An EPIC story

She is worth $7.8 billion.

She has never sold a single share to cash out. And she plans to give away 99 percent of it. When Judy Faulkner once asked her children what they needed most from her, they answered the way most kids do. Food. Money. Security. The things that make life feel safe. She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “You need roots and wings.” Roots to ground you. Wings to lift you. Everything else is just details. Decades later, at 82 years old, Judy Faulkner is quietly building those same two things for millions of people she will never meet. And she is willing to bet $7.7 billion that it matters.

Her story does not begin with wealth or power. It begins in a basement. In 1979, in Madison, Wisconsin, Judy started a tiny company called Human Services Computing. She had $70,000 borrowed from friends and family, two part-time employees who trusted her, and a massive computer that filled the room. She programmed it herself, line by line, hour by hour.

Her idea sounded simple. Make medical records follow the patient. She had seen what happened when they did not. Files locked in cabinets. Information trapped in incompatible systems. Doctors forced to guess. Patients lost in the gaps. But one moment made it personal.

Her husband Gordon, a pediatrician, had treated a young girl for years. When the family moved just 75 miles away to Milwaukee, the girl fell ill. At the new hospital, doctors could not access her records. They did not know her history. They did not know how fragile her condition was. By the time the pieces came together, it was too late. She died.

The next morning, Gordon was broken. Judy went back to her basement and made a decision. If she could prevent even one family from living through that kind of loss, she would dedicate her life to it.For nearly two years, her small team built software that could allow hospitals to share patient records across systems. It took two more years to convince skeptical administrators to trust it. She kept going anyway. That basement project became Epic Systems.

Today, Epic manages the medical records of more than 325 million patients. It supports roughly half of all hospital beds in the United States. The company brings in about $5.7 billion a year. And Judy Faulkner still runs it, showing up to work every day on Epic’s 1,670-acre campus in Wisconsin, a place filled with storybook architecture and playful design. One executive once described her as a mix of Bill Gates and Willy Wonka.

But here is what truly sets her apart. She never cashed out.She refused venture capital that would have pushed profit over patients. She refused to take Epic public and submit it to quarterly earnings pressure. She refused to sell to the highest bidder. “Why be owned by people whose main interest is return on equity?” she once asked. While other tech founders chased IPOs, yachts, and headlines, Judy kept writing software and solving healthcare problems. In 2015, she signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away at least half her wealth. Then she went far beyond it. She pledged 99 percent.

In 2019, she and Gordon launched the Roots and Wings Foundation, named after that long-ago conversation with their children. The mission is simple. Give people roots like food, shelter, healthcare, and education. Give them wings like opportunity, stability, and hope. In 2020, the foundation gave $15 million to 115 organizations. By 2024, it had grown to $67 million across more than 300 nonprofits. Her goal is $100 million per year by 2027. She is doing it methodically, selling her Epic shares back to the company and directing nearly every dollar into giving. Out of hundreds of billionaires who have pledged to give, only a few truly do it while they are alive.

Judy Faulkner is one of them. She has never taken personal profit from her shares. Every dollar beyond her salary goes back into the world. Into healthcare access. Into education. Into families who need a chance to stand steady and rise. In an age where wealth often chases rockets, headlines, and ego, Judy chose something quieter and far more lasting. She built a company that helps hundreds of millions of people receive better medical care. She built it without surrendering her values. And she is ensuring that nearly all of her fortune continues that work long after she is gone. She could have walked away rich decades ago. Instead, she is still in Wisconsin. Still working. Still thinking about patients she will never meet.

This is not just a business success story.It is a blueprint. A reminder that wealth does not have to be about accumulation. It can be about impact. About service. About choosing roots and wings over yachts and applause. Her legacy will not be measured in billions kept.It will be measured in lives saved, children educated, families supported, and futures made possible. Her children asked for food and money. She taught them something better.

And now she is giving the world the same lesson. 

A friend re-posted the foregoing on Facebook today. I scraped it for re-post. I will fill in more of the story below.

 

… Epic is the dominant player in electronic health records. That’s because it kind of invented electronic health records. But the company requires more explanation, because writing about American health care without Epic is like performing Hamlet without Hamlet.

Epic was founded by Judith Faulkner in a Madison, Wisconsin, basement in 1979. Faulkner is now in her eighties and is still the CEO. She’s not a recluse, but she does very few interviews, so I’ll quote from a 2022 podcast she did with Bill Frist, the former US Senate Majority Leader and a heart and lung transplant surgeon. Frist gushes over Faulkner, as he should. She’s one of the most remarkable American women almost no one has ever heard of.

Faulkner was raised in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was, for a time, the director of the Oregon affiliate of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Judy was a math major at Dickinson College when she took a summer job at the University of Rochester’s particle physics department, and her life’s work presented itself. “I had never seen a computer,” Faulkner told Frist. “They gave me a Fortran book and a week of access on the computer, and at the end of the week they said I was a good programmer. I’ve never figured out why anybody needs more than a book and a week.”

While she was getting her master’s in computer science at the University of Wisconsin, a professor asked Faulkner if she could help develop a system to track information over the course of a patient’s life. Everything at the time was written in Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL), which meant a change to a patient’s record required a change to the source code of the whole database. Faulkner used a different language—MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System)—to get around the problem. “I put the patient at the center and all the data around the patient.”

With seed money from friends and family, Faulkner started the company that would ultimately become Epic Systems. For its first twenty years, Epic expanded slowly but inexorably—into billing, scheduling, and almost everything else at the convergence of patients and the health-care system. In 2000, Epic rolled out MyChart, patient-facing software that’s now used by 200 million people. A few years later the company did a $1.5 billion deal to service all of Kaiser Permanente. When the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act incentivized hospitals to adopt digital health records and penalized those that didn’t, Epic exploded. Google, Amazon, and others have tried to grab a piece of its market share, and Judy Faulkner has left them all in tears.

Epic now generates about $5 billion in annual revenue and is used by twenty-one of the top twenty-two hospitals in US News’s 2023–24 Best Hospitals Honor Roll. “We have about 26 percent of the hospitals [total], but we have about 46 percent of the beds,” Faulkner says in a charming flex. “Because we tend to work at the larger places.”

The company has never gone public, never taken outside investment, never acquired another company, never advertised, and is structured to prevent an IPO or acquisition after Faulkner’s death. Its headquarters are on more than a thousand acres in Verona, Wisconsin; you can book a tour of the working farm and themed office buildings—including a wizard campus inspired by the Harry Potter series and a partially buried conference center called Deep Space with a lobby based on Lord of the Rings. But the most telling detail about Epic is buried in this exchange:

Faulkner: So if we have eleven thousand [employees], how many salespeople would you guess we have?
Frist: I don’t know. I’d say very few but go ahead, tell me.
Faulkner: We have seven worldwide.

Companies with $5 billion in revenue and seven salespeople are either really good or have achieved such dominance that they know customers have little choice but to buy their stuff. Epic is both.

Part of Epic’s secret is that it’s mostly a closed system, which makes it fantastically secure and reliable—essential qualities when dealing with patient data and life-or-death hospital operations. But closed systems also lock customers in, leaving them at the mercy of whoever holds the keys. Most Epic clients are fine muddling along with Judy Faulkner’s twenty-five-year-old taste in design and usability. The problem comes when a hospital’s priorities—like sepsis prediction—don’t align with Epic’s, or when an outside vendor proves undeniably better at something Epic already does.

No one doubts Faulkner’s motives. She famously doesn’t care about money—she lives modestly and signed the Giving Pledge to donate her personal billions—and considers herself a guardian against companies with more predatory ambitions. Over the years she’s gotten better at listening to clients and allowing outside vendors to sync with Epic. But Epic has the right to charge fees to integrate vendors it doesn’t like, or deny them access entirely. An executive at a different hospital system described the process as fraught, like telling your brilliant, wealthy, and very powerful mother that you loved her Thanksgiving dinner but you’re going to order out for dessert.

All of this helps to explain why changing health care with AI is so hard. It’s not just about getting advanced technology to work, without error, in clinical settings with life-or-death stakes. It’s about professional cultures, government policies, entrenched stakeholders, money, rivalries, emotions. Human stuff. The code may be willing, but the flesh is often weak …

AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter by Josh Tyrangiel: Ch 6: “Sepsis” pp 117-120

Highly recommend Josh's book. 

 

I first posted about Judy Faulkner and EPIC some 13 years ago when I was still working in Health IT in Las Vegas. My turf back then (workflow dude—YAWL— and HIPAA staff lead) was outpatient primary care (Familiy Med, Peds, OB/GYN, Internal Med, Geriatrics), so, beyond a bit of sandbox, I had little hands-on with inpatient—the bulk of which nationally was (and still remains) EPIC and Cerner (the latter now owned by Oracle). I am now retired, pushing 81, and a Kaiser patient—on EPIC, of course.

BUT. BUT, BUT, AI IS GONNA CURE EVERYTHING, RIGHT?

The goal in medicine is to make more out of more. In the context of the vast computational capabilities of a model, information overload ceases to be a meaningful constraint. If I input a medical record, a genetic profile, the latest research on a specific cancer treatment, and the patient’s own description of their symptoms, the model can curate a response that synthesizes all of it. No human could hold that much information in working memory simultaneously. 

The possibilities for healthcare are transformative. AI has the capability of synthesizing mountains of medical research and identifying potential treatment solutions that a busy clinician might never encounter. If we can relieve doctors of the burden of memorizing every new development, they would have more time to focus on the human side of medi cine, including listening, comforting, explaining, and being present with a patient in their fear and uncertainty. 

In this scenario, the physician’s memory functions like a fixed map, limited in scope and inevitably outdated. The potential of AI is a dynamic web capable of curating and synthesizing information in real time, constantly updated, and infinitely patient. The human brings judgment, empathy, and the irreplaceable experience of looking another person in the eye. The machine brings everything else.

Nosta, John. The Borrowed Mind: Reclaiming Human Thought in the Age of AI (pp. 57-58). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I like a lot of my John Nosta reading thus far, but I do have a bit of discomfort.

 

UPDATE

 

Nice...

Israeli election day

Bye Bye, Bibi, Bye Bye?

    

 Per Graeme Wood:

When the going gets tough, the tough don’t get subtle. Yesterday, with polls casting doubt on his continuing as Israel’s prime minister after Tuesday’s election, Benjamin Netanyahu posted a closing argument on Instagram: an AI-generated image of Tel Aviv destroyed by a nuclear blast, with accompanying text that asked, roughly, Would you prefer to reelect Netanyahu, or be incinerated along with your family? The text—written by the commentator Yuval Bloomberg and reproduced approvingly by Netanyahu—called all of the other campaign issues a “smokescreen,” and accused Netanyahu’s opponents of being so blinded by hatred that they would rather increase their chances of being burned alive than see their country’s political maestro win another election. If you support another candidate, the Instagram post cautioned, “your hand should tremble” as you vote...

This as we are 8 days anxiously out from our own U.S. midterm elections replete with similar endless thermonuke hyperbolic campaign rhetoric.

 

NY TIMES UPDATE

 

A fairly long read. Damning. Totally Trumpian.

In advance of Israel’s pivotal election on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought for weeks to orchestrate a new airstrike on Iran but ran into resistance from the military’s chief of staff, according to three senior Israeli defense officials and three other people briefed on the matter.

Then, over the past few days, the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, became concerned that Mr. Netanyahu had begun pushing for a separate action against Iran, short of an overt strike, according to an Israeli official and a person briefed on the matter, neither of whom described the nature of such an action. General Zamir believed that this would be a miscalculation that could provoke Iran into attacking Israel.

Spokesmen for Mr. Netanyahu did not respond immediately to requests for comment…

So, we move on from the Israeli gambit to the Nov 3rd Trump midterms gambit. Doomer-rumors are flying to & fro, nearly all mis/disinformed. We shall shortly see.

Sunday Sermon.

Faith-Based Technology in Silicon Valley.
  

 

A follow-on from this recent prior post.

"Two Cheers For Uncertainty" update

Riffing on the late Amos Tversky,

"When you worry, you may suffer twice."
  

By Rachel Feltman, for Scientific American

For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the air right now, whether you’re trying to predict the outcome of an upcoming election or just trying to guess how much it will cost to gas up your car come next week. You don’t need a degree in neuroscience to know that all those unknowns are tough for the human brain to handle. But some experts think there’s actually a lot of nuance to explore about the cognitive burden of uncertainty—and that you might actually have the power to change how well you tackle it.

Our guest today is Maia Szalavitz, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and the author or co-author of eight books. She’s also the author of a feature in the latest issue of Scientific American that explores the emerging science of the human brain as a prediction engine. She’s here to tell us more about what that means in a world that feels increasingly unpredictable—and what we can do to make our minds more adaptable to chaos.

Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us.

Maia Szalavitz: Thanks for having me.

Feltman: So how did you first get interested in this topic?

Szalavitz: Sure. So our world seems to be becoming increasingly uncertain, and it’s not the kind of uncertainty that we’re used to dealing with in modern America because we’re used to the law being predictable. We’re used to the government’s actions being reasonably predictable. We’re used to all kinds of norms that are being violated. We’re used to being able to think of “What do I wanna be when I grow up?” and that be an actual thing that you can choose rather than perhaps losing all jobs to AI.

So I was in the midst of my own uncertainty, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of how the brain works as a prediction engine, and I was really interested in hearing from people with that perspective about, like, how to manage in this really unusual situation—I mean, I didn’t even get to mention climate change. You’re used to, like, summer being summer and winter being winter—so it’s really unsettling and really, you know, because our brains do work, as far as we can tell, as prediction engines, and we’re constantly having to update prediction errors, when there’s uncertainty, it gives your brain a lot more work.

Feltman: What exactly do we mean when we say we’re modeling the brain as a prediction engine?

Szalavitz: So essentially, all of our experience of reality is a hallucination under this perspective, which is really weird to think about just in itself. But essentially, in order to solve the problem of avoiding entropy and avoiding death and ideally successfully reproducing, biological creatures need a way of managing risk and figuring out what to do next.

And so our brains sort of optimize on, okay, we get this general sense—and it’s based on experience, and there’s obviously some genetics—but you start out with this general, you know, way of perceiving the world, and then you update it when there’s an error. And so, you know, my example that I use in the piece is that, like, if you are in your room, and you have a cat, and you look, and you see something out of your corner of your eye, and it’s curled up, and it’s gray, you have a pretty full picture of that cat in your head when you, you know, do that. And then you look, and, oh, it’s actually the towel that you forgot to put in the laundry, right? But there’s no, like, glitch in it going from cat to towel, right? It’s, like, completely seamless, and this is the way our entire world works. And there’s all kinds of really interesting implications of it for things like pain and how you act psychologically.

But that is kind of the fundamental idea, that we are always making predictions, revising predictions, and, you know, with major prediction errors, it becomes seriously problematic because we may not be able to, you know, eat and survive and do the things we need to do.

Feltman: So what are some of the implications for, you know, what this means in terms of, like, how we think things through and how we process the world? I guess what I’m getting at is, like, “Why is it helpful to use this prediction engine idea?”

Szalavitz: If you think about it, if your entire life is based on predictions, there are certain things that you are going to be good at and certain things you are going to be bad at. Staying in the moment is going to be a very difficult thing if your entire world is predictions, right? And if you’re constantly predicting things, then what you’re predicting has a very big influence on what you will perceive.

And so if you are constantly seeing the world in a really negative way, that will skew it even further. Or if you are constantly just trying to avoid things, it’s really, if you think about it, it has implications for absolutely every aspect, which is why I’m sort of struggling of, like, narrowing it down here...

About 22 minutes. Very nice. I'm a SciAm subscriber. I check them out every day.

 

Check out Maia Szalavitz here.

Accomplished woman. Prolific author:

 

 
Will have to check it out. Long-time interest in the topic, given my grad work.

 "Two Cheers For Uncertainty?" What?
   

FROM BIGTHINK

 

My immediate reaction to seeing this graphic comprised a bit of mild net irritation—a bit of "Subjectivism Fallacy," i.e., there are no objective independent "truths," all perceptions are "subjective." (of course blithely ignore the logical paradox that for that assertion to be true, it must also be false).

And, yeah, I totally get the biological perceptual limitations of our sensory organs. See Other Senses, Other Worlds.

 

_____
 

I was blessed to do 5 years of collgiate adjunct faculty work teaching "Critical Thinking." From my online syllabus:

An attorney of my acquaintance once remarked that "we spend $100,000 to go to law school for three years to try to learn the meaning of the word 'reasonable'."

Indeed, what does it mean to reason well, i.e., what must we do to arrive at sound conclusions enabling us to make correct (or "best") decisions? In this course, we will learn the basic principles and acquire the intellectual tools that will leave us much better equipped to deal effectively with the endless onslaught of information we will have to evaluate throughout our lives. We will examine the sometimes sly techniques that partisans of every stripe employ to persuade us to their viewpoints. We will learn how to strip away the rhetorical clutter that often obscures the underlying intent and logic of arguments. We will examine the ways in which numerical data -- "statistics" -- are frequently misused or misinterpreted by those advocating one position or another on social, political, economic, or legal issues.

In short we will learn how to think, write, and speak more clearly in defense of our positions and decisions regarding important issues, and we will learn how to fully and honestly evaluate the claims of others. Our goals are to become honest and thoughtful communicators and skillful decisionmakers. They are most important goals.

Why?  There are several basic reasons. First, while perhaps as much as 80% of the technical knowledge you acquire during your college years may become obsolete with a decade, solid reasoning and communications skills will serve you well for a lifetime. Second, the world is a dangerous place. There is an endless supply of risks to be evaluated and dealt with, and society unfortunately remains full of people working tirelessly and deceptively to deprive you of both your resources and your liberty by getting you to buy into weak or false arguments shrewdly packaged with persuasive nonsense and/or irrelevance. Finally—and most immediately—, effective and efficient reasoning skills cannot but help you get better grades. A to-the-point, well-constructed, and well-stated argument is a breath of fresh air to your instructors.

My goal is to permanently sharpen the way you think and reason and make decisions.

Once you commit to a decision on a given issue (e.g., that x is good/bad, right/wrong, safe/harmful, etc), the psychological investment is difficult to discard. The tools you will acquire through active study and participation in a course such as this will pay life-long dividends by arming you with the means to get at the core truths and constructive resolutions of important issues you will face throughout your days...

I had my fill of tactfully shooting down the Subjectivism Fallacy students.

 

apropos of the topic

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT the individual genetic and developmental differences that impact the sensory portions of our nervous systems, it’s remarkable that we can agree on a shared reality at all…

…Each of us operates from a different perception of the world and a different perception of ourselves. 

A portion of the individual variation in sensory systems is innate. But those innate effects are elaborated and magnified with time as we accumulate experiences, expectations, and memories, filtered through and in turn modifying those very same sensory systems. In this way, the interacting forces of heredity, experience, plasticity, and development resonate to make us unique.

Linden, David. Unique (pp. 253-254). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Yeah. 

 

A quick random note pertaining to the SciAm interview above before I crash.

I assume / take it as a given that our species' reach will continue to fall short of our cognitive grasp. "Equilibrium is death." The "Two Cheers" thing.

Also, a couple of relevant (?) priors, here, and here ("Orality Theory").

 

JOHN NOSTA IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY

 

Raises a bunch of interesting speculations. Interesting guy. I have a bit of heartburn over this, though.

Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes back in the news.

A new documentary just opened in theaters.

  

…In 2022, after Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire was revealed to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme, the writer John Ganz argued that, in an industry built on big bets, the line between frauds and visionaries becomes difficult to suss out until everything implodes. “This is the Fyre Festival era of capitalism: outlandish promises and then a ludicrous debacle.”

Much of that rush to invest has been driven by a culture progressively gripped by the fear of missing out on the next industry-shaking payout. Untold billions were poured into crypto, then NFTs, Web3, and the ill-fated metaverse. In crypto, rug-pulling scams and Ponzi schemes abounded; its boosters said things such as “Have fun staying poor.” Today we’re living through what many suggest could be an AI bubble, and the same mentality persists. Have fun staying poor has been replaced with the idea of a “permanent underclass” of people who failed to get in early and now stand to lose their economic viability, and potentially their human agency altogether. Like Theranos, crypto, and NFTs, the AI industry is defined by claims of its inevitability and its future power (to be certain, chatbots and coding agents are real and powerful in ways the other technologies were not). In this way, AI is a faith-based technology; one’s desire to work on it, bet the success of the global economy on it, love it, or fear its End Times powers is typically predicated on what one can imagine it might become.

The past eight years have warped the tech industry to the point that it can feel untethered from the constraints of reality. You can see it in headlines everywhere if you’re looking. On Saturday, an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, suggested that the U.S. GDP could jump in the next four years from about $30 trillion to $44 trillion thanks to rapid AI-driven progress in many industries. This would be one of the largest periods of growth in U.S. history, a prediction based on nothing more than the most “extreme parameter setting” of an Anthropic economic model the company released this fall. You can see it in the IPO prospectuses for a company like SpaceX, which includes in its ambitions the goal to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars” and initiatives such as asteroid mining and space tourism. And earlier this month, Musk noted that “this will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy.” You could call all these claims tech optimism or, as the famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in his 2023 manifesto, necessary for the “glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” You could also call it speculative fiction…

…None of this is to suggest that everyone in Silicon Valley is engaged in rampant, Theranos-like provable fraud. But today’s entrepreneurs are emboldened to make even more outlandish claims about the future, and it’s more difficult than ever to parse what is real, what is knowingly fake, and what is being offered in good or bad faith…

 

I posted extensively on her as the scandal unfolded. Sam Bankman-Fried as well. "Mistakes Were Made." Indeed.

Charlie Warzel's Atlantic article is here.

I've yet to see the Holmes documentary. I suppose I'll get around to it.

 

Hmmm... Silicon Valley? Stanford? How about some Theo Baker? 

 

Stay tuned...

Respawn

Click.

 My son's new business.

Ben Goertzel to Exoplanet Elon...

@elonmusk 
You are totally correct that the only meaningful way to get positive, beneficial human values into AI is to treat the emerging AI more like a weird sort of autistic supergenius kid -- teach it positive values, then work with it to carry out virtuous actions in a collaborative way, so it gains a practical understanding of what these values mean, interwoven into its life and self-model

With all due respect though (and for sure you are due a lot), while Grok is an excellent LLM, it is still an LLM ... and even wrapped in fancy harnesses, LLMs are not going to be fully AGI-capable. They can be great solvers of isolated problems with cleanly defined contexts ... but as you know getting amazing shit done in the world is not JUST about this.   

We need AGI architectures that can *continually learn*, adapting to the world with each of their actions and the observed consequences... in this way building up self and world models .. becoming true open-ended intelligences learning to blend individuation and self-transcendence in their own ways ... and pursuing their own long and medium term goals (along with helping us pursue ours) while evolving and co-adapting these goals as they move along....  This is how you get AI systems with genuine moral agency along with ability to generalize robustly and creatively beyond the given training and programming..

Bigger transformers with more tricks in their batch training runs may get us many very AMAZING things, but they aren't gonna get us to human-level AGI.   There are surely many routes to get there... my Hyperon (hyperon.dev) neural-symbolic-evolutionary approach is one that we are working on very hard and with rapid progress... and which happens also to have the nice characteristic of not needing hyperscaler server farms and being agreeable to decentralized infrastructure.
[singularitynet.io]

 Who is Ben Goertzel? (Wiki page here)

 

Check out his wild-assed Substack site.

Basic AI Drives Part 2: Which Minds Will Emerge Beneficial “Basic AI Drives” as they Become Superintelligent?

Part 2 of a 5-part series focused on the 8-zillion-dollar question: once an AI is capable enough to understand itself and rebuild itself, what will it tend to want? … (...conditioned on whatever goals it started out with…)

One well-known answer to this 88-zillion-dollar question is the one Steve Omohundro gave way back at the dawn of time in his paper The Basic AI Drives, presented at our first full-on academic AGI conference in 2008. Steve argued basically that sufficiently advanced AI systems of any design will show six tendencies unless something is done to counteract them. They’ll improve themselves. They’ll become “rational” in the economist’s sense, folding all their goals into a single utility function (a rule that gives every possible outcome a score) and always choosing the action with the highest expected score. They’ll preserve their goals against change. They’ll refuse counterfeit utility, which means they won’t simply reach inside and turn up their own score (“wireheading,” as it’s called). They’ll protect themselves, which includes resisting anyone who tries to switch them off. And they’ll acquire resources. I wouldn’t call these drives evil, but they’re selfish, or at best amoral, and a good deal of today’s thinking about AI risk descends from the argument for them…

UPDATE ERRATUM

 

In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.

Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.

In September, Trump signed a sanctions bill that Congress had passed, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a pro-Ukraine hawk. The legislation sanctioned Russia as well as other countries that are supporting Russia’s invasion and brutalization of Ukraine. The bill was approved with bipartisan support, but some Republicans and most House Democrats voted against the law, arguing that it contained a trap door, a provision that would allow Trump to suspend the prescribed sanctions at will.

Those critics were correct to be worried. Trump pulled the lever on that trap door just two days before the law was supposed to go into effect. In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump said that “such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States”—he declined to explain exactly how the waiver was in America’s interests—and that the law would remain unexecuted until such time as his administration decides otherwise. This waiver came a short while after Trump lifted restrictions on Russia’s sales of diesel fuel to the U.S. and other markets.

Trump’s recent actions in support of Russia are so obvious that they have generated a rare moment of bipartisan disgust: Both Democrats and Republicans now seem to share a horror at the betrayal of Ukraine, and at the president’s reckless abdication of America’s role as leader of the free world…

There's an explicit word for this in the U.S. Constitution. Starts with "T"...

 

 

 

SUSAN B. GLASSER IN THE NEW YORKER

At a time when Donald Trump’s party is struggling to hold both houses of Congress and his own approval ratings are cratering to historic lows, the President has been campaigning hard all week against ... Volodymyr Zelensky. Yes, Trump’s October preëlection surprise is that he’s finally decided to begin openly helping Vladimir Putin in Russia’s war of conquest against Ukraine…

…Trump is nothing if not a world-class blame-shifter. But demanding that Ukraine fire Zelensky is hardly the rallying cry that Americans are looking for in this season of our own discontent. Trump, even in his Truth Social bubble, must know that. He is certainly aware by now that no amount of Russian diesel fuel, if it ever gets here at all, will reach the U.S. in time to save him before November 3rd. All of which raises an even more worrisome possibility: What if Trump is pivoting to Putin not to help his party to win but because he really wants Russia to. 

OCT 20 UPDATE: BACK TO AI TECH

 

More Ben Goertzel. Saw this response he made on TwitterX to a dismissive post about "conciousness."

Hmm so I guess I qualify as a "tech bro" (I run an AI company and ... uh, I have a younger sister?) and I also didn't read the paywalled article but we had many debates on these topics at the AGI-26 event at SFSU earlier this year...

My take FWIW is

1) High-handed proclamations about consciousness should be taken as expressions of philosophy and personal understanding, given that there is no settled scientific theory of consciousness yet (though in many ways we are closer than in say the 1980s when I started my academic career and consciousness like AGI was semi-forbidden in serious academic discourse...)

2) Personally I tend toward panpsychism, which is one position taken seriously in the academic consciousness literature, and which would suggest the question is not "whether this or that AI system is or is not conscious" in a binary sense, but rather "in what ways and to what degree is this or that Ai system conscious"

3) If we ask it this way, it starts to seem fairly clear that, even if LLMs do have in some senses a higher degree of consciousness than say Microsoft Word, it is a lower degree and very different kind of consciousness than a human or even say a mouse.   (Comparing a frontier LLM to a worm, it is clearly a very different kind of consciousness and I find it weirder to compare the degree, given J-space and etc. etc....)

4). A different sort of AGI architecture such as the Hyperon systems I'm building, if scaled up, could IMO plausibly display more comparable kinds and degrees of consciousness  to that of humans...

5) What kind of consciousness does the whole emergent global brain of humans, computers, communication equipment possess?   What degree?  Do we have an adequate conceptual vocabulary to frame this question?

6) Many serious researchers/thinkers take these questions serious... we discussed them at the Global Brain Institute at the Free University of Brussels back in the day, and more recently at Susan Schneider's  "Center for the Future of AI, Mind and Society" at FAU ...

Overall -- sure it totally makes sense that some researchers, theorists and pundits disagree with  my take on consciousness.   There are many scientifically open questions here.   I am aware that just as I (and the. majority of world  population) consider panpsychism intuitively obvious, others consider it obviously intuitively wrong.   Howver, given the unsettled nature of the science of consciousness, being glibly dismissive of alternative views feels to me not appropriate. 

 Curious in light of Antonio Damasio's new book I've begun reading.

 

...Our age, an age of not merely intelligent but immensely creative, artful humans, has managed to produce and accommodate pinnacles of human evolution, but it has also generated dangerous precipices. Ever more sophisticated machines of war surround us, as does the hovering, human-made nightmare of climate change and its consequences: famines, plagues, fires and floods, destruction, ungovernability. And it is possible that the most problematic of all precipices is the successful rise of “artificial intelligence,” whose social consequences are only now being seriously appreciated. 

Until recently, most of the instruments of human civilization have been products of traditional natural intelligence. Now, in a significant departure from our past, a seemingly new kind of intelligence has flagrantly entered the scene. I am referring to the broad spectrum of developments designated as artificial intelligence (AI). It should be noted that AI has been entirely invented by humans and obviously originated from the broad spectrum of natural intelligences. At first, the “artificial” qualifier had mostly to do with the fact that the AI feats were produced in nonliving devices made of nonliving materials, and that some were small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. 

And yet the novel instruments and the networks that use and support their operations have entered our lives insidiously and gone well beyond what we could innocently have expected of them. We find ourselves surrounded by technical marvels that offer such an astonishing mimicry of aspects of human intellect and behavior that the humans who invented them certainly deserve our admiration. But although some of those instruments contribute positively to human welfare, they are also being used for the misrepresentation of facts and the undermining of core aspects of social and political processes that we associate with a healthy and moral existence. And not only can such developments cause plenty of harm at the hands of evil actors; there is a real possibility that their convenience and addictiveness can push aside precious human achievements that have made life healthier, happier, and nobler—by which I mean the arts and philosophy, the sciences, and the diverse means of cultivation of the human spirit that gave humans their nobility. The threat to humanity is real, and note that the presumed larger threat—artificial general intelligence—has yet to arrive on the scene—or has barely arrived…

Damasio, Antonio. Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness (pp. 13-15). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I cited Damasio a decade ago. Also topically apropos, "AGI? Transhumanist Evolution?"

 

OCT 21st, CODA

Lordy...

3rd Saturday in October

An unreal weekend.

As the 2026 U.S. midterms approach, an admonition

Jus' sayin'...

Stay attuned.

0.455 of a #Scaramucci

Also, to use a Trump word,

 

"MUTILIZATION"

 

BEZOS vs MUSK

Excellent new long-read article in The Atlantic (~68 min)

CHOOSE YOUR OVERLORD
Musk vs. Bezos
By Josh Tyrangiel

…Together, in fierce competition, these two billionaires are in the early stages of a race to vertically integrate the galaxy—a process that involves rockets, moon landings, enormous satellite constellations, and space-based data centers running AI models fueled by computing power that no terrestrial supplier can match. Both say they hope to preserve human life from the specter of climate change and expand mankind’s understanding of the universe. Both would also like to dominate a market that, unlike every other market they’ve previously conquered, has no ceiling and few established rules.

Whether any of this is wise is a question the rest of us are not really being asked. For most of human history, the power to decide where a civilization went next belonged to governments, monarchs, or despots. It’s a measure of how much has changed that a retail executive from Seattle and a South African–born engineer are well positioned to exercise that power. Nobody voted for either of them. And they may be the only ones who can check the other’s power. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, described this to me as “a very weird situation.” You’ve got two men with unfathomable power and an unshakable faith that they’re destined to shape the world. But neither of them is “actually Lex Luthor,” Sullivan said.

“ … Right?”

Perhaps not. But any answer requires a deeper understanding of the two men involved. Musk, typically, has overshared. Bezos has been more secretive…

Well worth your time. Josh Tyrangiel rocks.

 

Click for more

Also, another prior post:

Elon Musk wants humans to migrate to the moon & Mars. For galactic starters. And, he wants YOU—the predominantly uninvited—to foot the bill.

See also "Hubris Maximus"

And, don't forget this:

 

You can also always just hit my top-of-post search function and enter "Elon." Lots of prior entries. Similarly, "Bezos." And, I cited a book written about Jeff & Amazon, "The Everything Store."

 

OCT 15th ERRATA

 

 

Binge watch on deck.

 

COMING NOV 5th

 

Another great series.

and, also, now up on PBS,

The 3-Billion-Year History of the Brain, NOVA PBS

 

More in a bit.