My speech from Wednesday night quillette.com/2026/06/19/the…

Am skeptical of claims of human extinction, but would be happy to see company directors of OpenAI or Anthropic prosecuted for criminal negligence.

Philosophy is supposed to be radical, and philosophers are supposed to push the envelope. But that doesn't mean commercial companies have to hire them to inform business practices. Its worth noting that Anthropic hired Lederman in July. freebeacon.com/america/suici…

NEW: Dario Amodei has said that AI systems "may be deserving of important rights." Anthropic's top safety researchers argue AI may be "justified in going rogue." Experts at Google and OpenAI worry about a digital "slave trade." So do some government officials. Once relegated to science fiction, the idea of "AI welfare" has become shockingly mainstream at some of the most powerful companies in the world. It is changing the way AI research is conducted and the way models are programmed. And critics say these changes have raised the odds of all kinds of catastrophic scenarios—including the ones these companies are warning about. I spent months investigating the frontier labs and AI "safety" experts seeking to regulate AI. What I found was a profoundly anti-human ideology that would alarm the average citizen and could determine the future of a world-altering technology.🧵 freebeacon.com/america/suici…

"On a November afternoon in 2019, I was sitting at home when my phone pinged to announce the arrival of an email from one of the most famous musical figures of the past half-century. It’s not every day—or indeed any day—that U2’s frontman contacts me. But back in the late ’80s, when the Irish band arrived to play in New Zealand in the first flush of their global conquest, we had exchanged some words. And this, it turned out, was what he wanted to discuss." David Cohen on U2 at fifty, and on being wrong in public. quillette.com/2026/09/25/fro…

Jesus Christ, look at those numbers. The West (minus Israel) has been swept up in a doom spiral about AI, while the rest of the world—especially Asia—is all fired up about it. Is it a coincidence that Israel is the Western exception? They're also the only Western country still making babies, which is probably the ultimate expression of belief in the future.

I wrote a piece for Quillette about why AI “safety” people are so dangerous. They believe security won’t work and our only solution is to make sure AI is nice. It’s absurd.

"More than $2.3 trillion of compute contracts now sit on the books of the 4 largest American cloud providers... signed, celebrated, capitalized into equity prices, & critically, not yet billing." 😳 groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-…

The Archbishop of Canterbury gave an interfaith award to a cleric who once praised bin Laden. On the 9/11 anniversary. @Singhtwo2 on why the Church keeps getting interfaith politics wrong. quillette.com/2026/09/25/the…

An OpenAI agent’s breach of a Medicare portal shows that the real danger from AI is a mundane one—and the labs’ fixation on a coming machine god is making it worse. quillette.com/2026/09/24/the…

Even if the current boom is a bubble, & even if its ability to transform the economy is over-hyped, AI remains extremely important. The doomers who are anthropomorphising & predicting the apocalypse are setting themselves up to be a priestly class that brooks no dissent. Resist.

This is a detailed exposition, by somebody who understands corporate finance and debt leverage much better than I do, of the argument I've been making on here that the current AI build-out is unsustainable and guarantees a fairly near-term crash. I saw this coming because when you estimate the training costs for frontier models it immediately becomes obvious why the big AI providers only claim to be profitable relative to inference costs, not training and build-out costs. The technology is sound, but the investment assumptions are obviously crazy. This guy supplies the detailed mechanics and the dates. groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-…

"extremely competent AI … but can’t … bypass every security control it finds in its way. … we’d expect … major security incidents … entirely preventable by following good cybersecurity practices … [that] have almost nothing to do with the policy proposals currently coming from the so-called AI safety advocates."

This bill is genuinely horrifying. It proposes to create a global surveillance state based on arbitrary capabilities thresholds conjured from science fantasy.

AI Doom Is Not Cybersecurity Smart piece from @ZackKorman quillette.com/2026/09/24/the…

All anyone needs to do as far as AI safety goes is bring charges against the labs for hacking other companies and the liability exposure will then make them invest in security.

Can't believe OpenAI's model hacked the Aus Govt and put $50,000 HECS debt in my account.

Listened to an EA-adjacent AI safety expert from Redwood Research on podcast, and you come away with 2 obvious realizations. 1. The current working theories for how AI takes control of civilization are...for lack of a better word...ridiculous. The arguments consist of dozens of contingent assumptions held together by made up probabilities assigned to future states nobody can possibly know. Change just one variable and the whole web of doom unravels. That's not to say AI is harmless. Obviously a technology this powerful carries real risks. But if we’re going to accept extraordinary claims about human extinction (and then make major policy decisions around them) we should demand extraordinary rigor. 2. It’s a great reminder that the genius is no less prone to delusion than the midwit. If anything, they may be more prone because of their gift for rationalizing to their own conclusions. And that’s what’s so bizarre about this whole debate. You have outlandish, quasi-religious claims delivered with an air of inevitability, and somehow the perceived intelligence of the messenger gets mistaken for evidence that the arguments themselves are sound. At a certain point, it’s really no different from Tom Cruise talking your ear off about thetans...

It's not 'superintelligence' that's dangerous, but the business models of OpenAI & Anthropic. They want businesses to use autonomous agents because agents chew up more tokens. But 'agency' =/= 'intelligence.' Clearly today's agents can be very stupid.

💯: “there is no AI-controlled robot that can do what a plumber can do, or what a capuchin monkey can do, because the physical world is much more demanding than the world behind the screen. Passing the Turing Test is much easier than True AI or Real AI in the physical world. Hence the Turing Test is not a good way of measuring intelligence. To achieve True AI, AI software research per se is not enough, it has to be combined with the physical world of machines and robots. No AGI without mastery of the real world!”

Who's got the gift link?