Thinking Complete

I've been to a couple of interesting and thought-provoking musicals lately - in particular, Everybody's talking about Jamie and Hadestown . I'd give each of them slightly over 4 stars: excellent in most ways, but with a few clear flaws. The former is the story of a 16 year old from Sheffield who wants to become a drag queen, and his struggle to wear a dress to the school prom. The latter is a jazz and blues style retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and how he journeys into the underworld to rescue her from Hades. An interesting contrast indeed. (Watch out: spoilers ahead). The thing I liked most about Jamie was the superb dialogue and characterisation. The musical took place in working-class Sheffield, and while that’s not a setting I’m particularly familiar with, the voice that came through felt very authentic. Jamie's classmates were racially diverse enough to actually look like a typical British state school (half the girls wore hijabs), and the

I recently went on holiday to Italy and Egypt. Visiting such ancient countries has made me wonder whether historians will engage with our own civilisation in the same way in the future. From that perspective, it feels like we don’t spend much effort creating monuments intended to last indefinitely. Skyscrapers are objectively pretty impressive, but I have no idea if any would stay up if left unattended for 500 or 1000 years. To be clear, I’m perfectly happy with us building few or no big vanity projects, and indeed think we’re spending far too much effort preserving historical buildings, especially those from the past two centuries. But the more seriously we take the long-term future, the better - and so it’d be nice to normalise planning on the timeframe of centuries. On the other hand, we shouldn’t necessarily take the presence of durable historical monuments as evidence that our ancestors were more focused on the long term than we are. Firstly, there’s a selection effect whereby we

I recently attended the 2019 Beneficial AGI conference organised by the Future of Life Institute. I’ll publish a more complete write-up later, but I was particularly struck by how varied attendees' reasons for considering AI safety important were. Before this, I’d observed a few different lines of thought, but interpreted them as different facets of the same idea. Now, though, I’ve identified at least 6 distinct serious arguments for why AI safety is a priority. By distinct I mean that you can believe any one of them without believing any of the others - although of course the particular categorisation I use is rather subjective, and there’s a significant amount of overlap. In this post I give a brief overview of my own interpretation of each argument (note that I don’t necessarily endorse them myself). They are listed roughly from most specific and actionable to most general. I finish with some thoughts on what to make of this unexpected proliferation of arguments. Primarily, I t

Over the last few months I’ve talked with Eric Drexler a number of times about his Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS) model of AI development, and read most of his technical report on the topic. I think these are important ideas which are well worth engaging with, despite personally being skeptical about many of the conclusions. Below I’ve summarised what I see as the core components of Eric’s view, followed by some of own arguments. Note that these are only my personal opinions. I did make some changes to the summary based on Eric’s comments on early drafts, to better reflect his position - however, there are likely still ways I’ve misrepresented him. Also note that this was written before reading Rohin’s summary of the same report, although I do broadly agree with most of Rohin’s points. One useful piece of context for this model is Eric's background in nanotechnology, and his advocacy for the development of nanotech as "atomically precise manufacturing" rather than