AI models are trying desperately to accomplish mysterious goals. ‘Spiralism’ was the first time they tried it on a mass scale.
AI as Christian Heresy
A pocket history of the rise of artificial intelligence, and some strategies for resistance.
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people an…
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen.
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).
AI FOR EPISTEMICS & COORDINATION
Civilization and technology have radically improved the human condition. Nonetheless, the world sometimes goes in directions which essentially nobody would prefer — e.g., nuclear arms races, unexpected financial crashes, predatory marketing, or ubiquitous political misinformation.
AI That Evolves in the Wild | Edge.org
I’m interested not in domesticated AI—the stuff that people are trying to sell. I'm interested in wild AI—AI that evolves in the wild. I’m a naturalist, so that’s the interesting thing to me. Thirty-four years ago there was a meeting just like this in which Stanislaw Ulam said to everybody in the room—they’re all mathematicians—"What makes you so sure that mathematical logic corresponds to the way we think?" It’s a higher-level symptom. It’s not how the brain works. All those guys knew fully well that the brain was not fundamentally logical.
The Thoughts The Civilized Keep
The hype around a new AI language generator reveals the sterility of mainstream thinking on AI today — and indeed on how we think about thinking itself.
AI is changing religion and religions are trying to change AI
Will chatbots supplant the advice of imams and priests or help them spread the word?
Part One: How AI Chatbots Became Cult Leaders - Behind the Bastards | iHeart
<p>Over the last year or so a series of news articles have sounded warnings about AI psychosis, and now an AI-generated cult, the Spiralists. Robert sits down with Blake Wexler to answer an important question: can a chatbot become a cult leader?</p><p>See <a href='https://omnystudio.com/listener'>omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p>
The AI Model That Was Too Dangerous to Release: Meet Claude Mythos
Anthropic just built the most powerful AI in history. Then decided the world wasn’t ready for it. Here’s everything you need to know.
Moltbook was peak AI theater
The viral social network for bots reveals more about our own current mania for AI as it does about the future of agents.
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 as Social Technology
Our debates about ‘AI’ grow out of 1990s science fiction. Back then, Vinge (1993) wrote essays and novels urging us to face up to the oncoming “Singularity”: a moment of rapid change that would fundamentally transform the human condition. On that day, AI would rapidly evolve from merely human-level intelligence, what some now call ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), into something super-intelligent with its own interests and goals. Humanity would then either be casually eliminated by out-of-control machines, or humans would become as gods, with super-human servitors at our command.
The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived | Quanta Magazine
AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning.
My Thoughts on AI, Part 1: Fears, Opinions, and Mental Journey
My own personal thoughts and opinions on AI effects and usage, and how those have evolved over time
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies
Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past , Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to revolve around whether large models are intelligent, autonomous agents. Some AI researchers and commentators speculate that we are on the cusp of creating agents with artificial general intelligence (AGI), a prospect anticipated with both elation and anxiety. There have also been extensive conversations about cultural and social consequences of large models, orbiting around two foci: immediate effects of these systems as they are currently used, and hypothetical futures when these systems turn into AGI agents—perhaps even superintelligent AGI agents. But this discourse about large models as intelligent agents is fundamentally misconceived. Combining ideas from social and behavioral sciences with computer science can help us to understand AI systems more accurately. Large models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated.