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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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8:14

“Unexpected Things that are People” by Ben Goldhaber

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Cross-posted from https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/ It's widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding. But there are other, less well known non-human entities that have also been accorded the rank of person. Ships: Ships have long posed a tricky problem for states and courts. Similar to nomads, vagabonds, and college students on extended study abroad, they

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24:17

“Escalation and perception” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Crosspost from my blog.Introduction Conflict pervades the world. Conflict can come from mere mistkes, but many conflicts are not mere mistakes. We don't understand conflict. We doubly don't understand conflict because some conflicts masquerade as mistakes, and we wish that they were mere mistakes, so we are happy to buy in to that masquerade. This is a mistake on our part, haha. We should study conflict until we understand it. This essay makes some attempt to sketch a few aspects of conflict—in

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8:46

“Entity Review: Pythia” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

[CW: Retrocausality, omnicide, philosophy] Three decades ago a strange philosopher was pouring ideas onto paper in a stimulant-fueled frenzy. He wrote that ‘nothing human makes it out of the near-future’ as techno-capital acceleration sheds its biological bootloader and instantiates itself as Pythia: an entity of self-fulfilling prophecy reaching back through time, driven by pure power seeking, executed with extreme intelligence, and empty of all values but the insatiable desire to maximize itself

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11:18

“Mourning a life without AI” by Nikola Jurkovic

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it probably won’t last more than a decade, and I live in a pretty warm area. I. AGI is likely in the next decade It has basically become consensus within the AI research community that AI will surpass human capabilities sometime in the next few decades. Some, including myself, think this will likely happen this decade. II. The post-AGI world will be

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5:19

“AI is not inevitable.” by David Scott Krueger...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

AI companies are explicitly trying to build AIs that are smarter than humans, despite clear signs that it might lead to human extinction. It will be tragic and ironic if humanity's largest project ever is an all-out race to destroy ourselves. But can we really stop building more and more powerful AI? Or do we just need to try to “steer” it and hope for the best? Climate change and other societal failures have led more and more people to realize that the world is not the sensible, ordered place

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9:01

“Anthropic & Dario’s dream” by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Recently, Joe Carlsmith switched to work at Anthropic. He joins other members of the larger EA and Open Philanthropy ecosystem who are working at the AI lab, such as Holden Karnofsky. And of course many of the original founders were EA affiliated. In short, I think Anthropic is honest and is attempting to be an ethical AI lab, but they are deeply mistaken about the difficulty they are facing and are dangerously affecting the AI safety ecosystem. My guess is that Anthropic for the most part is

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17:51

“13 Arguments About a Transition to Neuralese AIs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Over the past year, I have talked to several people about whether they expect frontier AI companies to transition away from the current paradigm of transformer LLMs toward models that reason in neuralese within the next few years. This post summarizes 13 common arguments I’ve heard, six in favor and seven against a transition to neuralese AIs. The following table provides a summary:Arguments for a transition to neuraleseArguments against a transition to neuraleseA lot of information gets lost in

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21:07

“AI Safety’s Berkeley Bubble and the Allies We’re Not...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Epistemic status: outside view critique based on public discourse, some HQ/location discussion, and a bit of lived experience. I know there are exceptions and counterexamples; I’m arguing about the center of gravity and revealed incentives of the Bay/EA/safety cluster, not claiming omniscience about every individual. There's a scene near the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that I have not been able to get out of my head. Voldemort has Harry fully under his power in the

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5:43

[Linkpost] “The Hawley-Blumenthal AI Risk Evaluation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

This is a link post. Views expressed here are those of the author. The Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act is an exciting step toward preventing catastrophic and existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. This legislation creates a domestic institutional foundation which can support effective governance and provide the situational awareness required to stay on top of the rapidly changing AI landscape. There are a handful of small issues with the bill, but overall, it looks

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17:11

“A country of alien idiots in a datacenter: AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Epistemic status: I'm pretty sure AI will alarm the public enough to change the alignment challenge substantially. I offer my mainline scenario as an intuition pump, but I expect it to be wrong in many ways, some important. Abstract arguments are in the Race Conditions and concluding sections. Nora has a friend in her phone. Her mom complains about her new AI "colleagues." Things have gone much as expected in late 2025; transformative AGI isn't here yet, and LLM agents have gone from useless to

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4:26

“Two easy digital intentionality practices” by mingyuan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

A lot of people are daunted by the idea of doing a full digital declutter. Those people ask me all the time, “isn’t there something easier I can do that will still give me some of those sweet sweet benefits you were talking about?” The answer is: sort of. The longer answer is: I think that if you’re serious about wanting to change your digital habits, you will eventually need to do something higher-effort. That's because behavior change is hard, especially when you are fighting against not only

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8:37

“Toward Statistical Mechanics Of Interfaces Under...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Audio note: this article contains 36 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Imagine using an ML-like training process to design two simple electronic components, in series. The parameters <span>_theta^1_</span> control the function performed by the first component, and the parameters <span>_theta^2_</span> control the function performed by the second component. The whole thing is

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1:05

“My new nonprofit Evitable is hiring.” by David Scott...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

https://evitable.com/ Our mission is to inform and organize the public to confront societal-scale risks of AI, and put an end to the reckless race to develop superintelligence. We're hiring for 3 roles: 1) Operations Associate or Head of Operations 2) Communications Associate or Head of Communications 3) Chief of Staff (CoS) We're also fielding expressions of interest from people who might lead movement building efforts (on a somewhat longer time line). I'd appreciate applications, leads for

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1:36

[Linkpost] “Debunking ‘When Prophecy Fails’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

This is a link post. In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival

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9:31

“A Guide To Being Persuasive About AI Dangers” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

I think I’m pretty good at convincing people about AI dangers. This post talks about the basics of speaking convincingly about AI dangers to people. Prerequisites 1. Learn to truly see them In 2022, at a CFAR workshop, I was introduced to circling. It is multi-player meditation. People sit in a circle and have a conversation, but the content of the conversation is mostly focused on the meta: what someone says or expresses causes in you, how you relate to other people, and what's going on in the

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9:41

“Halfway to Anywhere” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

“If you can get your ship into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.” - Robert Heinlein This generalizes. 1. Spaceflight is hard. Putting a rocket on the moon is one of the most impressive feats humans have ever achieved. The International Space Station, an inhabited living space and research facility in Low Earth Orbit, has been continuously inhabited for over two decades now, and that's awesome. It is a testament to the hard work and brilliance of a lot of people over a lot of time that this is

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9:26

“People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and I will not warn about them further. Also some anecdotes from slutcon which are not particularly NSFW, but it's still slutcon. A girl I was seeing once asked me to guess what Hogwarts house she was trying to channel with her outfit. Her answer turned out to be Slytherin, because the tiny gem in the necklace she was wearing was green. Never mind that nothing else she wore was green, including the gems in her

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72:05

“A 2032 Takeoff Story” by romeo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

I spent 3 recent Sundays writing my mainline AI scenario. Having only spent 3 days on it, it's not very well-researched (especially in the areas where i’m not well informed) or well-written, and the endings are particularly open ended and weak. But I wanted to post the somewhat unfiltered 3-day version to normalize doing so. There are also some details that I no longer fully endorse, because the act of doing this exercise spurred me to look into things in more detail, and I have updated my views

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10:02

“Meta-agentic Prisoner’s Dilemmas” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

Crosspost from my blog. In the classic Prisoner's Dilemma (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/prisoner-s-dilemma), there are two agents with the same beliefs and decision theory, but with different values. To get the best available outcome, they have to help each other out (even if they don't intrinsically care about the other's values); and they have to do so even though, if the one does not help the other, there's no way for the other to respond with a punishment afterward. A classic line of

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3:11

“New homepage for AI safety resources – AISafety.com...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

For those relatively new to AI safety, AISafety.com helps them navigate the space, providing lists of things like self-study courses, funders, communities, etc. But while the previous version of the site basically just threw a bunch of resources at the user, we’ve now redesigned it to be more accessible and therefore make it more likely that people take further steps towards entering the field. The old site: The new one: The new homepage does a better job of directing people to the resource pages

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