Join me on Jan. 31 for a conference on Generative AI and National Security at
@CatholicUniv
, sponsored by
@LeidosInc
. We have a cracker-jack roster of experts from AI start-ups, defense, and think tanks, exploring this game-changing technology.
People can have all sorts of complicated feelings about Elon Musk's politics, personality, goals, etc.
But downplaying his technical acumen and entrepreneurial genius is one of the strongest signals that someone is utterly lacking in either intelligence or integrity.
Patient paralyzed from the shoulders down plays chess with the help of the
@neuralink
chip in his brain.
"It was like using the force on a cursor, and I could get it to move wherever I wanted."
"You leaked classified to impress some teenaged weebs? Have some dignity and post classified weapons specifications to War Thunder forums to win a debate about turret rotation speed like a man."
At
@NOV1TATE
, Peter Thiel arguing that “Nihilism is not Enough.”
“More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning - and that its meaning is terrifying.” Rene Girard
I'm in
@ForeignPolicy
with
@noUpside
, arguing that the recent Discord documents leaks are only the latest and greatest indication that, for many people, their loyalties to their online communities are more powerful than their IRL commitments.
We are already seeing an explosion of AI regulation that is designed to ban open source while claiming to be neutral.
SB 1047 designates a "hazardous capability" to include what a third party can show with infinite fine-tuning and re-training. Meanwhile, closed models get points
The thread also contains fear mongering about open source.
Unless you think catastrophic harms are going to happen left & right with open source projects, it’s absolutely false to say this “de facto criminalizes open source.”
+ these are civil sanctions, not criminal liability!
@jskochan
I'm sure there are some who take this too far. But there is a reason no other EV, or rocket, or brain chip company, or (back in the day) payments company took off, despite the tech elements being there. Elon is a brilliant engineer. But he is a 1-of-1 entrepreneur.
The narrative seems to be that Tucker Carlson has been let go from Fox.
I think he’s been unleashed.
We have never seen anything like what is going to happen next. To understand the new kind of power Tucker has, read my essay in
@tnajournal
.
At
@NOV1TATE
, Peter Thiel arguing that “Nihilism is not Enough.”
“More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning - and that its meaning is terrifying.” Rene Girard
In case you missed it, the latest Big Lie is that the dangers of AI are a secret Silicon Valley conspiracy to promote 'regulatory capture'.
This conspiracy evidently includes the eminent founder of deep learning who resigned from Google so he could speak freely about x-risk; the
Does technology make our lives better, or threaten the future of our species?
Marc Andreessen (
@pmarca
) has one answer for what ails humanity: accelerate. Our wide-ranging conversation explains his manifesto and addresses his critics.
Why are conspiracy theories so prominent in America today?
In
@tnajournal
, I argue that the explosion of conspiracy theory can best be understood as the long-delayed repayment on the epistemic debt of state secrecy.
The dark force ripping apart our shared sense of reality isn't misinformation. It's state secrecy.
New online... the latest installment in ʀᴇᴀʟɪᴛʏ: ᴀ ᴘᴏsᴛ-ᴍᴏʀᴛᴇᴍ
Weaponized brain drain is such a no-brainer. And you don't have to trust them/allow them into critical industries. Given them a green card to teach Electrical Engineering at University of Nebraska or whatever, or do QA process design for a tractor company. Easy strategic win.
Russian scientists clearly want to flee their country.
Let’s copy the “Soviet Scientists Immigration Act” and let them immigrate to the US.
It would weaken Russia and strengthen America 🇺🇸
It's time to take back our future. I'm proud to be a small part of
@aftfuture
, a new political advocacy organization aiming to give the future - our future, our children's future, America's future - a voice in American politics, and to push back against a growing conspiracy
Glad to finally announce what I've been working on alongside
@perrymetzger
@JonAskonas
@BasedBeffJezos
Enough arguing and complaining. Time to act. Time to protect AI. Time to accelerate America.
That’s right. As everyone knows, after Microsoft was forced to end some of its self-preferencing policies in 2001, Internet innovation ground to a halt. No one wanted to build software for PCs, and investment in the entire sector declined.
🙃
This is hilarious.
Open source is important, vital, and Khan doesn’t give a fig about it. Has she ever even mentioned the words before? I mean, I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Self-preferencing - i.e., running a business - is an extremely common and obviously beneficial
Are we in a moment of tech acceleration or stagnation? Moving too fast or too slow?
I thought Vaclav Smil's "Invention and Innovation" would make a strong case for caution. The book convinced me otherwise. My critical review of in
@AmericanAffrs
Now that DC wants to tamp down the Ukraine war because other theaters are heating up (not to mention the election), the Washington Post gets an exclusive from "people familiar with the planning" about the Ukrainian bombing of Nordstream. Like clockwork.
@jskochan
I've heard this from people that work for him. I've heard it from co-founders who otherwise hate his guts, from VCs that did or did not invest, from technical experts in those fields, etc. The more you know about how hard it is to actually build, the more impressed you are.
@SevaUT
Russia's mimetic imitation of the United States is really next level. "The US did a disastrous regime change operation. Are we really a великая держава if we don't have our OWN disastrous invasion and regime change?"
I will respond to Christine Rosen’s criticism of my essay “Why Conservatism Failed” sometime in the near future, but I will say this for now: everyone in this photograph has been dead for years.
Eight hour road trip through God’s Country with
@rSanti97
@Micaheadowcroft
and
@fxxfy
, cold plunge and sauna before hanging with a bunch of Doomer Optimists at the
@thewagonbox
.
The vibes are immaculate.
A snowy but cozy morning at the
@thewagonbox
in Wyoming today! (Can you believe some people cold plunged in the creek this morning not me I am not that brave)
Good 🧵
I argued years ago that Google’s core philosophy was authoritarian, and would show itself to be so over time. It’s still shocking how it has played out.
Google Gemini is just the natural evolution of a project Google set upon long ago.
I'm done with
@Google
. I know many good individuals working there, but as a company they've irrevocably lost my trust. I'm "moving out". Here's why:
I've been reading Google's Gemini damage control posts. I think they're simply not telling the truth. For one, their text-only
This is a classic of the Boomer warnings about Our Democracy.
It begins with a sober analysis of the precise reason why the Internet is incompatible with print-era democratic institutions.
And then switches to a deranged, reactionary diatribe against "the algorithms".
NOW — Al Gore Says Social Media Algorithms Disrupt Democracy and Need to be Banned: ‘They are the Digital Equivalent of AR-15’s’
“The shift from an information ecosystem based on print to one based on broadcasting and then moving on to the internet and to social media has
Of course, posting classified docs to impress your video game homies (the kind of thing I predicted last year) is only the beginning of the weirdness after the fall of consensus reality.
Catch up with the future at
@tnajournal
.
On Wednesday, a speaker at the
@ISI
forum lauded Wendell Willkie as a forgotten American hero.
Today, Peter Thiel highlighted him as a forerunner of the Antichrist.
You can’t deny that
@CatholicUniv
is where the most interesting conversations are happening.
At
@NOV1TATE
, Peter Thiel arguing that “Nihilism is not Enough.”
“More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning - and that its meaning is terrifying.” Rene Girard
In a recent post, Alan Jacobs criticizes Paul Kingsnorth and me for alarmism and abstraction in response to my
@compactmag_
essay "Why Conservatism Failed".
I respond by getting down to brass tacks on the demise of traditions and the future of piety.
We talk about technology, tradition, LARPing, craft, virtue, pro-natalism and more.
@reihan
came up with the term “traditionalist accelerationism”, which is a fantastic description of what I’m proposing.
"Freedom Conservatism" is the La Sombrita of political manifestos.
Announced with fanfare by the establishment, the product, we're told, of great focus and care, yet completely bereft of any social value and a condensed symbol of the total exhaustion of a political project.
Need
@lukeburgis
explain this kind of anti-mimetic phenomenon, the Avatar effect.
Neither Avatar nor its sequel made any kind of cultural impact at all. No derivative art, no fan culture, no water cooler conversation.
The sequel is the third highest-grossing movie ever.
Across the think tank landscape, there is one organization that seeks to grasp the promise of technology for American prosperity, while keeping both eyes open about the perils of proceeding without care or forethought. I'm proud to be involved with what
@ZacharyGraves
is building
@tnajournal
The last time this happened, Glenn Beck left Fox to do his own thing. He’s basically disappeared from mainstream media…but anchors $10Ms of annual revenue.
Tucker is bigger and far more politically central, with a younger audience. And now, the gloves are off.
The AI revolution has given SF and the "Cerebral Valley" an unearned second lease on life...and California legislators are racing to squander it by creating California's own "FDA for AI".
The California senate bill to crush OpenAI's competitors is fast tracked for a vote. This is the most brazen attempt to hurt startups and open source yet.
🧵
Navalny demonstrated something so singular in Russian political life that many speculated about the "angle" he was taking. Hopefully now it becomes obvious that his choice to return to Russia, knowing it meant death, was nothing but an act of extraordinary moral courage.
Neil Howe (
@HoweGeneration
) speaks with me on
@HiddenForcesPod
about why he believes we are nearing the end of a once-in-a-century cycle that will require the mobilization of most Americans in a struggle for national survival.
.
@tylercowen
nailed the problem. The more I talk to folks in the "AI Safety" world, the more apparent it is that the whole framework is tautological, inventing novel vocabulary for problems that other fields have been contemplating for hundreds of years.
I think, without an exaggeration, that US competition with China is more about institutional capacity than anything else, and these sorts of problems (tip of the iceberg) are a national security threat.
Weaponized brain drain is a powerful force in a multipolar world. We should be trying to get as many of China, Russia, Iran’s etc best and brightest to study and stay here, even if we divert them from certain fields for national security reasons.
I'm sorry, broadcast isn't coming back. The newspaper isn't coming back. The nightly news isn't coming back. Editorial board endorsements aren't coming back. The Sunday shows aren't coming back. That democracy is gone.
The only question is, what next?
I would feel more confident in the predictions of AI safetyists if there was any evidence they had read one (1) book about any previous historical case.
It’s weird that the libertarians brag about absolutely giving up on the idea of wielding political power or influence to achieve their objectives like it’s some kind of flex.
Real Charlie Brown and the football hours here.
@evelkniefall
not flaws--your word, not mine. Extension school students are mostly smart, ambitious, hard working, thoughtful, sometimes very accomplished--but mostly striving for upward mobility without background that would get them admitted to what is usually understood as Hvd. grad school
russia has to have the all-time record for squandering a great civilizational spawn point. $75 trillion in natural resources and a quarter of the population doesn’t have indoor plumbing. how do you keep fucking up so badly
Remarkable to see folks who rightly prize understanding AI systems at a technical level for thinking about how they will behave, completely disregard specialized knowledge in politics, economics, sociology, psychology, etc. Much of "AI Safety" is fundamentally unserious.
Hi, I am very mad that both these things are absolutely true at once:
1. We have let free markets run amok, free from political control.
2. Big business and government are so closely intertwined, there’s no private sector.
Help!
@TheAnnaGat
"When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” - Flannery O'Connor
Join us Nov. 1st for a high-profile conversation about how our economy can better advance the safety and happiness of the American people in 2023 and beyond.
Registration is FREE—and breakfast and lunch will be provided for student attendees!
@SevaUT
A certain Russian far-right nationalist Internet personality spent the initial week of the invasion explicitly comparing Russian progress in Ukraine to US progress in Iraq in 2003 and I think he maybe should have thought that through a bit more.
I would feel more confident in the predictions of AI safetyists if there was any evidence they had read one (1) book about any previous historical case.
@ylecun
Let's open source nuclear weapons too to make them safer. The good guys (us) will always have bigger ones than the bad guys (them) so it should all be OK.
One of the characteristics of our epistemic fracture is that the "fact" has become slippery. In the digital media ecosystem, you can always hotswap them on the fly. The assumption of immutability that reigned in the print era has collapsed. /1
I really enjoyed this conversation with
@kofinas
at
@HiddenForcesPod
, one of the most attentive observers of our tech and media landscape, where we got deep into the themes of my writing in
@tnajournal
.
The last few years have been characterized by a growing sense of bewilderment, anger, and distrust.
Distrust in institutions, in each other, and in ourselves—in our capacities to apprehend reality and come to consensus on the nature of our world.
🧵/x
I was thrilled to sit down with
@eriktorenberg
on
@Upstream__Pod
and discuss the political and civilizational impacts of the Internet and AI. If the printing press lead to the 30yrs War and the nation-state, what does digital tech have in store?
The anxiety and dread that many feel towards AI is driven by the fear that humanity will no longer be the smartest beings on the planet.
But only a small fraction of humans ever believed this in the first place.
The digital retrieves the medieval:
It’s funny to see people who never cared about tech before discover that they are conservatives (in Grant’s definition): “those who accept the orientation to the future in the modern but who want to stop the movement of modernity at points which touch their special interests.”
"time to upgrade our 19th-century institutions for a post-A.I. world, and to learn to master A.I. before it masters us"
from
@harari_yuval
,
@tristanharris
🚨Attention Postliberals of D.C.🚨
Join
@PatrickDeneen
,
@ampostliberal
&
@ISI
in Washington, D.C. on March 7th for a lecture on “Our Postliberal Future”!
Learn more and register here! ⬇️⬇️⬇️
While we often disagree on the merits, my
@JoinFAI
colleague
@hamandcheese
is one of the few people asking even the right class of questions about our moment in history. I always benefit from reading him, and you will too.
But, I argue in the piece, the impact is bigger than politics. State secrecy acts like dark matter, always threatening to upset our world of facts on a time delay. It's a major source of our ongoing epistemic anxiety.
McLuhan was right when he said the fascination with nostalgia is because people don't have a stable sense of self in the present; in a similar way, I think a fascination with conspiracy theories is directly related to a sense of epistemic collapse and confusion.
To be clear, this was always obviously the most likely case, and I'm glad we are pushing for a negotiated settlement.
But it's still shocking how many "serious people" beclowned themselves by insisting that stating the obvious was "Russian misinformation."
If you look at the state of US force structure and readiness, compared to propensity to serve, it's hard to imagine wars where we don't need to bring back conscription.
I mean, we totally maxed out Army + Marines combat arms to do Iraq + Afghanistan 2008-2011.
A beautiful piece from
@KTmBoyle
. Any apologist for the current regime around pain, harm, and safety must address the question: why are people in societies with more suffering than ours happier than us?
We have long been fully invested in eradicating the suffering we deem unconscionable, but more important are the simple questions that define a serious life:
For whom will you sacrifice?
What will you defend?
For what will you choose to suffer?
An insightful and critical take from
@noUpside
on today's "alternate" media - the constellation of Substacks, magazines, and others positioning themselves against the "mainstream". Usefully read alongside
@Andrey4Mir
's book.
I don't think it's a coincidence that both the smartest criticisms of American support for Ukraine AND the smartest criticism of Putin's global vision - one which obliterates it on its own terms - have both been in
@compactmag_
.
In a recent speech, Vladimir Putin articulated the guiding principle of the new multipolar global order he hopes to help usher into existence: “the possibility for any nation, any society, and any civilization to choose their own way, their own sociopolitical system.”/1
The Vietnam War remains, despite the public attention, the most misunderstood and mis-remembered war that I am familiar with. Many of the authors of the "first draft" (including journalists and academics) were intimately involved and had their reasons to skew the story.
1/ Stereotyping South Vietnamese generals as complete buffons (including Lam Quang Thi, who is not a complete buffoon and wrote two erudite works on Vietnam War in postwar exile in US) remains common among US and Western historians in 21st century, but the reality is far more
Ironically, this trend should substantially reverse, as AI makes coding easy and sophisticated, tasteful text generation scarcer (as the cost of SAT Writing-standard style text goes to zero).
Book Club should rebrand as Prompt Engineering.
The decline in liberal arts degrees bodes well for society on almost every dimension.
College students now know that majoring in Book Club won’t get you a great job. This is progress.
The piece is written to be accessible for an audience that just discovered what a Discord server was this week. It will serve well for briefing baffled Boomer bosses about what's going on!
In these dark times, it's good to be reminded of the lengths American civil servants have gone to forestall the apocalypse (finishing a handle of Wild Turkey with a Soviet factory director, RIP liver).
Everyone should be reading
@rSanti97
's new series.
In a crowded field, Tankie Willy Wonka comes through with the worst take of the day. Not the argument to make if you are trying to stop a war with Iran.
If a country attacked a US embassy, what would we expect the US to do in response? And would that be legitimate? Are Iranians permitted to do the same when their own embassy is attacked? Or do we adopt one standard for ourselves and another for "enemies"?
I’ve often thought that Arthur C. Clarke’s thought that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” was much more bidirectional than “rationalist” types want to acknowledge.
So the actual scary part to me is that GPT4 understands what it means to say, "Compress this in a way where *you* can decompress it." Humans take for granted that we know our own capabilities, that we reflect, that we can imagine how we would react to a future input, we can
"It is mankind's manifest destiny to bring our humanity into space; to colonize this galaxy; and as a nation, we have the power to determine whether America will lead or will follow. I say that America must lead."
- Pres. Ronald Reagan, September 22, 1988
“He wasn’t just interpreting the news; he was making it. What made something newsworthy was whether it fit into the narrative.” New on Forms of Life,
@jonaskonas
on the world Tucker Carlson created:
@JoshuaSteinman
Not only is this a classic regulatory capture move, it also speaks to AI Safety's incredible naïveté.
Real ones know that the best use of weapons inspections is espionage and intelligence preparation of the battlefield. 🌝
When DARPA and NASA want to buy cool things, they don't go through the traditional procurement process.
Instead, they can use flexible "Other Transaction Authority."
In today's Statecraft, we talked to the guy responsible.
China's dominance in heavy industry and manufacturing could provide a long-term AI advantage. Here's my reasoning:
1. Symbolic AI is to Deep Learning as declarative knowledge is to tacit knowledge.
2. Tacit knowledge can't fit in a recipe book; it's embedded in social
I’m joined on
@HiddenForcesPod
by
@LMSacasas
to discuss how the technologies of modern life are reengineering humanity in ways that are leaving many of us feeling increasingly depleted, isolated, and bewildered.