Views expressed here are those of the author.

The Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act is an exciting step toward preventing catastrophic and existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. This legislation creates a domestic institutional foundation which can support effective governance and provide the situational awareness required to stay on top of the rapidly changing AI landscape. There are a handful of small issues with the bill, but overall, it looks great to me. This short post will describe the bill and analyze its strengths and weaknesses.

What Does the Bill Do?

The bill requires AI developers to disclose information about their AI systems before they can be deployed. This information goes to a new “advanced AI evaluation program” within the Department of Energy (DOE) for analysis and to contribute toward recommendations for Congress. In this way, the bill is very forward-looking; it creates understanding today so that we can take action tomorrow. The disclosures must include detailed information required to carry out the evaluation program. This includes data, weights, architecture, and interface or implementation of the AI system. The final major section of the bill requires the creation of a comprehensive plan for permanent federal [...]

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Outline:

(00:46) What Does the Bill Do?

(01:32) Reasons I'm Excited About The Bill

(03:05) Opportunities for Developing the Bill

(04:34) A Great First Step

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https://techgov.intelligence.org/blog/the-hawley-blumenthal-ai-risk-evaluation-act

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Epistemic status: I'm pretty sure AI will alarm the public enough to change the alignment challenge substantially. I offer my mainline scenario as an intuition pump, but I expect it to be wrong in many ways, some important. Abstract arguments are in the Race Conditions and concluding sections.

Nora has a friend in her phone. Her mom complains about her new AI "colleagues." Things have gone much as expected in late 2025; transformative AGI isn't here yet, and LLM agents have gone from useless to merely incompetent.

Nora thinks her AI friend is fun. Her parents think it's healthy and educational. Their friends think it's dangerous and creepy, but their kids are sneaking sleazy AI boyfriends. All of them know people who fear losing their job to AI.

Humanity is meeting a new species, and most of us dislike and distrust it.

This could shift the playing field for alignment dramatically. Or takeover-capable AGI like Agent-4 from AI 2027 could be deployed before public fears impact policy and decisions.

Alarming incompetence

Public attitudes toward AI have transformed like they did for COVID between February and March of 2020.

The risks and opportunities seem much more immediate [...]

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Outline:

(01:21) Alarming incompetence

(04:07) Race conditions

(06:39) Incompetent AI spreads alarm by default

(10:24) Resonances on the public stage

(13:00) Impacts on risk awareness, funding, and policy.

(14:51) Concluding thoughts and questions

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A lot of people are daunted by the idea of doing a full digital declutter. Those people ask me all the time, “isn’t there something easier I can do that will still give me some of those sweet sweet benefits you were talking about?”

The answer is: sort of.

The longer answer is: I think that if you’re serious about wanting to change your digital habits, you will eventually need to do something higher-effort. That's because behavior change is hard, especially when you are fighting against not only your brain's ingrained patterns, but also external forces that are constantly pulling at your attention. But I still want to have something for those people who are not ready or willing to commit to anything big right now.

So, here are two things you can try in your everyday life, with no additional preparation. I chose these because they don’t require any sustained willpower or attention. You only have to remember to do it once, and then you’re doing it.

Go for a walk without your phone

Pick a time when you have nothing you need to be doing. You’re not waiting to hear from anyone, and there's nowhere you need [...]

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Outline:

(01:05) Go for a walk without your phone

(02:16) Switch phones with the person you're with

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Audio note: this article contains 36 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

Imagine using an ML-like training process to design two simple electronic components, in series. The parameters _theta^1_ control the function performed by the first component, and the parameters _theta^2_ control the function performed by the second component. The whole thing is trained so that the end-to-end behavior is that of a digital identity function: voltages close to logical 1 are sent close to logical 1, voltages close to logical 0 are sent close to logical 0.

Background: Signal Buffering

We’re imagining electronic components here because, for those with some electronics background, I want to summon to mind something like this:

This electronic component is called a signal buffer. Logically, it's an identity function: it maps 0 to 0 and 1 to 1. But crucially, it maps a wider range of logical-0 voltages to a narrower (and lower) range of logical-0 voltages, and correspondingly for logical-1. So if noise in the circuit upstream might make a logical-1 voltage a little too low or a logical-0 voltage a little too [...]

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Outline:

(01:09) Background: Signal Buffering

(02:26) Back To The Original Picture: Introducing Interfaces

(05:58) The Stat Mech Part

(07:50) Why Is This Interesting?

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https://evitable.com/

Our mission is to inform and organize the public to confront societal-scale risks of AI, and put an end to the reckless race to develop superintelligence.

We're hiring for 3 roles:
1) Operations Associate or Head of Operations
2) Communications Associate or Head of Communications
3) Chief of Staff (CoS)
We're also fielding expressions of interest from people who might lead movement building efforts (on a somewhat longer time line).

I'd appreciate applications, leads for candidates, and/or signal boosting the Tweet!

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In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.

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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jhbs.70043

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OpenAI does not waste time.

On Friday I covered their announcement that they had ‘completed their recapitalization’ by converting into a PBC, including the potentially largest theft in human history.

Then this week their CFO Sarah Friar went ahead and called for a Federal ‘backstop’ on their financing, also known as privatizing gains and socializing losses, also known as the worst form of socialism, also known as regulatory capture. She tried to walk it back and claim it was taken out of context, but we’ve seen the clip.

We also got Ilya's testimony regarding The Battle of the Board, confirming that this was centrally a personality conflict and about Altman's dishonesty and style of management, at least as seen by Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati. Attempts to pin the events on ‘AI safety’ or EA were almost entirely scapegoating.

Also it turns out they lost over $10 billion last quarter, and have plans to lose over $100 billion more. That's actually highly sustainable in context, whereas Anthropic only plans to lose $6 billion before turning a profit and I don’t understand why they wouldn’t want to lose a lot more.

Both have the goal [...]

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Outline:

(01:45) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(02:12) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(03:47) Huh, Upgrades

(04:48) On Your Marks

(12:48) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(15:42) Fun With Media Generation

(16:01) They Took Our Jobs

(16:28) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(17:51) Get Involved

(18:43) Introducing

(19:14) In Other AI News

(20:08) Apple Finds Some Intelligence

(22:54) Give Me the Money

(30:00) Show Me the Money

(35:57) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(39:14) They're Not Confessing, They're Bragging

(39:34) Quiet Speculations

(47:08) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(50:55) Chip City

(52:53) The Week in Audio

(58:19) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:07:13) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:08:11) Everyone Is Confused About Consciousness

(01:10:34) The Potentially Largest Theft In Human History

(01:12:34) People Are Worried About Dying Before AGI

(01:15:54) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:20:47) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:24:11) Messages From Janusworld

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I think I’m pretty good at convincing people about AI dangers. This post talks about the basics of speaking convincingly about AI dangers to people.

Prerequisites

1. Learn to truly see them

In 2022, at a CFAR workshop, I was introduced to circling.

It is multi-player meditation. People sit in a circle and have a conversation, but the content of the conversation is mostly focused on the meta: what someone says or expresses causes in you, how you relate to other people, and what's going on in the circle as a group.

It is sometimes a great experience; but more importantly, it allows you to (1) pay attention to what's going on in other people and to your models of them and (2) explicitize your hypotheses, ask people what's actually going on, and be surprised by how you’re very wrong about other people! This is awesome, and quickly updates you to learn to be very attentive to other people and to see them, in a far less wrong way.

(Related: Circling as Cousin to Rationality.)

I think step 1 of talking well about AI dangers to people is to learn to try to see them, to notice where [...]

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Outline:

(00:19) Prerequisites

(00:23) 1. Learn to truly see them

(01:53) 2. Be honest

(03:34) 3. Try to understand the subject well

(05:05) How to talk in three steps

(05:12) 1. Identify what they're likely missing

(06:33) 2. Listen attentively

(08:02) 3. Say things

(08:45) Practice all of the above

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“If you can get your ship into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.” - Robert Heinlein

This generalizes.

1.

Spaceflight is hard.

Putting a rocket on the moon is one of the most impressive feats humans have ever achieved. The International Space Station, an inhabited living space and research facility in Low Earth Orbit, has been continuously inhabited for over two decades now, and that's awesome. It is a testament to the hard work and brilliance of a lot of people over a lot of time that this is possible.

And we’re not done yet. There are footprints on the moon today, but there are also robots leaving tracks on Mars and satellites have taken photos of the rings of Saturn and the craters of Pluto. Voyager has stood waaay back and taken a family picture of the solar system. Give us a rocket and a place to send it, and we’ll go anywhere we’re curious about.

There's a funny property of space flight though, which is that half the work happens very close to home and is surprisingly similar no matter where you’re going.

When you boil spaceflight down into the very abstract basics, it [...]

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(00:17) 1.

(03:30) 2.

(06:02) 3.

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WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and I will not warn about them further. Also some anecdotes from slutcon which are not particularly NSFW, but it's still slutcon.

A girl I was seeing once asked me to guess what Hogwarts house she was trying to channel with her outfit. Her answer turned out to be Slytherin, because the tiny gem in the necklace she was wearing was green. Never mind that nothing else she wore was green, including the gems in her earrings, and that colors of all the other Hogwarts houses appeared in her outfit (several more prominently), and that the gem itself was barely visible enough to tell the color at all, and that she wasn’t doing anything to draw attention to the necklace specifically.[1]

I wonder, sometimes, just how much of the “subtle social signals” people think they’re sending are like that case - i.e. it's basically a game with themselves, which has utterly zero signal for anyone else.

Subtlety to the point of invisibility clearly happens more than zero percent of the time; I have seen at least that one unambiguous case, so existence is at least established. [...]

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Outline:

(01:21) Just How Subtle Is The Signal?

(01:25) Hints in Writing

(02:34) Hints in Flirting

(04:26) Hints in Outfit

(05:46) Oblivious?

(06:29) Emotional Investment?

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