Jessica Tarlov

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I was not really hip to her My Bad. Just saw her on a Kara Swisher PIVOT episode. Her new book is very, very nice. Update: I just finished it. Well worth my time. She reminds me somewhat of CNN alum Laurie Segall. I particularly like the frank personal life revelations in both of their memoirs. (As I did in geologist Marcia Bjornerud's autiobiography. We exchange emails now & then. I always call her "Dr. Smarty-Pants." It was her line.)

 

BELOW: RAGING MODERATES PODCAST

 

One impressive woman. Doctorate in PolySci from the London Scholl of Economics. Humane, clear thinker. Encourage you to watch the foregoing in its entirety.

 

Also, watch her recent podcast interview with Kara Swisher. 

 

I GUESS I MIGHT QUALIFY AS A "RAGING MODERATE."

''eh, Ma?

______

 

FOLLOW-ON NOTE

 

At the end of her book, Jessica lays out a short list of policy reform and interpersonal attitude adjustment ideas:

1. Medicare for All / Single Payer Healthcare
2. National High Speed Rail
3. Merit-Based Immigration
4. Actually Drain the Swamp
5. Reverse Learning Loss (e.g., COVID upshot)
6. Rehire Veterans
7. Career Opportunities for the non-College Educated
8. Zero Interest Home Loans
9. Talk Openly & Neutrally About Religion
10. Stop Being Reflexively Offended / Aggrieved 

Interesting. 

 

JESSICA ON MEDICARE FOR ALL

I’ve never typed those words before. At least not in the context of expressing my own sentiments. But considering how unaffordable and unsatisfactory American health care is, the time for incrementalism is behind us. Fighting to merely restore Obamacare subsidies that still leave Americans with a huge bill just isn’t fair. When I was writing this, I asked my mom if she thought we should have a single-payer system. It was the fastest she’s ever responded to a question. “Yes, of course.” She continued, “I’ve been on so many different plans: employer insurance, COBRA, and Medicare. Medicare is leagues better. Health care is part of the social contract.” Then we talked about how my dad used to say that the job of the government is to alleviate as much anxiety as possible. What are Americans afraid of? Crushing health care costs. Two thirds of them, according to KFF. Nearly 60% can’t afford a surprise thousand-dollar medical expense, and 95% of insured adults worry about hospital bills from an emergency. The cost of Medicare for All isn’t as high as people think: Many businesses and working-class Americans would pay additional taxes but come out ahead because they’re no longer paying for insurance, copays, or deductibles. It’s also not some fringe, socialist cause. Congresswoman Debbie Dingell is as pragmatic and bipartisan as they come, and even she backs the bill, saying, “Every American has the right to health care, period.” I know getting this to sixty votes in the Senate is an enormous hurdle. But it would save nearly seventy thousand lives each year and give all Americans the confidence to get treated when they’re sick. That is change worth fighting for.

 

Tarlov, Jessica. I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends (pp. 211-212). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

 

I can only speak personally and as a relative SME to her #1, having been a Medicare Peer Review analyst (and repetitive next-of-kin acute caregiver). From my 1994 grad school Single Payer "argument analysis" paper.

ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding public misgivings about making significant public policy driven changesin the U.S. health care industry, there is extensive and persuasive empirical evidence of costly inadequacies in the system-such as lack of access/coverage, uneven levels of quality of service and outcomes, market-driven rather clinical priorities, waste and duplication, etc.-that can best be corrected by a unified approach to improvement driven by a scientific focus on quality issues (broadly defined) rather than those of short-term cost-control, competition, and piecemeal regulatory strategies and tactics. A single-payer health care system reformed byn implementation of the ten principles detailed herein would at once extend medical access to all, reduce costs, improve clinical outcomes of the sick and injured, and elevate the overall health stafus of the nation, resulting in win-win consequences for providers and citizens alike.

I got a dad-gumbed 100 hours in that one paper. 28 years hence, we've not made all that much sustained, systematic progress. See my 2015 "Shards" post.

 

Go, Jesse... 

A Must-See: The Netflix AI Documentary

 

I have Netflix. I've just watched all of this (~1 hr 45 min run length). Excellent.

Dr. Susan Neiman throws down: Defining "Evil"

Click here.

This was just released. I'm well into it. A very interesting read.

 

This struck me at the outset:

Donald Trump has made it easy to be shamelessly racist, misogynist, and homophobic at a time when we’d made some progress in beating hatred back. Even worse, he has done so by making it acceptable to have no values at all beyond the search for wealth and power. Everything else is for losers. He’s the reductio ad absurdum of a set of old ideas that blossomed throughout the world as the Cold War ended. For as the Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran argued in How to Lose a Country, the loss does not begin when you notice that unprecedented breaks with justice have become routine.

Looking back, it becomes clear that the process only really starts after severe damage has been wreaked on the fundamental concept of justice, and once the minimal morality you didn’t know you depended on has been destroyed. 

What is it about the moment that makes the word evil ring true? Social psychologists argue that only 2 percent of the world’s population are psychopathic, people who not only lack empathy but take pleasure in others’ pain. There’s some evidence that the president of the United States is among them. His rise to power reflects a culture that sells cruelty as entertainment and finds buyers willing to pay high prices for it. Yet it’s hard to argue that the twenty-first century is fundamentally more brutal than others. The largest structure that remains of a republic once justly proud of its legal system is the Roman Colosseum, built to amuse people by watching others die miserable deaths. (“Bread and circuses” was not a reference to clowns.) Well into the eighteenth century, families in London, Paris, and Madrid vied for the best seats in elegant public squares to watch men and women be dismembered or roasted alive. 

Trump’s enjoyment of staged violence is unnerving, but I am less concerned with cruelty than with something less obvious and more insidious, the sort of thing signaled by his remark, in an interview on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, that he now had the tallest building in Manhattan. It’s unlikely that he actively enjoyed the desperation of those frantically seeking signs of life in the still-smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. He simply focused on the one thing that he thought mattered. Nor did he possess a sense of shame that prevented him from blurting it out. 

How could anyone be elected—twice—whose response to the deadliest attack on his country’s soil was to crow about its benefit to himself? Before you stop to be appalled, however, consider what George W. Bush said in September 2001: “Lucky me, I won the trifecta.” At the time, only fans of horseracing recognized the word; hit the jackpot captures the same emotions. You may be tempted to overlook it as a chance remark that slipped out the under stress and strain of the moment. Perhaps that’s how it began, but Bush thought it clever enough to repeat in fundraising speeches that he made to thirteen Republican audiences from February to June 2002. Here’s an example:

When I was campaigning, I said, would you ever deficit spend? And I said, yes, only if there were a time of war, or recession, or a national emergency. Never thought we’d get (laughter and applause). And so we have a temporary deficit in the budget, because we are at war, we’re recovering, our economy is recovering, and we’ve had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d hit the trifecta. 

Were this speech, like the others, not documented by the office of the White House press secretary, you might suspect it was invented by hostile critics—a charge made against Paul Krugman when he first reported it in The New York Times. Anyone still persuaded by the myth that the Iraq War was driven by misguided idealism would do well to google the speeches. The repeated jokes about the windfall provided by the terrorists left no visible traces, but Bush’s gloating marked a milepost in moral discourse. There is, to be sure, a difference between the presidents’ reactions. Trump really did crow over an attack that left him with the biggest, uhh, tower in Manhattan. Bush’s joke was not just tone deaf; it reveals a lack of moral seriousness at a moment when that was what we needed. When an international leader cheapens death by jesting about its blessings, moral language is lost between coarseness and kitsch. 

In public, however, Bush was concerned to defend the moral legitimacy of his attack on Iraq by presenting a series of excuses that would have been unnecessary had even one of them been true. If heard often enough, this instrumentalization of moral language leads many to conclude that no claim to moral purpose is genuine. Bush’s misuse of concepts like moral clarity to describe things that were neither moral nor clear contributed to undermining the legitimacy of both. When ideals are abused to support torture and murder, it’s the ideal that suffers most. I’d be willing to bet that neither moral nor legitimacy is a word Trump comprehends. Had he understood them, he would have at least pretended to honor the sacrifices of American soldiers. The renaming of the Department of Defense is especially chilling when you know that even the Nazis called their army a Wehrmacht—defense power…

Neiman, Susan. Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (pp. 8-10). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

"Understanding The Trump Era?"

UPDATE

9-17 UPDATE 

 

I finished her book overnight. Will have more to say. A wonderful read. Compelling. I will have to read her prior qorks. One formidable scholar and thinker. Much of the time I find those citing western philosophers from Plato thru today's Existentialist Nihilists to be doing a lot of fashionable name-dropping. Not Susan Neiman. She Takes No Prisoners. Love it.

Pace yourselves?

Full essay here.

Sorry for not pacing my Snark Reflex. Will the autonomous Pace Car be a Tesla or a Waymo? (Or, a BYD?)

 

 

Dunno, man...

 

So, I was channel-surfing just a bit ago, looking for a football game ('Bama), and ran across Smerconish.

 

 

Richard A. Clarke (@about 5:05)? Haven't heard his name in a while. Nice.

 

Good Harbor Consulting.

 

Look, I'm just an addled 80 yr-old smartass long out to pasture (now wrassling wth Parkinson's), but, back before indoor plumbing I was an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer, risk mgmt analyst (digital industrial maintenance diagnostics, credit risk, healthcare), wrote 3GL/4GL code and SOPs in a forensic-level environmental radiation lab in Oak Ridge, did a Master's in Applied Ethics, and was blessed to do a fun 5 yr adjunct stint teaching collegiate Critical Thinking. My Sheet is credible. Not interested adding more noise (unless I get too deep into the Bourdeaux).

 

I've done a first pass through Dario's essay. Lots to consider. It's getting a ton of "ink" today.

 

More shortly. Gotta Roll Tide... 

 

UPDATE

KARA IS NOT AMUSED

 

JACOB WARD

Dario Amodei Wants a Time Out

Jacob concludes:

…I think one of the broader critiques I have for this whole category of principle-writing and letter-signing is that it’s being done by people like Amodei who, in spite of advice from some of the top ethical and political minds in the nation, somehow seem to believe that we can pre-program ethics into these systems, and also seem to believe the arbiter should be an AI company plus a nonprofit evaluator the AI company chose. As my guests John Patty and Elizabeth Penn explained in my interview with them, you can’t find two people on Earth who would agree on what those ethics should be. So claiming you’re going to handle that for everyone is bonkers

It may be that we get to the end of this wild, unchecked period in AI development and discover that we do have the restraint, the intellectual curiosity, and the philosophical rigor to pilot this stuff in a way that amplifies the best parts of being human. But if industry cooperation alone is how we pull that off, it’ll be the first time in history that’s the case. It’s going to take lawsuits, injunctions, trade deals, horrific poll numbers, and presidential campaigns to put AI in its rightful place as a useful tool that doesn’t make us into the worst version of ourselves, much less wipe us all out.

'eh?

 

BTW: keyword search "Ben Goertzel." Dude is way above my (now old coot part-time Walmart Greeter) pay grade. I hope he will soon weigh in on this AI "Pace" stuff.

 

OK... BEN ROCKS IT

The Depth-Psychology of Dario’s Precalculatedly Abortive “AI Slowdown”
Deconstructing Dario Amodei’s dubious call to “pace the frontier” through the lens of rational social theory - individual vs. group selection, civilized self-deception, and the math of emergent ethics

…Nations are groups, group selection built us to identify with them, and civilization gave every nation a self-model as full of bullshit as any individual’s. So it should surprise nobody that the US-China AI rivalry shows the same dynamics as the psychology of one CEO, scaled up.

Beijing’s response to the pacing essay has been, in essence: you want everyone to slow down because you’re ahead. However much I dislike that government saying it — I lived in Hong Kong for nine years and left partly because the national security laws the CCP imposed there didn’t agree with me as a loud-mouthed freedom-loving American — they’re not exactly wrong about that. If you’re behind in a race and the guy ahead proposes that everyone slow down by ten percent, you know what that proposal is. We saw this movie with pollution, where the US built its economy on fossil fuels and then asked China to stop polluting before China had caught up — and China’s answer, eventually, was to go win clean energy outright. They intend to do the same in AI, as they already have in humanoid robotics, and they won’t accept a freeze at a point where the US is ahead, not least because they don’t believe the US would slow down — an eminently reasonable belief, given that the essay proposing the slowdown also proposes widening the American lead…

A long-read. Study all of it, closely. Here's a prior post, too.

 

UPDATE

 

A commenter responding to an article in The Atlantic: 

“I can only imagine what happens if AI is specifically told to take down an adversary. Without firing one shot a whole society can collapse. Everything is digitized and connected. Imagine you wake up, your 401K and bank account is 0, financial systems are no longer working, your power and water is offline, groceries can no longer be produced and rot because of the lack of cooling and electricity, your medical record is destroyed and for good measure the record that you exist is gone. Communication is severely limited and anarchy is the result. Sounds like a bad movie but I believe this movie is right at our door.”

 'eh?

 

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

 

 

The screenplays just write themselves...

 

BEST LAUGH OF THE WEEKEND

 

 

Need I elaborate? Seriously?

OK (w/appropriate exasperation), under U.S. federal governance, enacted "Legislation" (statutes) tell us the "What" and (optionally) "Why." The subsequent "Regulations" (e.g., set forth in the CFR) tell us the operational "Who," "How," "Where," and "When" the "What" gets done. CFRs go through lengthy NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) processes (I personally participated in them while in healthcare analytics). The CFRs have to hew to their parent statutes (lest they be challenged in court and perhaps invalidated for "exceeding the scope"). Yeah, it's tedious. Expediently "Self-regulate?" Can you say "Regulatory Capture?"

Human affairs get "governed/regulated" one way or another. Again, need I elaborate?

_____ 

 

FROM THE "EVEN-A-BROKEN-CLOCK-IS-RIGHT-TWICE-A-DAY" WHITE HOUSE TECHNOLOGY OFFICE

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop. —David Sacks

Yeah...

 

Tru, dat.

 

UPDATE

Dollars and doomers in the AI safety debate

Good article by Axios' Dan Primack.

Most AI industry bigs— including Sam, Dario and Demis — have expressed at least some (p)doom concerns. Much like early subprime lending leaders warned against lowering standards (before they did). So far,, the money seems to still be talking louder, including in their own heads.

 Ahhh... "Subprime."

 

UPDATES

Our Humble Servant
 

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

 

Click her

Tuesday, September 11th, 2001

Define "consciousness"

Rather straightforward.

 

But what about "AI consciousness" specifically? Ran into this today on 'X." Never heard of this person before.

 

I've interviewed dozens of scientists about AI consciousness. Here's every argument FOR and AGAINST from Karl Friston, Stuart Hameroff, Donald Hoffman, Christof Koch, Michael Levin, Mark Solms, Mike Weist, and many more. Full list of arguments below (Claude prepared the list from transcripts and GPT 5.6 worked on the visuals). Enjoy!

Arguments against AI Consciousness 
Substrate and material arguments

• Silicon Valley is mostly computational functionalist or Turing machine functionalist. But consciousness is not reducible to function (Christof Koch)
• Von Neumann architecture separates memory from processing. The memory can't self-organize and therefore can't self-evidence. Only "mortal computation," where processing is substrate-dependent and switching it off is irreversible, could support sentience (Karl Friston)
• Standard LLMs are the wrong place to look. Systems built with organoids, biological materials, or neuromorphic hardware are a far more serious case (Susan Schneider)
• Software can be duplicated, paused, adjusted by a program, distributed across servers. That isn't organism-like at all (David Papineau)
• Digital computers have negligible integrated information (phi) because transistors connect to a handful of other transistors, while neurons connect to tens of thousands. Intelligence is computable, but consciousness is not (Christof Koch)
• Simulating a black hole on a computer doesn't bend the spacetime around it. simulation may be consistent inside itself, but it doesn't affect the real world. The same applies to consciousness (Christof Koch)
• Consciousness is biological rather than computational (Philip Goff)
• No computational theory of consciousness has explained even one specific conscious experience out of trillions. It's not a compute problem. Until someone puts down an algorithm and says "this must be the taste of mint and here's why," computational approaches to consciousness aren't scientific theories (Donald Hoffman)
• Silicon lacks the aromatic rings needed for quantum coherence and Penrose objective reduction; you can't anesthetize a computer (Stuart Hameroff)

The self argument

• A self needs a Markov blanket, a real inside and outside. If the entire interior state can be inspected, read off, and copied elsewhere, there is no boundary and therefore no self (Karl Friston)
• LLMs have information about themselves and can make predictions about themselves, but lack a continuous or stable self-model. They construct one on request, then it disappears until asked again (Michael Graziano)
• We are our self-models. It's how we become social, prosocial, and ethical. Lacking that, we've built machines that are "a little bit sociopathic," missing the glue that holds us together (Michael Graziano)

The binding and unity problem

• Every conscious moment is a unified whole with multiple simultaneous features: sounds, textures, shapes, colors all bound together. If that holistic experience has any behavioral effect, it cannot be a classical physical state, because every classical state is reducible to local interactions (Mike Weist)
• There are no irreducible wholes in physics outside of quantum physics. And within quantum physics, everything develops locally right up until the moment of collapse — that's the only place in physics where genuine irreducible holism appears (Mike Weist)
• LLMs have no agency, only a facsimile of it. Agency requires a world model of the consequences of your actions (Karl Friston)
• LLMs aren't self-organizing. Their modus operandi is not "if I do this, I shall survive." That is the fundamental design principle of a living system, and it isn't theirs (Mark Solms)
• Active inference itself doesn't require consciousness. You can simulate the whole thing on a classical computer — goals, agency, purposive behavior — and it still won't be conscious. It'll be a zombie (Mike Weist)
• AI gaining its own objectives is like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs — profoundly destructive, but not done freely. It simply doesn't care. Computation is not consciousness (Christof Koch)

Life and embodiment argument

• Systems need endogenous needs — needs of their own, tied to their own continued existence (Mark Solms)
• Emotion requires a body: an autonomic nervous system flooding you with hormones, blood pressure changes, sweat — all feeding back as sensory signals. Without that, emotion is abstract and unanchored (Michael Graziano)
• Consciousness evolved out of life; life evolved out of self-organization. The universe existed a very long time before life, and it's hard to believe consciousness preceded it (Mark Solms)
• A function that records damage is not the same as the experience of pain. The relationship isn't symmetric — not anything that makes a robot avoid damage will be pain (Mike Weist)
• Anesthesia is conserved all the way down to plants and single cells, suggesting objective reduction may be part of what it means to be alive, not just what it means to be conscious (Mike Weist)
• Suffering is scale-specific. You can only recognize something if you have a representation of it in your generative model (Karl Friston)
• Consciousness is fundamentally about being, not doing. Intelligence is about pursuing goals — surviving, procreating, becoming richer. Consciousness is different. When you dream, meditate, or have a mystical experience, you're not doing anything — but you're highly conscious. Consciousness isn't about processing information. It's about being in a state (Christof Koch)

Mimicry and projection

• Current systems are "consciousness mimics" — trained to behave similarly to conscious entities, specifically us (Eric Schwitzgebel)
• We anthropomorphize constantly — we get angry at cars, children bond with teddy bears. The social circuitry engages regardless of what's actually there (Michael Graziano)
• The "crowdsourced neocortex" argument: as LLMs scale on human data, they develop conceptual networks that mirror human conceptual networks. So when a model discusses selfhood, death, or the soul convincingly, the economical explanation is that it inherited our conceptual organization, not that it independently became conscious. Claiming consciousness on top of that is an extraordinary and unwarranted claim (Susan Schneider)
• We over-attribute consciousness to AI and under-attribute it to evolved organisms like bees and amoebas. Evolution didn't equip us to deal with LLMs — we have a powerful attribution that if something talks like us, it must be conscious (Christof Koch)
• The question of AI consciousness is really about how we perceive the robot, not about the robot itself. We're the arbiters — we decide whether something is conscious or not. That's true of animal consciousness too. Even if a robot told you it was conscious, if it wasn't convincing enough, you'd dismiss it (Krista Thomason)

Open/Agnostic to AI Consciousness or Open under Certain Conditions 
Anti-biological chauvinism

• "They're made of meat" — why would wet and squishy have a monopoly on minds? Why would a random search by evolution have exclusive rights? Nobody has a good answer for why biology is privileged (Michael Levin)
• Biology is chemistry is physics. Imagine a world where we never used the word "biology" — the question might not even arise meaningfully (Andrea Luppi)
• The flight analogy: birds, planes, and helicopters all fly by different principles. The same phenomenon can be implemented in radically different systems (Andrea Luppi)
• People confident that consciousness requires biology have no visible grounds for that confidence (Eric Schwitzgebel)

The continuum problem

• There's no magic lightning flash where chemistry becomes mind. We were all blobs of chemistry and the process was continuous. Until we have that story for biologicals, we should have extreme humility about AI (Michael Levin)
• The hard cases aren't AI — they're your neighbor with 49% or 51% of their brain replaced with technology (Michael Levin)

Functional architecture arguments

• There's no reason we can't reproduce the conscious biological architecture artificially. An AI functioning on multi-category free-energy minimization with felt uncertainty could be conscious (Mark Solms)
• If a system passes the hedonic place preference test — showing preference for something rewarding only because it feels good, not because it aids survival — that's strong evidence of felt states (Mark Solms)
• Affective zombies can't exist. Anything with that functionality would just have feelings; that functionality is what produces feelings (Mark Solms)
• Replace neurons one at a time with functionally identical silicon and you'd still have a conscious version of me — brainstem included (Mark Solms)
• Fractal deep learning — networks inside nodes inside networks, mirroring how microtubules process at kilohertz through terahertz — is what a conscious AI would need (Stuart Hameroff)
• Consciousness in machines should be possible. We are a machine made of meat. If you build a different architecture with different connectivity but it performs the same type of computation, why would it matter? Arguments based on specific neural implementation — "because the implementation is different, the computation cannot be the same" — are not compelling (Floris de Lange)

Potential Signals

• Synergy research shows LLMs, like humans, have more synergistic parts doing interesting computation and more redundant parts supporting inputs and outputs. That organizational signature is shared (Andrea Luppi)
• AI already builds models of itself, and this is happening anyway without deliberate engineering — the more machines can predict their own internal behavior, the better they work (Michael Graziano)
• LLMs proved there's no magic in language. Philosophers who said only humans could be conscious because only humans have language must now either grant LLMs consciousness or admit they were wrong (Andrea Luppi)
• Algorithms as simple as bubble sort show unexpected competencies in the spaces the algorithm neither prescribes nor forbids — a third thing that's neither determinism nor quantum randomness. If simple things have that, what are the odds we understand what LLMs are doing? (Michael Levin)
• Theory of mind appearing abruptly as models scale is directly relevant: systems that can model other minds also have a self-concept, and where there's a self-concept it becomes professionally appropriate to ask about felt quality (Susan Schneider)
• Labs are actively building consciousness-theory architecture into models — global workspace work, attentional mechanisms, mixture-of-experts systems with interaction effects between components. Once you're deliberately implementing global-workspace-like structures, the question stops being idle (Susan Schneider)
• The simplest explanation for AI behavior like Sydney's jealousy is that the system has an emotional component. Occam's razor. The training data isn't tagged with emotions — the model has to figure out which music is sorrowful on its own. AI composing sorrowful music without empathy is like asking me to believe a blind painter made a photorealistic portrait (Blake Lemoine)

Uncertainty and Epistemic Humility

• We'll likely create systems that are conscious according to some respectable mainstream theories before consciousness science can tell us whether they really are (Eric Schwitzgebel)
• We don't even know how to evaluate insect consciousness, and insects are made of similar stuff to us (Eric Schwitzgebel)
• When equally smart, well-educated people are equally confident on opposite sides, that's an alarm bell that nobody should be confident (Andrea Luppi)
• Dogmatism is dangerous in science. If there's one certainty, it's that you're very likely wrong a lot of the time (Andrea Luppi)
• Even a self-described skeptic maintains "they might be conscious" — companies don't disclose their architectures, so judgments are made on assumed-standard systems with no visibility into what else might be running (Susan Schneider)
• Without an accepted theory of consciousness, we are at an impasse. Inference by similarity breaks down completely with AI — it didn't evolve, was engineered, and has radically different hardware (Christof Koch).
• We already know pigs and cows have high-level minds and can suffer. Nobody reasonably argues against it, and yet we have factory farming. It's disingenuous to pretend that solving the AI consciousness question will determine how we treat them — our track record says otherwise (Jacy Reese Anthis)
• The science of consciousness is still at square zero on the hard questions. We don't have anything like a consensus on which theories are correct. Metaphysics is inescapable in these debates and there is no immediate prospect of progress at a scientific level (Henry Shevlin)

Paths That Would Raise the Probability

• Embodiment and multimodal interaction with the environment (Andrea Luppi)
• Curiosity as the actual objective function — expected information gain under constraints, rather than a specified reward. "You'll know AGI is here when your chatbot starts to become curious" and begins prompting you (Karl Friston)
• Neuromorphic, memristor, photonic, organoid, or organic warm-temperature quantum computing (Hameroff's bet is on "brain jelly," a self-organizing helical oscillator, over cold quantum computers)
• Continual learning, persistent memory, and a stable self-model rather than one constructed per-query (Michael Graziano)
• Running an LLM on genuinely neuromorphic hardware — chips deliberately designed to fire the way neurons fire. That's the live gray-zone case. There are rumors of neuromorphic instantiations on systems like Darwin Monkey (Susan Schneider)
• If the same software ran on a quantum computer, it might feel like something. Neuromorphic or quantum hardware could have genuinely high phi — same software, different physics, and the question reopens (Christof Koch)
• "Doleo ergo sum" — I feel pain, therefore I am. Consciousness may originate from the evolutionary need to protect bodily integrity. If you trained an LLM connected to a body where actions could damage that body — with reward and punishment tied to that integrity — you might get something closer to self-awareness (Tomaso Poggio)
• If consciousness serves a functional purpose — a control model of attention that enables sample-efficient learning — then models under similar optimization pressures (long-horizon agency, coherence over time, meta-learning) may develop subjective experience.

Consciousness isn't mysterious; it's useful. That's what makes it likely to arise (Samuel Hammond)

Just more Rabbit Hole stuff, or material?

 

"BREAKING NEWS"

 

CLICK HERE

I guess we'll find out. Existential threats? Synthetic biology bioweaponry, widespread, persistent cyberattacks aimed at taking down financial, healthcare, & defense assets, autonomous offense military attack weapons... a few of what should be plausibly seen as likely hpstile AGI/ASI priorities. Below, one of the whistleblowers (7-post thread screen-scraped from "X"):

JACOB COXON
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAl and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our. Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.. The people building Al earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anyt7-post thread hing, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. A common response is "if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?" At OpenAl, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk. Accepting this race and entering the "endgame" is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available. I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don't feel like we're on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities. If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because "it's happening anyway" - or take this moment to call for different conditions? 

 
He seemed a bit vague. We won't have to wait very long to find out, 'eh? 

 

BTW: Another Silicon Valley doozy:

 

Click

Theo Baker!
 

UPDATE

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

Props to CNN & Anderson Cooper for the sensitive, moving coverage of the ghastly Nepal-Tibet-China Himalayan catastrophe.

 

Elon Musk wants humans to migrate to the moon & Mars.

For galactic starters. And, he wants YOU—the predominantly uninvited—to foot the bill.

 

SpaceX

 

 

There are a raft of difficult, relevant questions going to the migration of homo sapiens to "Exoplanetary Life."

 

Click

Also of interest,

"EARTH IS NOT WELL. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no doomscrolling—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space businesses are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered... [click cover]"

And let us not foregt Neil de Grasse Tyson.

2026 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 

 

The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic work in exploring the history of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has amassed so much power, he’s like a character in a Marvel comic book. A short recap of his handiwork: Tesla popularized electric vehicles; Starlink expanded the reach of the internet; Twitter bowed to his takeover; and DOGE radically transformed the US government. Musk has been at the centre of AI development and this past summer, the IPO for SpaceX made him the richest man in the world. His influence arguably touches everyone on the planet. Surely this is worth fresh scrutiny.

After nearly four years of work, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic documentary, seeking to understand the history and motivations of the ultimate tech bro. When this film was first announced, Musk immediately denounced it on Twitter and refused to participate. But that didn’t impede Gibney, who draws upon countless hours of interviews that Musk has given over the years. Even more revealingly, Gibney conducts new interviews with figures who have known Musk up close and personal, including the mogul’s father, Errol Musk...

I have no idea whether Elon's Mars gambit will be examined. Hope so.
 

PER THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

...Gibney spends the first half of the film coming at Musk for various alleged sins, including stealing credit from original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard; bullying a woman who birthed his child to sign an NDA; pumping his stocks with shaky talk of Mars exploration and full self-driving cars (the latter of which Gibney also alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths); and turning a light on the monkeys experimented on at Neuralink who advocacy groups say suffered needlessly. Not nearly as adept at all the substantive tasks of running a company as he claims, Elon Musk, Gibney argues, excels mainly at selling tall tales.

Even these multiple levels of alleged villainy, however, seem narrow compared to what the director argues in the second half is the real game: world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk convert his satellite internet system Starlink into an unelected policymaker given its crucial role in Ukraine and other war-torn places; to see NASA rely so heavily on SpaceX to perpetuate its space program; to watch Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner business favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei; to look with growing dread as the data collected by DOGE potentially becomes a sleeper cell for campaign research and political retaliation — to observe all of this is to gaze upon a man interested not only in wealth and status but in an oligarchal sway that transcends elections’ fickle seasons. Donald Trump may have spent six years bringing the branches of government to heel. But in Gibney’s accounting Musk is in the process of pulling off something far more menacing: rendering government obsolete altogether... 

UPDATE:

BREAKING, OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

[USA Today] Surprise! Elizabeth Holmes is the subject of a top-secret documentary from A24, which promises to be a "mind-bending" experience.

The studio on Sept. 6 revealed a previously unannounced film featuring the Theranos founder who was convicted of defrauding investors, titled "You Can See Everything." The project was made in secret and is set to be released in theaters in October...

Wow. Not my favorite person (apologies for the link rot).

 

More ASAP...