Oxford in autumn can be nice. Especially indoors.

I am worried that people converge to general "AI hating" instead of being against particular reasons (e.g. IP, xrisk, slop, competition, power concentration etc.) AI is not going to go away - it is too useful - so general rejection will not work other than as social posing.

Lovely visualisation of CMEs. helioforecast.space/cme

When @fermatslibrary.bsky.social brought up this 1940 article about why we have nothing to worry about from nuclear chain reactions, I checked that it was real and not a modern forgery. Because it seems almost too good to be true in light of current AI safety talk.

"Think of the children!" responses commonly hurt children and young people, often by creating rigid systems motivated more by institutional self-protection than achieving the actual aim. www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...

All Saints' Day is one of those holidays that has grown on me. To me it is all about acknowledging the network of lives across the human project, past, present and future.

One of the major fruits of research is delight. Think of how often you’ve read about a discovery and really enjoyed it. Often the most pleasurable kind of news. Public delight isn’t discussed enough as one of the major outputs of funding research.

Projektet “Nya sätt att sprida forskningsresultat till samhället” testar nu policy briefs förmåga att nå ut med forskning till beslutsfattare. Kan vi förutse opinionsförändringar? Hur når experter fram i kriser? Har vi koll på våra fördomar? Läs och tyck till om formatet: www.iffs.se/ovriga-sidor...

I had a fun Halloween discussion with Adam Ford on Scary Futures - we made a tier list! (Because that is apparently what kids do these days.) youtu.be/3sToD13u_78?...

Playing around with Grokipedia and finding it a bit too wordy. While I enjoyed this long biography of myself for narcissistic reasons, honestly it gets a bit repetitive. grokipedia.com/page/Anders_...

One pattern I have noticed is that people often have trouble thinking well about AI systems because they use a mental model of what they "should" be doing (whether being human-like, stochastic parrots, Data, etc). Models rarely fit the weird reality.

Existential Threats and Other Disasters: Novel (Bio)ethical Solutions for Novel Challenges Conference, Paris, 11-12 June, 2026. => Abstract submissions = 5 Nov => Early registration = 12 Nov For more info: www.csb.eu.com/conference

Let’s face it: soon, being read by AI will be more important for influence than print or clicks. You might have to pitch to the machines, not just readers. Welcome to #TeamAITextbook w/ @kevinkelly.bsky.social kk.org/thetechnium/...

What about a flower smelling like injured ants? Apparently Vincetoxicum nakaianum is pollinated by flies that make a living stealing body fluids from injured ants, such as after spider attacks. Ah, the beauty and harmony of nature... www.cell.com/current-biol...

One interesting difference between terraforming pioneerlabs.substack.com/p/an-introdu... and directed panspermia is that in the former human action is necessarily present throughout, and hence ethical control in principle possible, while this is not true for panspermia and ecopoiesis.

"Sit back and relax while the magic happens" the grimoire said. There was a little rotating circle of colored light at the end of his wand. A progress bar slowly crept around the summoning pentagram while animated glyphs advertised the power of the being. Had the bar stopped?

The original air safety instructions, as given by Ovid: suno.com/s/bflovXLsVF...

I think a conversation between @adapalmer.bsky.social and @johanknorberg.bsky.social would be really interesting. Very different perspectives on golden ages and much else, but also two very smart people who care about learning from history.

Best mis-speaking of today: "Hegel's Hallelujah Chorus". I had to make it real: suno.com/s/2JYabob6yF... Glory to the Absolute!

I'm here at #AIES2025, and still worry quite a lot about this. The deep skepticism about AI systems ever being generally capable, or even human-level in specific domains, doesn't seem to have changed over the past few years.

"We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is (1) broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and (2) strong public buy-in." Many prominent signatories to this. And me. superintelligence-statement.org

Today I lectured for four hours about AI, my book manuscript, philosophy and whatnot. I think I learned more than my students. In particular, I realized that queues are (1) awesome coordination mechanisms, (2) just the example my book needs, (3) well researched.

Shower thought: there will likely not be any beings that excrete Einstein-Bose condensates as waste, since waste is generally high entropy for open thermodynamic systems maintaining themselves and BEC is quite low entropy. Same for laser light.

Biochemistry uses far less types of chemical reactions than are known or allowed. (Lin, G. M., Warden-Rothman, R., & Voigt, C. A. (2019). Retrosynthetic design of metabolic pathways to chemicals not found in nature. Current Opinion in Systems Biology, 14, 82-107.)

An approach to longtermism over our own lifespans: if there is a chance of radical life extension, we ought to prudentially act more to help our remote future selves. academic.oup.com/book/60794/c...

AI is evolving too quickly for an annual report to suffice. To help policymakers keep pace, we're introducing the first Key Update to the International AI Safety Report. 🧵⬇️ (1/10)

Paper and video makes an important point: video generation contains an amazing amount of world knowledge and emergent strategic thinking that in the past one could write entire SIGGRAPH (or AI) papers about how to model for one particular case. A sweet demo of the Bitter Lesson.

We’re hiring! Society isn’t prepared for a world with superhuman AI. If you want to help, consider applying to one of our research roles: forethought.org/careers/res... Not sure if you’re a good fit? See more in the reply (or just apply — it doesn’t take long)

The other evening I attended the launch of David Edmonds' book on Peter Singer's Shallow Pond. I was quite struck when he called it 'the most influential thought experiment in the history of moral philosophy' yet with no influence for its first 30 years… 🧵 press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Join us in Paris June 11-12, 2026 www.thehastingscenter.org/hastings-cen...

This essay aligns well with my long-running annoyance with blaming social media for everything. Maybe the problem is a truly efficient marketplace of ideas instead. www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/is-social-...

Pointing out illiberal and anti-human rhetoric and myth-busting AI hype is important. But humanist rhetoric around AI is also weaponized, and digging into politicians and corporations that use it to defend the status quo is crucial, writes @mmblaszczyk.bsky.social.

The cliched "sexy robot" has breasts because of the male mammalian gaze. What attributes would a "sexy von Neumann replicator" have?

A lot of people are worried about a flood of trivial but true findings, but we should be just as concerned about how to handle a flood of interesting and potentially true findings. The selection & canonization process in science has been collapsing already, with no good solution

One of my big questions is how much dust affects interstellar settlement. I ended up making a model of Milky Way stellar density with a dust model, assuming settlement only happens inside a range set by integrated dust density.

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

New RAND report on an important (and messy) question: When should we actually worry about AI being used to design a pathogen? What’s plausible now vs. near-term vs. later? (1/12) I helped convene two expert Delphi panels in AI + Bio to weigh in. Full report: www.rand.org/pubs/researc...

Breakfast conversation: "What do we know about the emissivity of bread?" (The physical mysteries of the toaster)

Announcing ALLFED's new study in Earth System Dynamics: Even modest crop declines from nuclear war or infrastructure collapse could trigger cascading food trade disruptions. Global food systems are more fragile than we think. allfed.info/research/pub...

Benjamin Parviz: "Philosophers sometimes talk about charity as a feature of a good argument: charitably presenting the opposing argument in its best and most defensible form. Philosophers should also consider hospitality: making those with opposing views feel welcome to the discussion."

TIL about osteocalcin, a hormone produced by bone cells. Normally it binds to the hydroxyapatite crystals in bone. But when osteoclast cells break down the crystals it gets released in the body in a soluble form, affecting insulin, fat metabolism, and anabolic activity.

E11 Bio is excited to unveil PRISM technology for mapping brain wiring with simple light microscopes. Today, brain mapping in humans and other mammals is bottlenecked by accurate neuron tracing. PRISM uses molecular ID codes and AI to help neurons trace themselves. Read more: e11.bio/blog/prism

Evaluating the Infinite 🧵 My latest paper tries to solve a longstanding problem afflicting fields such as decision theory, economics, and ethics — the problem of infinities. Let me explain a bit about what causes the problem and how my solution avoids it. 1/N arxiv.org/abs/2509.19389

Clearly memes are the next step in human communication. The $10K Existential Hope Meme Prize: www.existentialhope.com/existential-... Making culture that celebrates optimism, progress and forward thinking makes sense. Stimulating this also makes sense.

Jag har testat att skriva policy briefs som ett sätt att sprida forskning till beslutsfattare. Men funkar det? Har du själv läst eller använt policy briefs, vad tycker du om formatet?

Nobel Prize Laureate Roger Penrose, Yvette Fuentes, and myself, request your help in order to save an archive of incredible scientific and historical value. Please raise awareness by *sharing*, or *contribute*: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/roger-penr...

I am increasingly of the opinion that any scientific paper needs a few musical versions. Here is one for Rani et al. (2019). An ultra-high-energy density supercapacitor; fabrication based on thiol-functionalized graphene oxide scrolls. suno.com/s/IXktFapLOj...

So this ant...can give birth to male clones of its own species AND of a different species... then mates with the male clones of the other species to produce hybrid workers...and mates with males of its own species to produce new queens... 🐜 Yo these ants are wildin' 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This came to me in a vision

Finally an update on astrology! www.immaterialscience.org/2025/astrology (Although I also want the 847,427 minor planets to be included in my personal horoscope; it might matter if 968 Petunia is in quadrature with 2015 AF43!)