Geoffrey Irving

I left DeepMind to join the UK AI Security Institute (AISI) as a Research Director in December 2023 and officially started in April 2024 (I spent the intervening time on family travel, wandering around London, and formalising interval arithmetic).

There’s a story I like to tell, which I vaguely remembered as originating at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

I’m in the middle of the third book in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.

Retraction (15 April 2022): Greg Egan has kindly explained on Twitter that I was misinterpreting the narrator’s statements, and specifically that from the “from within” part means that morality is in part a result of human internal mental processes but th…

Thanks to a recommendation from Dandelion Mané, I recently read “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus” by Yuval Noah Harari.

The Long Now Foundation is a wonderful organization advocating for long term thinking.

I make weird typos when writing.

(This is an expanded version of a Facebook comment, because Jeremy asked.)

I am writing this in Mac OS X, having momentarily given up getting Linux satisfactorily configured on my laptop.

I went to the Rootstrikers conference yesterday, which consisted of a few panel debates/discussions plus questions from the audience.

The normal scheme for donating to charities is to divide money up among several different charities.

In the scale free government post, one of the completely unresolved issues was what to do about the federalism axis.

A past girlfriend and I would occasionally (cheerfully) quibble over the optimal strategy for extracting toothpaste.

The phrase “everything happens for a reason” came up in a couple contexts recently (conversation with a friend, Radiolab, etc.).

In well designed cryptographic security systems, the attacker needs to do exponentially more work than the defender in order to read a secret, forge a message, etc., subject to appropriate hardness assumptions.