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...

If you want inspiration for this moment in time I have two recommendations: watch Babylon Berlin and read the Foundation Trilogy. They are roadmaps for living a moral life in a time of profound regression. I am approaching this moment with the clarity that comes from recognizing that one has failed. Over a decade ago I started calling for dramatic changes to how we organize society. I gave talks, wrote blog posts and even published a book. But I didn't make a dent. Instead, the existing socie...

I wrote the following in April of 2025 and sent it to some friends in Europe. But now seems a good time to just publish it here as a provocation. Illustration by Gemini/Nano Banana Pro. European Federation Manifesto Europe needs to be strong – for itself and for the world. China has become a superpower and the United States is struggling with the accumulated debt of neoliberalism and global intervention. Russia is waging a war at Europe’s doorstep. Europe can no longer rely on the support of ...

As introduced in the prior post, studying the interaction between “ought” and “is” permits a scientifically grounded approach to morality. Previously we looked at the importance of avoiding absorbing states. Today we will consider the mobilization of resources. We visited Luang Prabang in Lao as a family and observed monks in the ritual morning alms walking down the street with locals and some visitors putting rice into their bowls. The alms bowl is one of only eight “requisites” which Buddhi...

Invocations of the Lump of Labor Fallacy have recently been superseded by appeals to Jevons paradox in claiming that we shouldn’t worry about what AI progress will do to workers. As with the case of calling something a fallacy, a paradox also suggests that those who understand it are smarter and more sophisticated than those who don’t. Case in point is Einstein’s famous Twin paradox, which people love to throw around in discussions of space travel but is quite difficult to actually understand...

In the Beginning was the Command Line is a famous essay by Neal Stephenson, in which he argues against the Disneyfication of computing represented by Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). And I do have fond memories of programming using nothing but a text editor (VIM) and the command line. Over the years though Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) became more and more popular. And today most programmers are using something like Visual Studio or more recently Cursor. But IDEs are still code ...

One common objection to my program for Philosophy Mondays is an appeal to Hume's famous dictum "you can't get to ought from is." I recently read Science and the Good, an entire book dedicated to debunking the idea that science can provide a foundation for morality. The authors appeal to Hume pretty much in every chapter. And yes many claims they push back against are in fact weak attempts to infer a moral "ought" from a biological "is," such as in various studies of brains while making decisi...

In science, theories eventually get discarded if they lack explanatory power. This mechanism acts quite slowly at times, as we can see in the case of string theory. But over the course of history it has worked quite well. Nobody spends time on the phlogiston theory of combustion. It is at best of historical interest but doesn’t inform current science or engineering. In philosophy on the other hand, texts continue to be studied, no matter how impractical, useless, or even detrimental the ideas...

The term abundance is being slung around a lot these days. First came the discussion that was kicked off by the recent eponymous book, which fell comically short of its title. Now we are deep into a debate on AI. On one side are proponents of massive AI expenditure arguing that if we get to artificial super intelligence then we will live in abundance. And so of course we should aim to get there as fast as possible. On the other side are those who see this simply as a cynical ploy to drive up ...

The Magic Employment Fallacy Invoking the “Lump of Labor Fallacy” to shut down discussion of the labor market impact of AI and robotics is once again popular. Labeling something a fallacy is a powerful move. After all, who would want to hold “a mistaken belief, especially one based on unsound argument” (common definition for fallacy) and where one will be accused of zero sum thinking?So what is the lump of labor fallacy? It is the belief that there is a fixed amount, a “lump,” of labor and so...

I wrote previously about the threat of a Trump dictatorship. That was in 2020 which seems like a long time ago. After I wrote that post we got close to disaster when Trump attempted in various ways to stay in power despite the election results. We are now in the second Trump term and the situation is considerably worse. Back then I wrote that “... I deem it unlikely that Trump has a masterplan for becoming a dictator. Then again he probably didn’t have a masterplan for becoming president but ...

So promptly after I wrote about having "Renewed Energy" I entered another 7 week writing gap. There are of course many reasons, with some better than others. On the fun side there was a brief sailing adventure on Frolic, heading from the Canaries to Cabo Verde and exploring the volcanic islands on both ends with Gigi (Frolic is now en route to the Carribean). At work I have been particularly busy with several financings happening at the same time along with working on a new investment. I have...

Between work, projects and travel I have missed many weeks of writing on Philosophy Mondays. Thankfully during this time I have also gained clarity that my fundamental goal with this series, which is to argue for a universal moral core on an objective basis, is more important than ever. As a result I am feeling a renewed sense of urgency for this work. I was utterly fascinated by the conversation between Dwarkesh Patel and Richard Sutton, which is worth listening to in its entirety. Quite ear...

“God is dead” Nietzsche famously proclaimed. Humanity’s desire to be ruled by god, by contrast appears very much alive. Our latest hope for salvation rests with Artificial Intelligence. Climate crisis? AI will cool the planet. Death and disease? AI will make us immortal. War? AI will bring about peace. Machina deus ut deus ex machina (with apologies to my Latin teacher and asking for help from anyone who can come up with the right idiom; update: "Deus machinae ut deus ex machina" has been pro...