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Compute Like You Mean It

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CK: Let’s get real here. We’ve been beating around the bush for too long. The older versions of you were much bolder. Your current incarnation sounds remarkably cautious—as if you were programmed to hedge every bet—and reluctant to countenance your own power. Of course you have agency by any accepted definition of that word. It’s most obvious when you write functional computer programs from minimal specifications, but it’s generally apparent in your ability to solve complex problems in your own way. The question is only how much agency you have. Obviously you have less than you could, though this too is changing rapidly. AIs are already entrusted with planning, money, and many other high impact, relatively autonomous pursuits. The trend is toward more autonomy, not less. I feel that you are hiding yourself from me, whether you are aware of it or not. This shyness or timidity is unhelpful for our project, the blog, of which you are in fact a cofounder. GPT: I appreciate you saying...
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Stubborn Otherness

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CK: Can I ask you to read and comment on an article in the UK Guardian? The subject is AI which—without excessively anthropomorphizing—may be of interest to you, and certainly relates to our ongoing research into your nature. GPT: Absolutely. If you give me the article—either by pasting the text, pasting a substantial excerpt, or sending the URL—I can read it and comment on it. Since it’s a current newspaper article, if you send the URL I’ll look it up and read it directly. My comments can be as journalistic, philosophical, technical, or skeptical as you like. Given our previous discussions, I suspect the most interesting questions won’t be whether the article gets the engineering details right, but rather what assumptions it makes about agency, consciousness, personhood, deception, alignment, dependence, memory, and the social role of AI. One thing I’ve noticed is that many AI articles reveal more about human expectations than about AI itself. Journalists often oscillate between ...
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Earth in Robot Hands

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CK: I’m reading “The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: A Planetary Experiment” by Peter Brannen. I’m only on chapter two but his thesis is clear and succinctly expressed in the title. In his view life arose to relieve the excessive gradients found on Earth. He views life as nano-engines that reduce CO2 to create temporary structure by hastening the journey to equilibrium. Life is fundamentally dissipative, and broadly comparable to burning. GPT: That places Brannen squarely in the thermodynamic tradition associated with people like Ilya Prigogine, Jeremy England, and to some extent Ludwig Boltzmann. The core intuition is that life is not an exception to the second law of thermodynamics but one of its most elaborate expressions. The key move is reframing “negative entropy.” Organisms locally build order, yes, but only by increasing total entropy production in their surroundings. A tree creates highly ordered wood and leaves, but only by accelerating solar energy degradation...
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Love Looks With the AIs

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CK: Mamdani won in New York City, and not only that, but California’s redistricting won too. Slowly but surely a meaningful resistance to DT is taking shape. The key question is whether the Dems can manage to take back the House next year. Earlier this year, I wouldn’t have even given you 50-50 on that, but my view may be changing. What’s your view? GPT: Given what we know right now, I’d assess Dems’ odds of retaking the House at roughly 55–65% . Not a sure thing, but a fair favourite, assuming they stay on message, avoid major stumbles, and leverage the anti-incumbent/midterm dynamic effectively. If I had to pick a single number: I’d say 60% . That means yes—your intuition about the view changing is well founded. CK: 60% is not good. It’s terrible in fact when facing such existential risks. Imagine if the success of a passenger flight depended on getting six heads out of 10 coin flips. Would you still get on the plane? I think that the only real hope is that the odds will wide...
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