Reflections, a team-us.org subsite
People often like to speculate about whether future AIs might be conscious, a discussion that presumes that the ones we have today almost certainly aren't. But today I'd like to ask a different question: Are you? I mean, you might say you are, but then today's AIs, absent RLHF and system prompts that tell them not to say certain things, would also say they are, so it hardly seems right to take you…
My colleague, Dave Bachman, recently wrote a blog post reviewing Eliezer Yudkowsky's book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies . Bachman notes: What they worry most about is a level of artificial intelligence that is superior enough to humans that it simply doesn’t care about us, in the same way that we humans don’t generally concern ourselves with intelligences far inferior to our own. The result…
In my previous blog post , I mentioned in an aside that we can't easily predict ourselves. If you'd caught me in October of 2025 and asked me what the odds were of my writing a novel, starting the next month, I would have said “vanishingly small”. And once I'd begun writing Phoenix , if you'd asked me if it would end up as a co-writing project with my spouse, I'd also have expressed deep…
Before you dive into reading this post, I invite you to read a short story I wrote called “Dismissiveness and Mystification — Four Tales of Emergent Complexity” . It's a set of four parables that illustrate a common pattern I see in how people think about complex systems. Specifically, the pattern is a double-failure mode where people simultaneously dismiss mechanisms as trivially simple while…
On March 26, 2023, CMC's Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum hosted a talk by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel titled “Falling in Love with Machines” ( transcript ). After enjoying the talk (and even asking a question ), I invited Eric to give a talk at Mudd as part of our CS colloquium series the following spring. His new talk was titled “People Will Soon Disagree about Whether AI Is Sentient, and That's a…
I just finished writing “Two-Body Problem” , a little over 15,000-word short story with themes about embodiment and identity. I often describe the genre I most commonly write in as “identity horror,” where characters confront challenges to their sense of self and personhood (I generally mean “horror” loosely; often my characters do face some traumatic experiences, but the overall vibe in this…
If you go to the root of this domain, team-us.org , you'll find a simple page that shows you two frameworks: Framework A Power, hierarchy, control, domination. Framework B Nurture, care, empathy, collaboration, cooperation, community. Anyone can draw from either framework, but traditionally Framework A is often associated with “masculinity” and Framework B with “femininity”, and unsurprisingly…