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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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10:22

“Learning (more) from horse employment history” by Tim H

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/23

The economist Wassily Leontief, writing in 1966, used the then-recent decline of horses to make vivid what he foresaw as the coming impact of technological advances on workers. In 1910, the horse had remained indispensable for farming, transportation, and even war, despite decades of the radical technological progress of the Second Industrial Revolution. By 1960, though, horses were obsolete for all of the above, the US horse population having fallen by 85% as a result.In 1982, when unemployment

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21:39

“Reward button alignment” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/23

In the context of model-based RL agents in general, and brain-like AGI in particular, part of the source code is a reward function. The programmers get to put whatever code they want into the reward function slot, and this decision will have an outsized effect on what the AGI winds up wanting to do. One thing you could do is: hook up the reward function to a physical button on a wall. And then you’ll generally (see caveats below) get an AGI that wants you to press the button. A nice intuition is

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3:06

“Mirror Organisms Are Not Immune to Predation” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/23

Core ArgumentThe barrier to preying on "mirror-image" life is likely lower than presumed due to: Immediate energy from achiral fats. Existing L-sugar pathways. Existing D-amino acid racemases. 1. Fats: Achiral Energy Bridge Lipids (triglycerides), largely achiral, offer immediate energy. In E. coli for example, they constitute ~10% of dry mass, yielding ~27% of its macronutrient calories[1]). This non-chiral caloric gain from mirror prey could sustain predators during adaptation to chiral

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12:14

“Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its Safety...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/23

The company released a model it classified as risky — without meeting requirements it previously promised This is the full text of a post first published on Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. After publication, this article

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48:17

“We’re Not Advertising Enough (Post 3 of 6 on AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/22

In my previous post in this series, I explained why we urgently need to change AI developers’ incentives: if we allow the status quo to continue, then an AI developer will recklessly deploy misaligned superintelligence, which is likely to permanently disempower humanity and cause billions of deaths. AI governance research can potentially be helpful in changing this status quo, but only if it's paired with plenty of political advertising – research by itself doesn’t automatically convince any of the

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1:55

“Units have more depth than I thought” by Morpheus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/22

Last week I stumbled over Dimensional Analysis which is not only useful for applied fields (physics, biology, economics), but also for math (Why did no one tell me that you can almost always think of df/dx as having "the type of f"/"the type of x"? The fact that exponents always have to be unit-less etc.? It had never occurred to me to make this distinction. In my mind, f(x)=x went from the reals to the reals, just like <span>_e^x_</span> did.One example of a question that before I

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6:12

“Policy recommendations regarding reproductive...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/22

PDF version. berkeleygenomics.org. Introduction Here we list six policies that would help accelerate the development of novel assisted reproductive technologies. Such technologies include mitochondrial donation, in vitro gametogenesis (making eggs and sperm in the lab)[1], artificial wombs, and genetic engineering. These technologies could eventually enable millions of parents to have healthy children, when they otherwise would not be able to. The recommendations listed here are addressed to the

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1:03

[Linkpost] “Claude 4” by Zach Stein-Perlman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/22

This is a link post. Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4 are out. Anthropic says they're both state-of-the-art for coding. Blogpost, system card. Anthropic says they may have dangerous bio capabilities, so it's implementing its ASL-3 standard for misuse-prevention and security. Blogpost, safety case report. (RSP.) Tweets: Anthropic, Sam Bowman, Jan Leike. Claude 3.7 Sonnet has been retconned to Claude Sonnet 3.7 (and similarly for other models). --- First published: May 22nd, 2025

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9:21

“Can We Naturalize Moral Epistemology?” by tylermjohn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/22

Epistemic status: shower thought quickly sketched, but I do have a PhD in this. As we approach AGI and need to figure out what goals to give it we will need to find tractable ways to resolve moral disagreement. One of the most intractable moral disagreements is between the moral realists and the moral antirealists. There's an oversimplified view of this disagreement that goes: If you're a moral realist, you want to align AGI to the best moral-epistemic deliberative processes you can find to figure

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1:11

[Linkpost] “President of European Commission expects...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/22

This is a link post. On May 20, during her speech at the Annual EU Budget Conference 2025, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, stated: When the current budget was negotiated, we thought AI would only approach human reasoning around 2050. Now we expect this to happen already next year. It is simply impossible to determine today where innovation will lead us by the end of the next budgetary cycle. Our budget of tomorrow will need to respond fast. This is remarkable coming from

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12:42

“Unexploitable search: blocking malicious use of free...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/22

Audio note: this article contains 53 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Summary: We have previously argued that scalable oversight methods can be used to provide guarantees on low-stakes safety – settings where individual failures are non-catastrophic. However, if your reward function (e.g. honesty) is compatible with many possible solutions then you also need to avoid having free parameters

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22:52

“The Need for Political Advertising (Post 2 of 6 on...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/22

In my previous post in this sequence, I made a fundraising pitch for my organization, the Center for AI Policy (CAIP), asking readers to donate to us so we can continue lobbying Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation. Here, in the second post, I want to zoom out from CAIP's particular concerns and argue that the AI safety movement as a whole should be investing far more resources into “political advertising.” We need to seek out individual politicians and personally let them know about the

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33:06

“Sleep need reduction therapies” by harsimony

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/21

None of this is medical advice.5 AM on a Saturday and I can’t go back to sleep. It's not the first time, so I get up to write, I might as well use the time I’m given. My hangover is to blame, even a little alcohol the night before changes my sleep cycle. You’d think it would ruin my day, but in some ways I feel better. I’m more alert, more anxious, more motivated. It's like being more alive. Being more awake for only one day has me asking questions. Why did sleep evolve? Can we sleep less? Why

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33:37

“The stakes of AI moral status” by Joe Carlsmith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/21

Podcast version (read by the author) here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. 1. Introduction Currently, most people treat AIs like tools. We act like AIs don’t matter in themselves. We use them however we please. For certain sorts of beings, though, we shouldn’t act like this. Call such beings “moral patients.” Humans are the paradigm example. But many of us accept that some non-human animals are probably moral patients as well. You shouldn’t kick a stray dog just for fun.[1]

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21:58

“The Codex of Ultimate Vibing” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/21

While we wait for wisdom, OpenAI releases a research preview of a new software engineering agent called Codex, because they previously released a lightweight open-source coding agent in terminal called Codex CLI and if OpenAI uses non-confusing product names it violates the nonprofit charter. The promise, also reflected in a number of rival coding agents, is to graduate from vibe coding. Why not let the AI do all the work on its own, typically for 1-30 minutes?The answer is that it's still early

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9:59

“Off-ramps of the Geopolitical Singularity” by Nikola...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/20

DSA - decisive strategic advantage. We will soon enter an unstable state where the balance of military and political power will shift significantly because of advanced AI. As different nations gain access to new advanced technologies, nations that have a relative lead will amass huge power over those that are left behind. The difference in technological capabilities between nations might end up becoming so large that one nation will possess the capability to disable the militaries (including

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2:17

[Linkpost] “Gemini Diffusion: watch this space” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/20

This is a link post. Google Deepmind has announced Gemini Diffusion. Though buried under a host of other IO announcements it's possible that this is actually the most important one! This is significant because diffusion models are entirely different to LLMs. Instead of predicting the next token, they iteratively denoise all the output tokens until it produces a coherent result. This is similar to how image diffusion models work. I've tried they results and they are surprisingly good! It's incredibly

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3:33

“Winning the power to lose” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/20

Have the Accelerationists won?Last November Kevin Roose announced that those in favor of going fast on AI had now won against those favoring caution, with the reinstatement of Sam Altman at OpenAI. Let's ignore whether Kevin's was a good description of the world, and deal with a more basic question: if it were so—i.e. if Team Acceleration would control the acceleration from here on out—what kind of win was it they won? It seems to me that they would have probably won in the same sense that

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17:53

“Semen and Semantics: Understanding Porn with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/20

Summary Porn content has gotten more extreme over time. Here's the average title for the first full year of Pornhub's existence, 2008: "Hot blonde girl gets fucked" and here's the average title for 2023: "FAMILYXXX - "I Cant Resist My Stepsis Big Juicy Ass" (Mila Monet)" Why did this change happen? We can understand porn's progression by converting titles to language embeddings. I downloaded Internet Archive snapshots of "pornhub.com" from 2008 - 2023 and analyzed the embeddings of the titles on

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49:02

“America Makes AI Chip Diffusion Deal with UAE and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/20

Our government, having withdrawn the new diffusion rules, has now announced an agreement to sell massive numbers of highly advanced AI chips to UAE and Saudi Arabia (KSA). This post analyzes that deal and that decision. It is possible, given sufficiently strong agreement details (which are not yet public and may not be finalized) and private unvoiced considerations, that this deal contains sufficient safeguards and justifications that, absent ability to fix other American policy failures, this

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