Some professional news: after nearly twelve years at Vox, I'm going to be joining @open_phil, working with @mattsclancy and @jddwor on the Abundance and Growth Fund

🚨 Federal harmonized liability bill alert! 🚨 @RepLoriTrahan has circulated a discussion draft bill that would ensure that when AI agents engage in conduct that would be a tort or crime for a human, *someone* is liable.

Picking my son up has gotten a lot more fun in the past week. I'm not just taking care of him, I'm stunting on Vivek

NEW on Transformer: @Kirsten3531 set up the UK Government’s AI and Energy Directorate. Now she warns that AI is going to run out of power, and the industry is not on track to fix that problem. "If the AI industry doesn’t act now, energy infrastructure will slow down how quickly new technologies can be developed and the economy can grow." transformernews.ai/p/ai-will…

Lydia Tár is still very real and she's doing the score for the next Daily Wire movie

There are no better chroniclers of the culture of the AGI era than @clarabcollier and @chengela, and this piece is a characteristically excellent illustration of that nymag.com/intelligencer/arti…

Great gut check! What do Americans not at The Curve think? We polled them. The results: Americans think it most likely than in 10 years AI is normal tech. They think utopia is least likely. 39% of respondents think that in 2036, AI will have made life worse for people like them. 27% better. 34% not sure. Do you find anything about these results surprising?

The procedural reforms in the permitting bill would do enormous good if enacted. (A BAAJA blast, if you will.) Here is an explainer of what those changes are, what they would do, and why it matters: artificialweights.substack.c…

Here are the first 4 problems on 80000 Hour's most pressing problem page in Dec 2019 web.archive.org/web/20191224…

[autistic guy 1000 bc] and god says that the different food can't touch on plates. and he also says you have to use one type of cloth. and uh just went up the hill to get more stone tablets yeah he says you have to cut the tags off first.

Fun fact - while I worked at OIRA in the Biden admin for (ardent environmentalist) Administrator Revesz, CBD's Brett Hartl sent us this charming public comment: Folks should listen to experts focused on the benefits (huge) & costs (small) of the permitting bill, not dogmatists.

Looking at the current debates about Anthropic makes me feel guilty for not keeping up with some academic domains. I honestly had no idea that we'd solved consciousness, and determined which substrates can and can't support it. Thought that one was more up in the air.

This @TheEconomist cover story on effective altruism was interesting and IMO way more accurate (including in its critiques) than most other reporting you will read on EA these days. A couple quibbles: -I think calling EA the “the century’s big idea” is, uh, premature to say the least. But I do appreciate the acknowledgement and curiosity about how EA was so early to pandemic risks and the promise and perils of AI. -They imply that EA started off with “charitable roots” but then got weird over time, whereas I think EA has always made space for pretty weird ideas (e.g., here’s @DylanMatt in 2014: vox.com/2014/4/23/5643418/th…). And EA still puts far more money and attention than almost any other community into the kind of evidence-backed global health giving the Economist praises. -Some of the purported wild EA views they critique are just standard topics of academic philosophy debate (e.g., cambridge.org/core/journals/…). -They attribute the EA interest in AI safety to longtermism, but I think it’s been clear for years that AI safety concerns are justifiable based on potential impacts this decade, not to mention this century (x.com/albrgr/status/15595748…). But I think they correctly gesture towards the IMO best critique of EA ideas, which is their totalizingness. My former colleague Holden wrote a great post about this in 2022: forum.effectivealtruism.org/… I wrote a long thread grappling with this critique a few years ago (x.com/albrgr/status/15327261…). I think part of what makes EA distinctive as a community relative to the underlying academic moral philosophy is the orientation around pragmatism - Giving What We Can took off decades after Singer had articulated the underlying case because “give until the marginal giving would entail as much suffering for you as benefit for the other person” was a much worse pitch than “give 10%.” But the community doesn’t always reflect that healthy moderation, and trying to grapple with the vertiginous stakes of increasingly near-term risks from AI really can run a risk of crowding out other sources of value. At CG, our response to this has been worldview diversification (coefficientgiving.org/resear…), spreading our giving across very different views of what matters, rather than going all-in on one. Worldview diversification leaves plenty of hard questions (how do you allocate the pie across very different types of moral good?) but helps cut off some of the ways maximizing can be perilous. It’s one reason global health and wellbeing – which @TheEconomist didn’t give the space it deserved – has gotten most of our funding since 2014.

what a time to be alive

Some personal news: I'm going to be leaving Vox after 12 years (!!) to start not one, but two new projects! The details are still under wraps, but I can tell you that I'll still be writing about the crisis of democracy, the far-right, and liberalism's future. Watch this space!

desperately hoping my gf becomes powerful enough one day that I, too, am featured in a tiny little "husband" box in an article

AI requires a redesign and expansion of core safety net programs -- including Unemployment Insurance, SNAP, Medicaid. The first thing political leaders should do is stop cutting these programs. Then, build on top of the scaffolding that Americans already trust. More from CSAIP advisor @KarenKornbluh: blog.csaip.org/p/washington-…

AI is arriving at a moment when Americans already believe the economy is rigged for the wealthy and powerful. That’s the lens through which they see every part of this story — jobs, AI, safety, all of it. That’s an opening for anyone willing to take it. People are looking for leaders who can name who they’re fighting for, and what they’re fighting to win for them. More from CSAIP Advisor and Blue Rose Research co-founder and CEO Jesse Stinebring in the next tweet.

In the 1930s, the American press was captivated by the prospect of a huge swath of labor being automated imminently, likely by a socially conscious company run by two brilliant siblings. My first piece for @asteriskmgzn is about the Rust Brothers, whose cotton picker promised to put millions of Southern farm workers out of a job. They were idealists (John Rust was a longtime socialist activist) and called for big government intervention to deal with the fallout from their invention. "We want to enlist the aid of the state and federal governments to introduce this invention in a socialized manner through national co-operation," he told reporters. "A part of the profits could be used to administer a social insurance scheme for the disabled and the aged, and a program of rural industrialization and diversification should be developed side by side with the use of the picker." It didn't turn out quite the way they planned. But I think the way it did turn out has some lessons for the AI transition to come. Read the full piece: asteriskmag.com/issues/15/ru…