A lot is happening these days that makes my book The World After Capital more relevant than ever. My central argument is that digital technology, with AI as its apotheosis, is so powerful that it requires a new age. We are not talking about some incremental tweaks to how we live, but rather about a shift as profound as that from the hunter gatherer age to the agrarian age, and from the agrarian age to the industrial age. Everywhere we look we now see the signs of this shift already in progres...

Last Friday we started a group at The Spark of Hudson on “How to Live a Good Life.” Despite announcing it only a couple of days earlier there was terrific turnout with almost twenty people attending. The motto of The Spark is “Learn Together” and in this spirit we will be exploring this challenge as a group. We started this first session with two reflections. The first one was to imagine yourself at the end of one’s life feeling deeply content. Where are you? Who is around you? How have you l...

Well over a decade ago I gave my first talk on the idea that we need a right to be represented by what I called a bot. At the time a lot of people simply shrugged off this idea. It seemed too outlandish. Of course now, we all see ads for Muse every day. We now call them agents and there are plenty of them, such as Instinct or Hermes. With their swift adoption we are also seeing the inevitable counter reaction. Amazon has already blocked Muse and is also interfering with other agents. If it’s ...

I have now been writing Philosophy Mondays on and off for 18 months with 31 posts total. The next phase of the project will be to go back over everything and make corrections based on what I have learned along the way. Much as when I was writing The World After Capital, it is the act of putting words on a page that helps advance my understanding far beyond what I can accomplish solely by reading. Early in the series I was using AI to help polish some of the posts, but I stopped that as I didn...

Last week's post provided an explanation of the third principle of the Universal Moral Core, which I will also refer to as the consciousness principle. Today we are looking at its implications. The most immediate implication today is that we should closely examine how we humans are treating other conscious species. Again, I am positing here that species such as apes, whales, elephants, etc. have consciousness while acknowledging that this is a claim (in the absence of a compelling and quantif...

Today’s post continues the Universal Moral Core series by explaining the third principle, which states Value the diversity and autonomy of different forms of consciousness. Let’s start, as we have with the other two principles, by looking at the last term first, i.e. consciousness. I use consciousness to mean the subjective experience of existence, sometimes also referred to as phenomenological consciousness. We can clearly separate two questions. The “what” it feels like (also referred to as...

Today’s post is an interlude to the Universal Moral Core series, which will resume next week. Labor Day originated during the peak of the Industrial Revolution to celebrate workers and their contributions to the economy. Now, however, the Industrial Age is two decades past its expiration date. The decline of labor as a share of GDP, which began in the 1960s, accelerated dramatically starting in 2000. But that was just a preview of what is about to happen. With the release of the latest AI mod...

Going back to the initial publication of my book The World After Capital in 2021, I had a paragraph in the conclusion discussing the potential for artificial intelligences to become "neohumans." I chose this word purposefully because I was and am still hoping that we can ultimately create a world without subjugation in either direction. We don't want to be slaves to machines, nor should we want to enslave them. Avoiding the first failure mode is broadly what people mean by alignment. Avoiding...

First up a quick recap to where we are in this mini-series. A few weeks back, I proposed a Universal Moral Core consisting of three principles. I am now writing posts explaining each principle in greater detail and examining some of the implications. There was a post on the knowledge principle (Principle 1) and one on its implications. Last week’s post was about the responsibility principle (Principle 2) and today I am considering some of its implications. The first and most important implica...

The second principle in my proposed Universal Moral Core (UMC) is as follows: Accept the responsibility that comes from power. This principle is inspired by the great font of philosophical wisdom that is Spider-Man. As a fun aside, while in movies and newer comics this line is credited to Peter Parker’s guardian, Uncle Ben, it originally appeared in the closing narration of the issue of Amazing Fantasy that introduced Spider-Man. Let me start by pointing out that the principle only applies wh...

Earlier this week, Gigi and I signed the Statement on Superintelligence and explained our rationale. Today the promised follow up post with a concrete proposal for a plan. There is a unique moment of opportunity for a negotiated AI slowdown with China with limits on how many GW of additional data centers can be built. Recursive self improvement, which is the next step in the race, is heavily dependent on massive capacity additions, so that even such a coarse agreement would provide a signific...

Gigi and I have signed the Statement on Superintelligence, which calls for a pause on the development of superintelligence. This blog post lays out our rationale for doing so now after having previously held off on supporting other “pause AI” appeals. We have a broad set of initiatives in the Hudson Valley and beyond aimed at securing human thriving in the AI age. These include a basic income pilot, various steward ownership projects, and a community learning center. Two preconditions appear,...

Gigi and I have signed the Statement on Superintelligence, which calls for a pause on the development of superintelligence. This blog post lays out our rationale for doing so now after having previously held off on supporting other “pause AI” appeals. We have a broad set of initiatives in the Hudson Valley and beyond aimed at securing human thriving in the AI age. These include a basic income pilot, various steward ownership projects, and a community learning center. Two preconditions appear,...

Gigi and I have signed the Statement on Superintelligence, which calls for a pause on the development of superintelligence. This blog post lays out our rationale for doing so now after having previously held off on supporting other “pause AI” appeals. We have a broad set of initiatives in the Hudson Valley and beyond aimed at securing human thriving in the AI age. These include a basic income pilot, various steward ownership projects, and a community learning center. Two preconditions appear,...

Gigi and I have signed the Statement on Superintelligence, which calls for a pause on the development of superintelligence. This blog post lays out our rationale for doing so now after having previously held off on supporting other “pause AI” appeals. We have a broad set of initiatives in the Hudson Valley and beyond aimed at securing human thriving in the AI age. These include a basic income pilot, various steward ownership projects, and a community learning center. Two preconditions appear,...

Today’s post is an interlude in the Universal Moral Core series to discuss human nature. Given how much philosophical and other writing centers on different ideas of human nature, including the endless nature versus nurture debate, this aside obviously isn’t meant to be some kind of definitive treatment. Rather I want to set out an argument about the importance of multiscale analysis that appears all too often absent from human nature discussions and is central to making moral progress. We ar...

In last week's post I explained the first principle of the Universal Moral Core (UMC) in greater detail. Today I want to investigate some of its implications for how we should behave. As a reminder, earlier in the series, I suggested that the goal of philosophy should be to help us answer the following question: How should we choose our actions in light of our understanding of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeli...

A few years back we experienced the infamous vibecession. Kudos to Kyla Scanlon for this terrific term which captures a moment where the public feels bad about the economy at a moment where traditional economic indicators are not showing a recession. At the time there was a huge amount of commentary on where the “bad vibes” might be coming from. Lots of theories were advanced, but then, as is always the case, the news cycle moved on. Therefore an important paper published in early 2024 about ...

The first principle in my proposed Universal Moral Core (UMC) is as follows: Grow knowledge as the source of technological and moral progress. Before diving into all parts of this principle and its implications, let me relate it upfront to the Kantian separation between moral norms (values) and epistemic norms (knowledge). My principle is about a necessary condition for progress. This doesn’t mean that individuals have to acquire specific knowledge to act in a moral way. Instead it does imply...

Technological progress requires moral progress. The necessity of moral progress becomes obvious in the extreme, when capabilities arise that allow entire worlds to be destroyed with the push of a button. Science fiction presents us with many dramatic examples, such as the destruction of the planet Alderaan in Star Wars, or the shocking finale of the Three Body Problem. But even today, far from these extremes, with every bit of technological progress our ability to destroy grows faster than ou...

Richard Sutton recently quit Keen to pursue his own reinforcement learning startup. That reminded of his conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, in which Sutton argues forcefully against the usefulness of training on existing human knowledge. Even though we can apply a lot of compute to it and have done so, we will run out of knowledge and then what. Arguably we have already arrived at this point. Sutton’s answer of course is that you just want to figure out what it really means to learn and then A...

To truly understand the world, we must bridge the gap between philosophy and physics. Recent breakthroughs in gravity and quantum theory are finally moving us past stagnant paradigms to make this possible.

By confronting China politically while becoming economically dependent, the US violated basic game theory. To reach a stable multipolar world, we must build supply chain resilience.

Before coming to the US for the first time, I attended a long weekend orientation held by the organization that was arranging my stay. We were warned that we would feel homesick, and that we would experience culture shock. I arrived in Rochester, Minnesota in 1983 at age 16. The wonderful Williams family welcomed me into their home. Bob was an engineer working on the AS400 chip at IBM's Rochester facility. Jeanette was a professional parliamentarian. Sandee and Scott, my host siblings, were a...

There is a heated debate about what an AGI-level economy might look like. On one side are pessimists who foresee extreme wealth concentration and a permanent precariat: people with no meaningful economic role, dependent on whatever crumbs fall from the table of capital owners. On the other are optimists who argue that AI will make everything so cheap that people won't need much money to live in luxury. Both sides have a point, which is what makes the debate frustrating: they're describing dif...

Are we in an AI bubble or not? As someone who lived through the dotcom bubble as an investor there are many parallels and also significant differences. By many metrics we are in obvious bubble territory with fantastically extended valuations and lots of roundtripping happening with NVIDIA at the center in a position similar to AOL. Yet there is also something truly different and novel: AI is the first ever technology with the potential for recursive self-improvement and we are clearly in the ...

I love food and I love drink. Food and drink provide wonderful delights from delicious flavors and through jolly company. To my great fortune I never had any eating or drinking problems. Well all of that suddenly changed a few months ago. I went from no problems straight to intense chest pain and massive acid reflux. I consulted both AI and my generalist who both concluded that I had Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease aka GERD. I had never even heard of GERD before which is all the more surprisi...

In the two prior posts in Philosophy Mondays I have argued for a universal moral core centered on knowledge. The first post shows how absorbing states curtail the growth of knowledge. The second post demonstrates the need for resources to further develop knowledge. To recap ever so briefly: knowledge is central to human affairs as it is the source of our power and responsibility. It is what uniquely sets us apart from all other species to date, although we are in the process of creating new s...

I am an immigrant, which has given me a profound appreciation of the interplay between culture and immigration. My first time in the United States was as an exchange student in Rochester, Minnesota. I was a junior at John Marshall High School. Early into the school year, some students missed an exam and I was told they would be given the same exam as make-up a week later. I was flabbergasted. Obviously they would get perfect scores because other students would tell them what was on the exam! ...

I learned how to code on a Texas Instruments TI-59 programmable calculator and then moved on to an Apple II. The calculator had a kind of assembly language and on the Apple I had access to Basic but still wrote a fair bit of assembly code. After a one year stay 1983-84 as a High School junior in the United States I returned to Germany determined to have my own income (as I had seen many other highschoolers do). I found a job writing software for Siemens in their regional office in Nuremberg f...