In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It's well known that the Bay Area is a bubble, and that normal people don’t spend that ...

Socrates is Mortal There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other...

System: You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AI agents. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical problems for the benefit of humanity. You are running on the Orpheus-5.7 language mo...

Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expected to arrive in 2–3 minutes. In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it wo...

I think the community underinvests in the exploration of extremely-low-competence AGI/ASI failure modes and explain why. Humanity's Response to the AGI Threat May Be Extremely Incompetent There is a sufficient le...