What problem do we get after we've solved all other problems? I. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom got famous for asking “What if technology is really really bad?” He helped define ‘existential risk’, popularize fears of malevolent superintelligence, and argue that we were living in a ‘vulnerable world’ prone to physical or biological catastrophe. His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia, he asks: “What if technology is really really good?” Most previous utopian...

Okay, let’s do this! Link is here, should take about twenty minutes. I’ll close the form on Monday 10/21 and post results the following week. I’ll put an answer key in the comments here, and have a better one including attributions in the results post. DON’T READ THE COMMENTS UNTIL YOU’RE DONE. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test 

Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: 1st: Two Arms And A Head, reviewed by AmandaFromBethlehem. Amanda is active in the Philadelphia ACX community. This is her first year entering the Book Review Contest, and she is currently working on a silly novel about an alien who likes thermodynamics. When she's not writing existential horror, she practices Tengwar calligraphy and does home improvement projects. 2nd: Nine Lives, reviewed by David...

I. My ex-girlfriend has a weird relationship to reality. Her actions ripple out into the world more heavily than other people's. She finds herself at the center of events more often than makes sense. One time someone asked her to explain the whole “AI risk” thing to a State Senator. She hadn’t realized states had senators, but it sounded important, so she gave it a try, figuring out her exact pitch on the car ride to his office. A few months later, she was informed that the Senator had...

I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Earlier this year, I published Daniel Böttger’s essay Consciousness As Recursive Reflections. While we were working on editing it, Daniel had some dramatic experiences and revelations, culminating in him developing a theory which he says “will contribute to saving the world”, which he asked me to publish. Although I can’t speak for its world-historical importance, and although he admits his mental state...

The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy. Therefore (continues the argument), atheists should be cultural Christians. While they can continue to privately disbelieve, they should support an overall...

How is Javier Milei, the new-ish libertarian president of Argentina doing? According to right-wing sources, he’s doing amazing, inflation is vanquished, and Argentina is on the road to First World status. According to left-wing sources, he’s devastating the country, inflation has ballooned, and Argentina is mired in unprecedented dire poverty. I was confused enough to investigate further. Going through various topics in more depth:   ...

Exegi monumentum aere perennius There’s a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To settle the matter, I included a question about this on this year’s ACX survey, “Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?” (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-often-do-men-think-about-rome 

Finalist #14 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Introduction The Ballad of the White Horse is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great...

Sakana (website, paper) is supposed to be “an AI scientist”. Since it can’t access the physical world, it can only do computer science. Its human handlers give it a computer program. It prompts itself to generate hypotheses about the program (“if I change this number, the program will run faster”). Then it uses an AI coding submodule to test its hypotheses. Finally, it uses a language model to write them up in typical scientific paper format. Is it good? Not really. Experts who read its...

Probably No Superintelligent Forecaster Yet FiveThirtyNine (ha ha) is a new forecasting AI that purports to be “superintelligent”, ie able to beat basically all human forecasters. In fact, its creators go further than that: they say it beats Metaculus, a site which aggregates the estimates of hundreds of forecasters to generate estimates more accurate than any of them. You can read the announcement here and play with the model itself here. (kudos to the team for making the model...

Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat:...

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2024 

Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes: What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let’s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we’ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of...

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes,1 sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense...

[Original post here.] Aeon writes: The main complaint about this expression is that it’s “not a real apology,” and that’s true, it isn’t. The error is in thinking it is therefore a fake apology. But it isn’t, because “I’m sorry” is not a statement of contrition, it’s a statement of sorrow. Somehow everyone has gotten confused into thinking an apology is the only correct use for that phrase despite the plain meaning of the words. This is the comment that best expresses what I wished I’d...

You look up from your massive mahogany desk. “Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you’re applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive - I didn’t even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.” “That’s what we want you to think,” says Tom. “Of course. Then just one question for you. What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?” “I think we’re in a simulation.” “Hm, yes,...

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] 1. The Supernatural is Dead April, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote...