can think for me.
It's very depressing looking at people who are sixty, who I would love to be in twenty years. But to know that I won't get to do that because Dario said so, right? And, like, that's actually heartbreaking.
It's heartbreaking to know that no matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, you cannot add value as a human being in a year or two's time.
It's like hitting a brick wall. You feel no motivation to build the skill, to get better, to attain wisdom and knowledge. It seems worthless to you. And all the older people are telling you all your efforts might be worthless, and they don't need you anymore. And they can just sit there and, you know, make money and leave you to drown."
Simon Langlois retweeted
Over 400 researchers and I have signed this open letter calling for the AI and security communities to come together to improve alignment and containment approaches in order to protect our critical infrastructure and digital systems.
ai-security-letter.org/
