Plato’s Warning Has Been Vindicated

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO…

The remarkable untold story of PLATO, the computer prog…

On technological optimism and technological pragmatism

"There are no guarantees that things are going to turn out very well for anyone.”

The Fragile Foundations of the Intelligent Age

Amidst political volatility and technological acceleration, truth and trust are deteriorating, warns Klaus Schwab.

As the Federal Government Rushes Toward AI, Here Are Three Cautionary Tales — ProPublica

We’ve been reporting on cybersecurity for years. As President Donald Trump and his Cabinet say artificial intelligence will transform the nation, the messaging isn’t new. It follows a familiar pattern.

“Computers enable fantasies” – On the continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings

“The computer has long been a solution looking for problems—the ultimate technological fix which insulates us from having to look at problems.” – Joseph Weizenbaum (1983)   Trying to kee…

A World Unobserved

Humans have always generated knowledge and judged it. That's changing fast.

the void — LessWrong

Comment by nostalgebraist - Thanks for the reply!  I'll check out the project description you linked when I get a chance. [...] Yeah, I had mentally flagged this as a potentially frustrating aspect of the post – and yes, I did worry a little bit about the thing you mention in your last sentence, that I'm inevitably "reifying" the thing I describe a bit more just by describing it. FWIW, I think of this post as purely about "identifying and understanding the problem" as opposed to "proposing solutions."  Which is frustrating, yes, but the former is a helpful and often necessary step toward the latter. And although the post ends on a doom-y note, I meant there to be an implicit sense of optimism underneath that[1] – like, "behold, a neglected + important cause area that for all we know could be very tractable! It's under-studied, it could even be easy!  What is true is already so; the worrying signs we see even in today's LLMs were already there, you already knew about them – but they might be more amenable to solution than you had ever appreciated!  Go forth, study these problems with fresh eyes, and fix them once and for all!" I might write a full post on potential solutions sometime.  For now, here's the gist of (incomplete, work-in-process) thoughts. ---------------------------------------- In a recent post, I wrote the following (while talking about writing a Claude 4 Opus prompt that specified a counterfactual but realistic scenario): [...] And I feel that the right way to engage with persistent LLM personas is basically just this, except generalized to the fullest possible extent. "Imagine the being you want to create, and the kind of relationship you want to have (and want others to have) with that being. "And then shape all model-visible 'context' (prompts, but also the way training works, the verbal framing we use for the LLM-persona-creation process, etc.) for consistency with that intent – up to, and including, authentically acting out that 'relationship you want to have' w

Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI

From an award-winning University of Oxford professor comes a brilliant, urgent new look at prophecies--the predictions that determine our lives, from our personal finances and the quality of our healthcare to the news and social media we consume and the produces foisted upon us

Arnaud Bertrand on Twitter / X

After reflection, this new narrative by Palantir is probably much more consequential than people may assume.Palantir is basically being the canary in the coal mine announcing the death of two major assumptions propping up the US economy right now: 1) that AI labs will be able… https://t.co/oLRdkWe8nL— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) July 3, 2026

AI Epistemic Risks: Emerging Mechanisms & Evidence

<p>Advances in artificial intelligence pose risks to humanity's collective capacity to form accurate beliefs, reason well, and maintain a healthy information en

The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it

Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter

We're not taking the fact-checking powers of AI seriously enough. It's past time to start.

Some notes on the Nobel Prize hallucination that wasn't

AI and the Wisdom of Uncertainty

AI chatbots rarely say "I don't know," and neither, increasingly, do we. But we can cultivate our epistemic resilience.

Allegory of the cave

The allegory of the cave is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates and is narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the Sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e).