Philosophical Multicore

As of a few months ago, I had this simplified mental model where either AI developers race ahead and kill everyone, or we coordinate a pause and things go okay.

Many people support stricter regulations on frontier AI, and some of those people donate to political campaigns for pro-regulation candidates.

Two weeks ago, I released a population ethics quiz. 582 people took it.1 Here’s what I learned from reading the responses.

I’m still analyzing the results from the population ethics quiz from last week, so in the meantime here are some notes I’ve written to myself that you might find kinda neat.

TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/ Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics.

or: The Future Will Be Weirder Than That, Part II People often treat AI as if it will improve on its current capabilities, but won’t gain any new ones.

This post is a submission to the Cluelessness Critiques Essay Competition.

I continue to believe we should pause frontier AI development.

Here’s some cool stuff I’ve enjoyed recently.

To achieve the best possible future, we must know what that future looks like.

I prefer to avoid saying things that I suspect might make me look stupid.

Some people think we should pause AI, but not now.

I continue to believe we should pause frontier AI development.

An argument goes: If we don’t build aligned artificial superintelligence, we risk driving ourselves extinct for some other reason.

Say you work at a private company that gives you stock options or RSUs.

Prior discussion: niplav’s shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer A frontier AI company (any one, I don’t care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race.

(Spoilers in this post are hidden with spoiler tags.)

Image credit: Jebulon To prevent superintelligent AI from killing everyone, I would like there to be a strong international agreement banning the development of ASI until it can be proven safe.

Depth-first plans lay out a path from here to aligned superintelligent AI.

Three categories of futures, depending on how AI goes: ASI timelines are long.

They say exercise improves sleep quality.

A few years back, I got a big pile of money from working at a tech startup.

TLDR: I basically don’t.

I’d guess maybe a 50% chance that we’re all dead within 5–20 years because somebody will build superintelligent AI, and then the superintelligent AI will kill everyone.

Previously, I wrote about how investors can simulate leverage via concentrated stock selection.

If civilization advances its technological capabilities without advancing its wisdom, we may miss out on most of the potential of the long-term future.

Even if we solve the AI alignment problem, we still face post-alignment problems, which are all the other existential problems1 that AI may bring.

The existence of liberal democracy—with rule of law, constraints on government power, and enfranchised citizens—relies on a balance of power where individual bad actors can’t do too much damage.

Many people in the animal welfare community treat AI as a powerful but normal technology, in the same category as the steam engine or the internet.

Cross-posted to the EA Forum.

Cross-posted to the EA Forum.

Cross-posted to the EA Forum.

Cross-posted to the EA Forum.

Cross-posted to the EA Forum.

Cross-posted to the EA Forum.

(Or: Why I don’t see how the probability of extinction could be less than 25% on the current trajectory) AI developers are trying to build superintelligent AI.

Introduction Most people who write about AI and investing fall into one of two camps: traditional investors who see the high valuations of AI stocks and say it’s a bubble;1 or AGI-pilled investors who will buy AI stocks at any price, regardless of fundame…

Value investing had a singularly bad run from 2007 to 2020.

Summary Time series momentum (TSMOM) is an investment strategy that involves buying assets whose prices are trending upward and shorting assets that have a downward trend.

You may have seen this graph from Chris Olah illustrating a range of views on the difficulty of aligning superintelligent AI: Evan Hubinger, an alignment team lead at Anthropic, says: If the only thing that we have to do to solve alignment is train away e…

Many people in AI safety, especially AI policy, want to increase government expertise.

As of a few days ago, my website supported comments via Commento.

I can’t figure out any good way to put a smiley emoticon inside parentheses.

I published a post every day of November as part of the Inkhaven program, in which we are required to publish a post every day of November.

A reborrowed word is a loan word that goes from language A to language B and then back to language A.

This post contains spoilers for the first episode of Pluribus.

A few years ago, there was some publicity around a Navy fighter pilot who claimed to have seen an unidentified object that couldn’t possibly be explained except as an alien phenomenon.

Nearly all gaming keyboards use the conventional typewriter-inspired keyboard shape.

I played a lot of MTG from age 9 to 14 or so.

In the spirit of You Can Just Do Things, here are some things I Just Do.