What is past, and passing, and to come?
I've realised lately that I haven't posted much on my blog this year. Funnily enough, this coincides with 2020 being my most productive year so far. So in addition to belatedly putting up a few cross-posts from elsewhere, I thought it'd be useful to share here some of the bigger projects I've been working on which haven't featured elsewhere on this blog. The most important is AGI safety from first principles (also available here as a PDF ), my attempt to put together the most compelling case for why the development of artificial general intelligence might pose an existential threat to humanity. It's long (about 15,000 words) but I've tried to make it as accessible as possible to people without a machine learning background, because I think the topic is so critically important, and because there's an appalling lack of clear explanations of what might go wrong and why. Early work by Bostrom and Yudkowsky is less relevant in the context of modern machine