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. 

adeiu, Miss Lizzie

Lizzie came to us in May 2010 from a litter of abandoned kitties found in a dumpster in downtown Las Vegas. She died yesterday. She'd been having elder cat health issues this year. Very sad here.

Crypto Update from the land of "The World's Coolest Dictator"

"More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle laid out the foundational ideas of Western civilization: the Poetics, which taught us how to tell a story, and the Ethics and Politics, where he defined the essential nature of sound money.

Money, he observed: must be durable, portable, divisible, and scarce.

For centuries, empires rose when they honored those principles—and collapsed when they abandoned them. Devaluing currency, borrowing against the future, and eroding the character of the citizenry led every single one to decadence, ruin, and historical irrelevance.

Then came Bitcoin.

Bitcoin takes Aristotle’s framework to near perfection: programmatic scarcity, near-infinite divisibility, and incorruptible durability across time and space. Pure, peer-to-peer electronic cash.

Then came "cRyPTo."

And shitcoiners gazed upon this marvel of human ingenuity and decided that what the world ackshually needed was not permissionless, unconfiscatable, decentralized money, but a centralized Rube Goldberg machine of faster, "more efficient" payments built on a layer cake of third parties, pre-mined tokens, and infinite degeneracy.

El Salvador is Bitcoin Country for a reason. We intend to win for generations to come." —Stacy Herbert

 WTF? Who is Stacy Herbert?
 

Who is "The World's Coolest Dictator?" This dude, President of el Salvador.

 

Crypto? Ben McKenzie reflexively comes to mind. 

_____

 

TOPICAL BACKSTORY

 

I've been working away at this book.

Much to recommend it.

 

Nonetheless. I'm a bit conflicted about him.

 

 

Not one word in his book about Bitcoin / Cryptocurrency or el Salvador.

 

OK...

AGAIN, WHO IS STACY HERBERT?

 

"The best legs in bitcoin?"

BUILDINELSALVADOR.COM

 

Yeah, sure.

 

ERRATA

 

Listened to this Nicolle Wallace podcast.

 

 

Just what I needed, another book to jump the VIP rope line. I'd forgotten that Michael's Lewis' new book was coming.

 

Click

Had to get it. I go all the way back reading Michael. e.g., "Liar's Poker," anyone?

 

More to come...

The Face of Love

Grandson Arlo, 1 yr old today.

The Face and Voice of Hate

"We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world—in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time."

Pastor Pete's Pulpit

@SecWar's Office of Religious Affairs.
   

Sept 28th, 2026

Among a half-dozen program announcements he made at his latest Quantico "State of the Force" presentation was his establishment of the "Office of Religoius Affairs," slated to report directly to him, noted theological scholar that he is.

 

I helpfully annotated the document image posted on X by his war.gov deputy Sean Parnell.

 

IN RELATED NEWS

 

New book release coming from Matthew D. Taylor.

 

Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists
by Matthew D. Taylor 

"Quite simply, Defying Tyrants is a book every Christian should read." --Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne.

In this powerhouse book, an expert on Christian extremism issues a profound and biblical rebuke to all who would claim the name of Jesus but disdain his way.

Christian fixation with political power is the theological emergency of our time, and in Defying Tyrants, Matthew D. Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force, traces the origins of Christian supremacy. Jesus directed his followers away from the race for power, but somewhere along the way, many Christians turned Jesus into a mascot for imperial domination. Where did it all go so wrong?

A trenchant reckoning with the murder, mayhem, and monsters of Christianity--from the early church and the Crusades to colonialism, slavery, and the Holocaust--Defying Tyrants demonstrates how imperialism has infected the body of Christ. With cogent argument and moral precision, Taylor excavates scriptural texts and unpacks the notion of Christian antichrists. When the term antichrist occurs in the Bible, it's frequently plural--not "The Antichrist" who populated the nightmares of fundamentalism's young people. Antichrists originate within the church and abuse people in the name of Christ. Christian antichrists justify harm and vengeance theologically, pointing people away from the God who entered humanity as a colonized peasant in the hinterlands of the Roman empire.

Both searing polemic and lyrical meditation, Defying Tyrants challenges us to put steel in the spine of Christian resistance to tyrants and reprimands the Christian leaders who bless them. It also spotlights a countertradition of Christians who have lived generous lives of sacrifice and stood up to authoritarians through the centuries. The gospel of Jesus pulls the rug out from under all human hierarchies, Taylor argues. In this brilliantly conceived and scrappy quarrel with Christian supremacy, he calls us to find in the teachings of Jesus and the witness of the early church a model of rebellion against tyrants of all kinds. Because if Jesus is Lord, Caesar isn't. [Amazon blurb]

I've cited Matthew before amid prior "Christian Nationalists" posts.

 

UPDATE

 

ALSO, GET A LOAD OF THIS CREW

 

www.newchristianright.com

 

Openly and unapologetically anti-democratic, anti-Islamic, antisemitic, and proudly misogynist.

 

 

Surf around on their website. Ugh.

BTW: Jus’ fer Grins, google “Life Surge Tim Tebow.”

 

AND, "GOD MADE TRUMP"

 

 

CODA

“Hegseth’s performance belongs to the same world as Trump’s gold. Each expresses a belief that power becomes legitimate when it looks impressive enough. More shine. More swagger. More insults. Surround yourself with famous men, furnish the room like a monarch and demand that everyone mistake the production for achievement.”

Fly Dubai?

Wow.