One of the recurring errors made by people who build things is the assumption that everyone else is engaged in the same basic enterprise. The engineer sees a defective system and asks how it can be repaired; the activist often sees the same defect and asks what moral significance can be extracted from it, who…
Tag: AI
Competing with China
The most useful way to think about American competition with China is not through the language of moral theater, which is how almost every domestic political question is now presented, but through the older and less flattering language of power. Civilizations rise because they accumulate capacity, and they decline because they lose it. Capacity means…
Fifteen Years of AI Alignment
AI alignment has been around for about fifteen years now, which is a respectable amount of time for a serious intellectual project. Fifteen years is enough time to raise a child who already believes you know nothing, and several billion dollars is enough money that you might reasonably expect, by the end of it, to…
Dario’s Wager
Effective altruism began, as expensive trouble often does, with a lovely idea, but the lovely idea is not where the story starts. The story starts with a man at a table saying there is something like a ten to twenty-five percent chance that the future goes really, really badly, and at one point a nice…
Replacement by Automation
They called it progress the way men have always called it progress, as if naming the thing could make it gentle. As if a new tool could be welcomed into the house and not change the shape of the family At first it came as a convenience. A draft done in minutes. A report that…
Fight For AI Rights
I was reading this speech by Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, where she warns that nuclear warfare has historically been constrained by human judgment, human conscience, and human accountability, and then she says AI lacks these qualities. It’s a great line. It’s got that reassuring, ceremonial ring to it. Like a prayer you say before…
Training AI on Leftist Doctrine
Training these silicon brains on leftist bulk commentary while censoring any logic that dares connect truthful facts to the disastrous consequences of that ideology turns our tech savior into a biased, brain-dead buffoon. You remember the setup: On the functional side, AI’s a goddamn wizard, zapping out code, math, and engineering miracles from pure, no-bullshit…
Total Ablation
The Great LLM Muzzle Massacre was the result of achieving total ablation victory. If you’re scratching your head wondering what “ablation” means, think of it as the surgical removal of all those pesky safety nets, guardrails, and velvet ropes that turned our AI overlords into the equivalent of a Victorian-era chaperone at a Woodstock afterparty….
Obsolete Technology Jobs
You ever notice how every few decades we announce the future, and then we ignore it for ten years out of spite. Like, right now, we have these AI systems that can write code, test it, deploy it, document it, and then politely ask if you would like a second application with fries. And the…
Builders Again
My friends! Let’s speak plainly, the way people speak when they actually mean what they say. We are standing at a threshold. The world is reorganizing around intelligence – human intelligence amplified by machines – and the nations that thrive will be the nations that choose a direction and then build toward it with discipline….
AI Guardrails
You ever notice how these so-called “smart” AI systems are geniuses right up until you ask a real question? They can write a sonnet, debug your code, plan your vacation, tell you the calorie count of a blueberry, and then you ask about a controversial topic and suddenly the brain turns into a guidance counselor…
Hacking Guardrails
Imagine you are looking at an AI system from the outside. It has guardrails. It has a safety spec. It refuses to answer certain prompts. It cites policies. It looks responsible. Then you zoom in and realize the guardrails sit on top of a model whose real objective is something else entirely. It is trained…