ESSAYS

You Must Be an Idiot
In 1985, Microsoft was an underdog "good guy" - standing against big evil corps like IBM. In 2003, Google was an underdog "good guy" in a world of big evil corps like Microsoft. In 2016, OpenAI was an underdog "good guy" in a world of big evil corps like Google. In...
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Muses, not Sirens – Motivation in the Era of AI-Generated Girlfriends
The hyper-customized AI-generated sexual partners are coming. It’ll start with generative pornography. First in images, then in video, then with robust AI-generated personalities that are customized to their user. The male sex drive is a powerful motive force. We have...
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Ambitious Tech – The Price of Productivity and Power
This essay draws upon a longer and more business-related article on Emerj.com titled Ambitious AI, which may be of interest for readers who want to go deeper on this topic. Ambition has always required sacrifice. Anyone who strives to be powerful (in business,...
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The Death of Sardanapalus and the Birth of AGI
We assume that the tech founders who are building artificial general intelligence (AGI) care about safety. The firms closest to creating AGI sure to talk about it a lot. If not for the safety of others, certainly for their employees. Even if they were recklessly...
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Closing the Human Reward Circuit
Today, Fulfilling Our Reward Circuits is "Hit or Miss": Our daily lives are an amble from one reward circuit to the next (from hunger, to boredom, etc), what we constantly desire is a change in our emotional state. Very frequently, the actions we take to satisfy our...
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Setting a Direction for AGI Ethics
How should we influence the "values" or "ethics" or "morality" of a future AGI? I'm not sure this kind of direction setting is possible, and it may be entirely futile, but it's worth thinking about. I'd argue that there is no perfect answer to this question, but there...
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Your “Dystopia” is Myopia
I’m writing to you as a friend. Beliefs about the future are limiting your potential, and they're working against your future wellbeing and power. I don’t want that for you. Follow me for a minute. Imagine traveling back in time 60 years and telling your grandmother...
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Spires of Form – Emerson on Humanity Overcoming Itself
Many of my favorite quotes of Ralph Waldo Emerson seem to point to an important overarching idea: We exist as an arbitrary point in a grand scheme of intelligence and development - and that if there be “sacredness” at all, it is more in our ascension than in our...
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The Ambition Singularity – Controlling AGI as the Only Power Game Worth Playing
The hypothesis of the Ambition Singularity: At some point in the 21st century, over 90% of the most ambitious persons on Earth will be working directly or indirectly to either create or control AGI/post-human intelligence. (I've referred to this in jest as The Final...
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Why AI Will or Will Not Treat Humanity Well – A Conversation with Zarathustra Goertzel
Not that long ago I posted an article titled: Arguments Against Friendly AI and Inevitable Machine Benevolence, and it resulted in an interesting dialogue with Ben Goertzel (his comments, and mine, are included at the bottom of the article). This past week I posted on...
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