A collection of 59 posts
AI veteran Jerry Kaplan tells Claire Lehmann why he thinks the doomers are wrong, what the rogue-agent incidents did and didn’t show, and where real risks lie.
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay interviews AI expert Gary Marcus about the possibility that a rogue artificial intelligence will turn us all into paper clips.
The dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive.
An OpenAI agent’s breach of a Medicare portal shows that the real danger from AI is a mundane one—and the labs’ fixation on a coming machine god is making it worse.
Bernie Sanders wants to outlaw artificial superintelligence. The risks he points to are real—but the answer to a powerful new technology is regulation, not prohibition, and China has no intention of pausing.
The digital revolution is not remaking the world as the industrial one did.
Political analyst Zineb Riboua discusses Iran’s declining influence, the Houthis, Turkey’s ambitions, Israel’s changing role in the Middle East, Islamist radicalisation in Europe, AI doomerism, third-worldism and the West’s demographic decline.
The knowledge and infrastructure needed to engineer a pandemic pathogen, once confined to a handful of elite military and civilian research institutions, are quietly becoming more accessible.
How AI prose exploits the charity that makes reading possible.
LLMs are incredibly useful, even astonishing. But they aren’t “thinking” about anything.
What is consciousness for?
Worries about AI doom rarely take Darwinian evolution seriously. A new paper argues we should—but we are still further from that scenario than its authors suggest.
Despite the dangers, we must seize the gifts bequeathed by world-altering technologies, since these amount to life in unprecedented abundance.
Prescient about the possibility of machine-generated writing, George Orwell’s life and work offer a deeper warning about the LLM era.
What happens when human manipulation arrives at its Claude Mythos moment?