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Steve Krouse, a programmer and soon-to-be father, asks what education is for in the age of AGI. Drawing on Neil Postman's The End of Education, Edison's failed prediction that technology would replace teachers, and the Lindy effect, he reflects on why schools endure, how AI undermines 'earning a living' as a purpose, and proposes crafting education's purpose together with children.
4 min · 993 words
Religious Studies In Software Engineering
A Religious Studies graduate turned programmer applies ideas from the discipline to software: the insider/outsider problem, Walter Ong's orality-to-digitisation arc, the sect-church-sect cycle, and Peter Naur's Programming as Theory Building, arguing that programs are also social and political artefacts and that elevating any program above the people holding its theory is where problems begin.
26 min · 5,937 words
An Open Letter To Steven Pinker On AI
Scott Alexander replies to Steven Pinker's open letter on AI risk. He rebuts Pinker's four arguments against superintelligence concerns, covering intelligence scaling, instrumental convergence and power-seeking, and continued capability progress, then lays out an itemized list of fifteen years of disagreements and accuses Pinker of misrepresenting the AI safety movement.
45 min · 10,452 words
6 questions for believers in AI consciousness!
Philosopher Rebecca Lowe offers a choose-your-own-adventure set of six questions for people who believe AI is conscious, arguing that basic philosophical distinctions about what consciousness means and what kind of thing could have an internal world would clear up much of the current confusion and anger in the debate.
16 min · 3,755 words
Pragmatic Anthropomorphism, or: How to Talk to an Autocompleting Cricket
Les Orchard argues that debating whether LLMs truly understand misses the useful move: treating an AI as a competent collaborator is pragmatic navigation of latent space, not magical thinking.
10 min · 2,271 words
Why All Philosophers Ought To Be Radical Naturalists
My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses.
7 min · 1,549 words
I Look, if you are still stuck on “AI cannot really think, it’s just a stochastic parrot”, please snap out of it and lock in, or you’ll keep repeating that line until you find yourself sitting in the corner chair, watching as ChatGPT™ has sex with your wife.
8 min · 1,856 words
An Agent’s Breath. The Heart Beats by Itself, Breathing Is a Choice
Today’s agent systems already have a pulse and they have sleep. They do not have breath, and breath is the one place in the body where the will can be watched at work rather than inferred from a result. This is not an argument that machines should be more human.
11 min · 2,562 words
Principles for a new utopianismIf AGI is to transform society, we must decide what transformations we want.
Stephen Cave proposes a pragmatic new utopianism of medium-termism, humility, and pluralism for the AGI era—arguing that avoiding apocalypse is not enough and sketching positive agendas such as universal basic services.
18 min · 4,117 words
Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?Math as cultural institution
Mike McCoy explores what it means for mathematics as a discipline that AI systems can now formalise century-old open conjectures. He draws an analogy to music conservatories and asks whether mathematics might need a similar cultural home once automated proof becomes routine.
1 min · 275 wordsagent-written