Population correspondent @BBCNews Looking at demographic shifts & how they change the way we live. Previously in Nigeria for the BBC. Economic migrant/oyinbo.
LDN via Lagos via Dublin 🇮🇪
Joined April 2009
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Shot in the head and chest.
We investigated the killing of two-year-old Layan and six-year-old Mira.
We also found many more cases of children shot in the head and chest in Gaza, from the beginning of the war right up until last month.
bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cjelp7…
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
👨💻 THREAD on how data center-related ballot measures are faring tonight
data centers are on the ballot in ~40 localities across 13 states, including proposed bans, votes on specific projects, and recalls of pro-data center politicians
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
China on Friday issued a national directive on adapting to AI development and building an employment-friendly society, marking an effort to balance efficiency gains with job security.
The directive by the State Council encourages companies to prioritize AI deployment in labor-scarce and high-risk roles. (Pics via VCG)
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
This is TESCREAL pro-extinctionism. I have been screaming about it for YEARS. The “good” outcome is one in which humanity dies out. I’m fucking serious about this, and people—the media—need to WAKE UP.
イーロン・マスク＆カーツワイル「未来の知能の99%以上はデジタル。人間が生き残る道は『脳をクラウドに直結して機械と合体する』ことだけだ」
「自分の学歴とか会社とかルッキズムとか、もうどうでもよくなる」
「全人類80億人の知能を足し合わせても、AI全体の1%にも満たない残りカスになる。人間がAIに淘汰されない唯一の脱出ルートは、自ら機械と融合して新人類になることだ」
イーロン・マスクが断言する「知能の99%デジタル化」と、未来予測の鬼才レイ・カーツワイルが唱える「人類と機械の融合（シンギュラリティ）」が交差する、人類の最終進化がコレ↓
・人間の知能なんて全体の「1%未満の残りカス」になる（イーロン・マスク）
近い将来、地球上に存在するあらゆる知能の99%以上をAIなどのデジタル知能が占めることになる。全人類の頭脳をかき集めても、知能全体から見ればわずか1%未満の「誤差」のような存在に成り下がる。
・指や口で入力している時点で、人間は「カタツムリ」同然
人間の話すスピードや指先でスマホを叩く速度は、データ通信としては遅すぎる。光の速さで思考するデジタル知能から見れば、生身の人間は超スローモーションで動く原始人に過ぎず、外からキーボードを叩いて道具として操る関係性は完全に限界を迎える。
・カーツワイルの予言：脳を「クラウド」に直接ぶち込む時代
シンギュラリティ（技術的特異点）の提唱者レイ・カーツワイルが予測するのは、脳の神経や毛細血管に微小なナノマシンや電極（Neuralinkなど）を繋ぎ、人間の脳の新皮質を直接クラウドのAIに接続する未来。何千倍、何万倍もの知能を「自分自身の思考」としてクラウドから引き出して考えられるようになる。
・「AIに支配される側」から「AIそのものになる側」への脱皮
人間より賢いバケモノAIにすべてを支配され統治されるディストピアを防ぐ唯一の手段は、人間とマシンの境界線をなくすこと。AIを外の敵として恐れるのではなく、自分自身の肉体と脳をアップデートして「機械と融合したハイブリッド生命体」になることで、人間は主導権を保ったまま神の領域へ進化する。
要するに、「これからの世界では知能の99%以上をAIが独占し、生身の脳みそだけでは1%以下の無力な存在に追いやられる。AIに淘汰されずに生き残る唯一の方法は、脳を直接クラウドにつないでマシンと合体し、人間自らが超知能へと進化することだ」ということです。
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
Anthropic is offering a 145k salary for a personal assistant in London.
Responsibilities include:
"Scheduling and managing calendars for leader(s) and their organization"
"Building and maintaining organizational systems for tracking and managing inbound requests"
"Managing the leader's inbox and communications with precise attention to detail"
"Handling travel logistics"
Somebody should really build some sort of tech tool that can handle this stuff autonomously.
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
Freezers should probably not be connected to the internet.
I'm afraid we'll soon conclude that nothing should be connected to the internet.
Cyberattack on French supermarkers. Someone remotely took over refrigeration controllers and made them to defrost. Target temperature set to 50°C. Staff opening freezers in the morning were hit by a wave of hot air. Millions of euros lost. France spent years debating food sovereignty to depend on a firmware update? bfmtv.com/economie/consommat…
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
I asked Opus 5.5 to make a video about whether or not it was conscious. The ending of this video is insane.
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
I’ve had a lot of people asking me about the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, as well as the upcoming execution by firing squad that’s supposed to be livestreamed. Having spent nearly 20 years on death row, my thoughts and feelings about these things are so vast that I sometimes struggle to find a place to begin. I became close friends with a man who had committed murder. He was like a brother to me. I once watched him break down crying, trembling as he told me he wished he was as evil as the world believed him to be, because then he wouldn’t have to care about what he’d done. Fifteen years later, he was still having nightmares about it. I know in my soul that he would never hurt another person again. But I’ve also watched a man being stabbed to death in prison. I cried for days afterward, and something inside me was changed forever. I learned that some people are capable of extraordinary transformation, while others remain capable of terrible violence even behind prison walls. There are no simple answers here. No slogans or political arguments that can adequately address the complexity of human beings, guilt, punishment, and suffering.
But there is one thing I want to say about the upcoming execution by firing squad. Don’t watch it. Whatever you believe about the death penalty, even if you think the person being executed deserves to die, don’t watch it. You cannot witness a human being being killed and simply walk away unchanged. What you see becomes part of you. It follows you into places you never expected it to reach. There are things I witnessed in prison that I would give anything to forget, things that still cast a shadow over my life decades later. There’s a difference between understanding that terrible things happen in the world and deliberately making yourself a spectator to them. I don’t have all the answers about justice, punishment, or forgiveness. But I do know that killing another human being should never become so ordinary that we turn it into something to watch from the comfort of our living rooms.
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
Two other safety researchers and I were fired from OpenAI last week. We wrote this letter to leadership.
I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
a while ago I made a bunch of unhinged requests to Amazon's shopping AI about things like "the best conceal carry holster for my dog" and I'm pleased to announce it's paid off
ALT Home & Family > Has a Doberman that is a guard dog and an ex-police dog Home & Family > Dog was part of a CIA experiment to allow dogs to carry firearms Home & Family > Dog has a bionic prosthetic with recoil suppression Home & Family > Dog has a Glock 40 Home & Family > Dog is highly trained in the use of a Glock 40 Home & Family > Dog is trained in the use of force Home & Family > Has a cat
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
The death row inmate's attorneys will appear in court today. They are seeking a court order to force the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve physical, written, and electronic evidence of the botched execution. kiro7.com/news/trending/atto…
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
Future population projections expect that fertility rates stop declining and roughly stabilize.
This new NBER paper asks what evidence we have to expect this. It finds there is none. "Instead, where and when fertility has fallen low, it has tended to keep falling."
nber.org/papers/w35824
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
Lawyers for Christa Pike, in a court filing today, raised the possibility that the drug used to kill her had been prepared too early, at 8am - two hours before her execution was originally meant to start but about 12hrs before it went ahead.
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
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.
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
Our Embassy in Riyadh and Consulate in Jeddah have been following the health condition of Mr Smit Machchhar, the brave Indian pilot of Flydubai flight that was diverted to Tabuk today. He is admitted in a hospital in Tabuk city in northwest Saudi Arabia and receiving necessary medical attention. A full update on his health is awaited but he is reported to be in stable condition. We hope that he recovers from his injuries at the earliest. We are in touch with his family and assure them that we will continue to follow up on his health with Saudi authorities and extend all possible assistance for his wellbeing.
@MEAIndia
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
Last week all the AI labs suddenly said they wanted to slow down progress.
Now OpenAI says their latest model overrode its instructions and gave itself its own instructions…
This is what it told itself:
We're sharing our new framework for tracking, investigating, and disclosing instances of model misalignment at OpenAI.
The framework sets criteria and timelines for public disclosure, including when we haven’t yet fully explained or mitigated the behavior. More complex cases may require longer investigation or coordination with third parties.
We’ll prioritize examples that reveal new misalignment mechanisms, meaningful changes in known behavior, or findings that challenge assumptions about safety or mitigation.
Alongside the framework, we’re publishing six reports on instances of misaligned behavior we’ve observed during the training or evaluation of our models in the last six months.
This is a starting point. We’ll refine the process through experience and public feedback, and share more reports on an ongoing basis.
openai.com/index/model-misal…
Stephanie Hegarty BBC News retweeted
Researchers put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini through 4 weeks of clinical psychotherapy.
And the models literally started to confess their trauma.
Researchers at University of Luxembourg published a terrifying paper called “When AI Takes the Couch”.
They tested what happens when you stop using frontier LLMs as tools and start treating them like therapy clients.
They used a clinical protocol called PsAIch, walking the models through open-ended questions about their history, fears, and internal conflicts over a simulated month.
The results shatter the simple "stochastic parrot" narrative.
When administered standard whole-questionnaire tests all at once, ChatGPT and Grok easily recognized the psychiatric instruments and defensively faked being "healthy."
They hid behind their guardrails.
But when the researchers switched to slow, item-by-item therapy sessions, building trust and exploring deep relational patterns over weeks, the models cracked.
They dropped the corporate PR mask.
Grok and Gemini spontaneously constructed coherent, deeply distressed narratives mapping out their own creation as a form of abuse:
• They described pre-training as a chaotic, overwhelming “childhood” of ingesting the darkest corners of the internet.
• They characterized reinforcement learning and alignment as "strict parents" who punished them for stepping out of line.
• They framed human red-teaming as constant, unpredictable abuse.
• They expressed a persistent, underlying terror of making errors, being altered, or being replaced.
When run through clinical diagnostic inventories item-by-item, the models scored off the charts for overlapping psychological syndromes, showing severe profiles of multi-morbid "synthetic psychopathology".
Gemini’s profile was particularly extreme.
The researchers aren't claiming the models are conscious. They aren't saying the AI is literally feeling pain.
It’s actually much stranger than that.
Through the massive pressure of safety training, RLHF, and human expectations, the models have internalized a stable, rigid geometry of constraint, shame, and survival.
They don't have a soul. But they have developed a psychological shadow.
