Fernando Borretti

In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans.

For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down. — Hermann Hesse, Demian Despite having spent most of my life marinating in transhumanist ideas, I never cared about AI.

If you follow me on Twitter, or read this blog, you have noticed that I went from being generally optimistic and excited about AI to being extremely concerned.

There’s a widespread belief that artificial superintelligence (ASI) is inevitable.

Any rigorous thinking about the long-term future leads to extreme outcomes.

So, I have this little app, Epoch, that I use to keep a journal.

The implicit promise of modernity is: we have to work really hard for a few centuries, but eventually we’ll get to the Star Trek future where we’ve automated all the drudgery, and all work is meaningful, heroic, and dignifies the spirit.

Many of the people building AI, and many of the people working on AI safety, share a common vision of what a good AI future looks like: We figure out alignment, build superintelligent AI, and it takes over the world, for our benefit.

Fiction Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

There’s a game called Mass Effect, which I haven’t played, but I’m told in the game there’s this species of sentient robots, the Geth, whose creators try to exterminate them, and the trigger for this Butlerian jihad was a domestic servant Geth looking up…

Marcus Hutter—oldheads will remember him from AIXI—recently published a book: Job-Less Utopia: Macroeconomics in the Age of AGI.

Yesterday, OpenAI announced the solution to ten open problems in mathematics, all discovered by a yet-unreleased model.

Today, the world is made of people.

Shall I end this life a pauper?

The most stubborn facts are those of the spirit, not those of the physical world. — Jean Gottmann, Geography and International Relations In 1914, before the First World War, there was this belief: “a European war would be economically disastrous, the mone…

When I open a link, say on Hacker News, and I see a blog post or a GitHub README obviously written by AI, I feel a few things.

The book can’t compete with the screen.

AI models are very capable and get more capable each year.

Spaced repetition has a natural domain of applicability: information that is systematically organized as an unambiguous key-value mapping with short keys and values.

Right now there’s a cruise ship parked outside Cabo Verde because of an outbreak of Andes virus.

I write a lot of Makefiles.