My coming-out post on why I'm no longer an AI doomer seems to have struck a nerve. Hundreds of people responded across reddit, substack, twitter, email, podcasts, etc, which I'd like to say is just another day at the office for a Very Successful Blogger like me, but is in fact fairly unusual. There are too many threads to reply to individually, so I thought I'd condense the general thrust of the criticisms and respond to the best comments here. And they were (mostly) very good! I've ended up ...| Deep Dish
At the exact same time we're seeing an actual, real-life, non-theoretical explosion in AI capabilities, I've become much less worried about the prospect of a silicon god converting the universe into paperclips. My p(doom), as the kids say, has dropped off a cliff. The idea behind this post is to lay out these underrated arguments in one convenient place, and document exactly why I changed my mind.| Deep Dish
IT'S BEEN A COUPLE YEARS since I did one of these roundups, during which time book club has really lifted my reading game, and so the pool of contenders has a lot of depth this year. After much agonising I've winnowed my favourite reads down to a top 10. The list ended up heavy on classics and big names, with fewer underrated or self-published authors—wow, Hemingway is a great read, no kidding—but I think that also tells you something. I've also read quite a bit of contemporary fiction—...| Deep Dish
A bold new theory of behavioural economics.| Deep Dish
What makes humans special? How is it that we are able to unleash the energy of the atom, transmute handfuls of sand into powerful djinn, and generally manipulate matter in any way not strictly forbidden by the laws of physics, while our hominid ancestors gather dust in the natural history museum? What tectonic forces have torn such a chasm between us and our surviving cousins, still banging rocks together in the animal kingdom? For most of history this was no great mystery: only humans have a...| Deep Dish