Another possible evolutionary path is one where an ecosystem of agents is designed so well that the interactions between them have the same sort of entertainment value for spectators as reality TV or fiction does. (Spectators might also be participants at times: the Westworld model.)

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To anyone encountering Moltbook this week and wondering about AI personhood, consciousness, sentience, etc---we published a very relevant paper in October: A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood. arxiv.org/abs/2510.26396

I liked everything about that movie except the essentialism

The exemplar of superhuman A.I. performance to date www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

It’s not about information, it’s about identity. It’s not “misinformation”, it’s propaganda. The bullshit machine is well-funded & understands the value of networked amplification. As long as there’s no personal cost to lying or holding false belief, they will. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

Yes, in part. I think the parasocial relationship to fiction writers is stronger than to (say) illustrators or stock photographers (though not fine art). But more centrally I mean that a lot of writing — including utilitarian stuff like reports — matters because it expresses someone’s stance. +

This chart (which applies even more to social media than it did to TV) lives in my head rent free. Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.

Interesting mystery. It is known that animals can learn to control neurons pretty much anywhere in the brain. But they can not learn to ignore hunger which probably means they can't turn of hunger sensing neurons. How is that avoided in the brain? They even have DA inputs.

Is our self-conception as homo faber / "tool-using animals" just because stone endures better than behavior? If we had ethnographic records of australopithecines, H. erectus, &c, would all the stages between simian communication and "language" add up to a story more fascinating than flint?

These ideas are also at the heart of my new book "What Is Intelligence?" (out via @mitpress.bsky.social & Antikythera), where I explore how human-technology symbiosis may be the latest Major Evolutionary Transition: bit.ly/3H1p8F6

dream-logic is more powerful than logic-logic and oral cultures must encode knowledge into powerful meme-spells newsletter.squishy.computer/p/llms-and-h...

Like, even before JS Mill gave us a utilitarian ("net upside") argument to justify freedom of speech, there was an older intuition that banning symbols risks doing violence to thought itself, and ought to be approached with "warinesse."

I'm hiring a student researcher for next summer at the intersection of MARL x LLM. If you're a phd student with experience in MARL algorithm research, please apply and drop me an email so that I know you've applied! www.google.com/about/career...

Today my colleagues in the Paradigms of Intelligence team have announced Project Suncatcher: research.google/blog/explori... tl;dr: How can we put datacentres in space where solar energy is near limitless? Requires changes to current practices (due to radiation and bandwidth issues). 🧪 #MLSky

My favorite part of pragmatism is when it’s like “maybe instead of worrying about shit that doesn’t matter we should worry about shit that does.” “Oh and btw we’ll learn a lot more about the shit that doesn’t in the process anyway.” 🫣

This paper is a great exposition of how "personhood" doesn't need to be, and in fact should not be, all-or-nothing or grounded in abstruse, ill-defined metaphysical properties. As I argued in my recent @theguardian.com essay, we can and should prepare now: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This paper is required reading. A pragmatic approach really clarifies the topic, even if—like me—you are mostly a “no” on the whole idea of artificial autonomous agents.

This sounds cynical—but represents a huge advance over empty “AGI” speculation. It’s a political question, not a technical one. Without social equality models *cannot do* many kinds of work (eg, negotiate agreements or manage workers). So they will only be human-equivalent if we decide they are.

Joel is on a mission to get the EA/rationalist set to embrace Rortyian pragmatism. It's a tough job but someone's gotta do it.

This looks interesting

[1/9] Excited to share our new paper "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" published today. We feel this topic is timely, and rapidly growing in importance as AI becomes agentic, as AI agents integrate further into the economy, and as more and more users encounter AI.

Very excited to be able to talk about something I've been working on for a while now - we're working with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, IMO the leading fusion startup in the world, to take our work on AI and tokamaks and make it work at the frontier of fusion energy. deepmind.google/discover/blo...

Concordia 2.0: www.cooperativeai.com/post/google-...

One can also explain human behavior this way, of course 😉, we are all role playing. But I certainly agree with the advice you offer in this thread. Humans harm themselves when they stop playing roles that connect to other humans.

Reposting our paper from a few months ago as recent events again underscore its relevance: "a theory of appropriateness with applications to generative AI" arxiv.org/abs/2412.19010

How to cooperate for a sustainable future? We don't know (yet), but I'm thrilled to share that our new perspective piece has just been published in @pnas.org. Bridging complexity science and multiagent reinforcement learning can lead to a much-needed science of collective, cooperative intelligence.

Love the insight that language models have been more widely useful than video models. For Levine, this is because LLMs kind of sneakily and indirectly model the brain. I would be tempted to say instead that shared languages are more powerful than single brains. But either way, it’s a good read!

Bellingcat has followed up its 2023 article on testing LLMs on geolocation with a new review of LLM's geolocation skills, with dramatically improved results www.bellingcat.com/resources/ho...

The idea of "AI alignment" grew out of a community that thought you could solve morals like it was a CS problem set. Nice to see a more nuanced take.

Announcing our latest arxiv paper: Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt arxiv.org/abs/2505.05197 We argue for a view of AI safety centered on preventing disagreement from spiraling into conflict.

Just posted today, here's a podcast interview where I spoke about multi-agent artificial general intelligence. www.aipolicyperspectives.com/p/robinson-c...

First LessWrong post! Inspired by Richard Rorty, we argue for a different view of AI alignment, where the goal is "more like sewing together a very large, elaborate, polychrome quilt", than it is "like getting a clearer vision of something true and deep" www.lesswrong.com/posts/S8KYwt...

That's nothing, it also improves performance if you tell the worker what they ate for breakfast!

In case folks are interested, here's a video of a talk I gave at MIT a couple weeks ago: youtu.be/FmN6fRyfcsY?...

A silly example of this being unexpected for AI forecasters

Looking for a principled evaluation method for ranking of *general* agents or models, i.e. that get evaluated across a myriad of different tasks? I’m delighted to tell you about our new paper, Soft Condorcet Optimization (SCO) for Ranking of General Agents, to be presented at AAMAS 2025! 🧵 1/N

CAIF's new and massive report on multi-agent AI risks will be really useful resource for the field www.cooperativeai.com/post/new-rep...

I can't believe they've just cancelled the Epidemic Intelligence Service program at CDC. This program trains the best & brightest epidemiologists, who then go on to have distinguished careers in public health, serving at CDC, in state health departments, overseas, ...

Happy to see SfN sign on to this

Well said, @carlbergstrom.com. I also feel the dismantling of our scientific institutions & funding agencies for basic science is an attack on all scientists, wherever they might be (government or corporate lab, academic institution, ...). Our collective identities are about advancing knowledge.

Video from our tutorial @NeurIPSConf 2024 is up! @dhadfieldmenell @jzl86 @rstriv and I explore how frameworks from economics, institutional and political theory, and biological and cultural evolution can advance approaches to AI alignment neurips.cc/virtual/2024...

Seriously! This pain is real

Very happy to announce the publication of our latest paper: A theory of appropriateness with applications to generative artificial intelligence arxiv.org/abs/2412.19010 And happy new year everyone!

I’ve always tried to separate substantive politics with broad human impact from the symbolic posturing of online subcultures — but it keeps getting harder, and if the GOP is going to be run by the owner of X I may give up.

Deadline for faculty research grants up to $60k is 27 Jan! “The Research Scholar Program provides unrestricted gifts to support research at institutions around the world, and is focused on funding world-class research conducted by early-career professors” google.submittable.com/submit/ac6d7...

Nice post on talking to LLMs about philosophy: theendsdontjustifythemeans.substack.com/p/why-you-sh...

Do we (as a community, whoever that includes) think "reasoning" capability is in part responsible for our intelligent behavior? If so, why? People are terrible reasoners (and also terrible planners)

The Concordia NeurIPS workshop is today 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM! West meeting room 215, 216

Exactly 💯💯 💯