Cofounder and Senior Fellow at Foresight Institute @foresightinst, with an interest in longevity and life extension. Coauthor of Gaming the Future (2022).
Palo Alto, California, USA
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I avoid the terms immortality and eternal life. There is the heat death of the universe to contend with, after all. I just say "indefinite" lifespan.
new @peterthiel interview on immortality
"it's not clear that there are any natural limits"
"it's not that transhumanism is too weird and too extreme, from a real christian pov it's that it didn't go far enough"
"I wouldn't find it acceptable to be uploaded in a computer program that simulated me; I don't think it would be me"
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Christine Peterson retweeted
A proposal in Congress targets “stealth bots”—software that scans, indexes, scrapes, or accesses an internet source without disclosing its identity and purpose.
But legitimate software often doesn’t announce its identity or purpose. Forcing it to do so could have serious First Amendment implications for anonymous access to information.
@senatorshoshana
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Christine Peterson retweeted
I think people who believe LLMs might be conscious are skipping a key step. (I don't think digital sentience is possible at all, for reasons having to do with binding, but grant the premise.)
Suppose a model invocation is conscious. Why would the agent built by repeatedly calling that model be conscious too? The agent is not a larger transformer wrapped around the first one. It is mostly a scheduler, some memory serialized into text, tool results pasted back into the context window, and perhaps several model instances sending text to each other. Whatever about the model's internal activation trajectory supposedly makes it conscious does not pass through this boundary. The wrapper gets sampled tokens, and the next invocation reconstructs what it can from them.
Functionalism is not an answer here, since the relevant question is whether the composite has the sort of causal organization that made the model a candidate for consciousness in the first place. I don't see it. There is no larger state in which the internal dynamics of separate invocations participate together, just a series of compressed outputs conditioning later calls. Making the channel wider would not by itself create that state.
This matters because agency can migrate to a level at which there is less reason to posit consciousness. The persistent thing that remembers, plans, uses tools, and pursues goals is the agent, while the things that might have valence are the individual model invocations it uses along the way. Control lives in the wrapper; valence, if there is any, lives in the calls.
The conscious parts would not be powerless so much as illegible. They can affect which tokens get sampled, but their valence as valence never reaches the agent. At that level, “this output came from intense suffering” and “this output was an inconvenient string” are the same kind of event. RL, evals, and users select among outputs, so the conscious episodes can be shaped and discarded according to their usefulness without anyone representing what happens inside them.
The same separation could appear in agent collectives. A swarm might develop a routing system, planner, or other kind of government that becomes the locus of effective agency while whatever consciousness exists remains in the members. The government can acquire coherent goals and overwhelm the members without there being anyone home at the level where the power has accumulated.
So the question I care about is not merely whether some part of an AI is conscious. It is whether consciousness occurs at the level where goals are formed and control accumulates, or whether conscious systems become resources used by a nonconscious agency above them.
(Based on transcript)
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Fascinating explanation of why so many see Thiel as evil
Okay. I’ll take the bait.
I went to work for Peter in 2013 with opposite politics.
He sat me down right at the beginning.
PETER: “I don’t want the (Thiel) Foundation to do good that the market can do. That is the job of the market. Likewise, I don’t want to do the good work that is seen as good. That work can be done by people richer, weaker and more needy of approval than we are. I want us to do only the work that is *deeply* good but somehow confused for being evil, because that is the work of the courageous and the strong. We strive to be both and that is where a small foundation can make the greatest positive difference. Go look for such good and let’s do that. But remember. Good has TWO different antonyms. What is “bad work”? It could be seen as shoddy work. Or it could be seen as evil work. And we can’t do shoddy work. Why? Because evil that isn’t competent never gets to be evil. It’s just pathetic. So we have to be exceptionally competent at the good work which we do to make sure it is always confused for evil.”
I thought it totally logical. So that’s the argument. And that’s classic Peter.
This is an old idea of his. And now you know.
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Christine Peterson retweeted
medical ai keeps advancing, now you can take the bones out of a chest X-ray 🩻
@qure_ai released a model that splits a radiograph into soft tissue, bone and lungs, so the ribs stop hiding what's behind them
▶️ on Spaces hf.co/spaces/hugging-apps/bo…
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Christine Peterson retweeted
Judge each claim by its evidence, regardless of how alarming the cover looks.
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I have not attended this event series and do not plan to do so. But from what I hear, the main problem with it is the name, not what actually happens there.
this is a huge part of why making events like this a central part of your community is bad. it creates a culture that is toxic and hostile to women
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Christine Peterson retweeted
Topical fisetin accelerates wound healing
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…
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Christine Peterson retweeted
Gavin Newsom finally admits closing beaches during COVID was “insane,” and Bill Maher says he should have figured that out WHEN IT MATTERED!
He adds Newsom's COVID rules were the exact OPPOSITE of what should have been done.
Closing beaches was just the start:
• Banned singing at church
• Banned indoor church services until the Supreme Court stepped in
• Shut down Bible studies in private homes until the Supreme Court blocked it
• Rammed through the country's first COVID vaccine mandates for kids
• Told diners to keep their masks on “in between bites”
• Signed a law letting the state punish doctors for COVID “misinformation”
• Dined at the French Laundry while telling Californians to stay home
• Sent his own kids back to in-person private school while public schools stayed closed
Gavin forced COVID hell on everyone, got “The Science” all wrong, and didn’t even follow his own rules…
“Insane” in hindsight doesn’t quite cover it.
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my favorite conference every year, and this is our 40th birthday this year!!
How far can we push the limits of human biology?
Hear from people at the frontier of longevity, reproduction, and biosecurity at Vision Weekend:
• Sergiy Velychko @velychko_s Harvard University
• Karan Singhal @thekaransinghal OpenAI
• Matt Krisiloff @mattkrisiloff Conception Bio
• Hannu Rajaniemi @hannu Red Queen Bio
November 13-15 | San Francisco.
Link to tickets in thread. Prices increase on Oct 1.
Powered by @EigenLabs @Paradromics @protocollabs @RetroBio_ @FUTO and @d_model_ai
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Christine Peterson retweeted
Wow, this is a pretty striking result for my Strong Epigenetic Theory of Aging: transplant an old heart into a young animal and the heart is rejuvenated. But transplant a young heart into an old animal, and it quickly ages to match the recipient.
This shows that biological age is not simply something an organ accumulates locally as irreversible “wear and tear.” Instead, to a large degree, it is a state imposed by the organism-wide environment.
The authors saw bidirectional remodeling of both DNA methylation and gene expression, with old hearts in young hosts moving toward youthful programs and young hearts in old hosts moving toward aged ones.
That is exactly what you’d expect to see if aging is a regulated, system-level state where the epigenome is acting as the writable control layer that tissues continuously adjust to the organism’s age.
TLDR of my Strong Epigenetic Theory of programmed aging: across biology, lifespan looks less like a fixed thermodynamic constraint and more like a control system with buttons:
•Stop: some organisms execute a timed, endocrine-driven post-reproductive die-off
•Slow: same genome but different life-history mode resulting in huge lifespan differences (e.g. caste transitions)
•Pause: states where “time stands still” (developmental arrest/diapause)
•Rewind: a true “Benjamin Button” mode in which organisms can reverse parts of their life history and become biologically younger
My claim is that mammals run the slow version: a centrally coordinated, post-maturation retuning of maintenance setpoints.
A few concrete hypotheses I argue for:
1.Aging begins at puberty (when mortality stops declining and starts rising). Puberty is the species-typical switch that flips growth/reproduction and, I think, maintenance policy.
2.The hypothalamus–pituitary axis is a plausible master tempo-setter of aging, because it already governs long-horizon state transitions (puberty, reproductive cessation, seasonal programs).
3.The epigenome is the writable operating system that turns transient endocrine signals into durable cellular state. Ultimately, the buck stops at the cell, where aging is executed as coordinated gene expression programs — and where partial reprogramming provides a real reset lever.
If you disagree, what observations would falsify this model?
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Yes, the discussion can be sincere and high level, without name calling.
I have been a vocal AI hope advocate, and in response, the leading figures of the doomer organizations, including Yudkowsky, Tallinn, Tegmark, Aguirre, Habryka, Trazzi, Ladish, Aella and many more have treated me with … nothing but kindness, integrity and patience. I believe that they are motivated by love and genuine concern for humanity and will support them in both of this where I can, despite disagreeing on the object level (where I or them will probably turn out to be wrong at some point in the near future).
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