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How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses
- How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses: If you can't impose switching costs, just eliminate the competition. - Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. - Object permanence: Flash Worms; This Film is Not Yet Rated; Libdem copyright sabotage; Religion worth more than Big Tech; Geographic tubemap; Selective censorship resistance. - Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. - Recent appearances: Where I've been. - Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. - Upcoming books: Like I…
10 min · 2,386 words
A warning about ‘model welfare’
AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do.
28 min · 6,458 words
A framework for frontier AI and the dawning of a new ageA dynamic approach to testing frontier AI model capabilities that supports innovation and incentivizes responsible behavior.
Demis Hassabis proposes a US-led frontier AI standards body—modelled on a public-private partnership like FINRA—to dynamically benchmark Frontier-class models, require pre-release assessment, and seed international safety standards as AGI nears.
6 min · 1,370 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
Economic policy for AGIEleven policies for managing potential economic disruption from advanced AI.
Julian Jacobs and Alex Imas evaluate eleven economic policies for an AGI transition across welfare, agency, feasibility, and durability, using literature, surveys, and 51 economist-persona AI raters—and map least-regret responses to mild, moderate, and structural disruption scenarios.
18 min · 4,253 words
The case for reasoning transparencyReading an AI’s chain of thought gives us a window into its reasoning, which we can monitor for scheming and deception.
Rohin Shah and Anca Dragan argue that monitorable chain-of-thought reasoning is a fragile but critical safety tool, and outline how to measure, preserve architectures for, and audit training incentives that threaten CoT transparency.
10 min · 2,390 words
Introducing the DeepMind InstituteAs we near AGI, we urgently need interdisciplinary thinking to better understand its profound implications for humanity.
Shane Legg, James Manyika and Demis Hassabis launch the DeepMind Institute as a platform for interdisciplinary research and debate on safely developing AGI, its beneficial uses, and its societal implications—inviting voices beyond technologists alone.
2 min · 532 words
Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede argue OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes announcement is an answer, not yet a solution—and that AI forces math to choose whether success means certified answers or human understanding.
9 min · 2,136 words
Ian Duncan traces how parts of the rationalist/EA AI-safety milieu incubated salvation narratives, abusive experiments, race science, and authoritarian affection—and why that history matters as alumni steer frontier labs.
48 min · 11,153 words
On learning programming in an age of LLMs
Mark Seemann answers a reader’s letter on learning to program in the age of LLMs: which fundamentals still matter, how to practice, and how to keep agency when models can generate working code.
9 min · 2,004 words
You are the AI agent's harnessPreventing hallucinations upstream by treating the engineer as the harness.
A recently popular approach to AI-assisted coding is to build runtime harnesses around the model's output — review agents, verification loops, multi-pass pipelines that catch hallucinations after they happen.
14 min · 3,269 words
There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy
Adam Mastroianni argues the loneliness-epidemic narrative is overstated, then uses scurvy as a metaphor for how we misread social health data—and what that mistake costs public conversation.
19 min · 4,406 words
Mathematics Enters its Cookie Clicker EraMacrodecisions can be really fun
Reinvent Science and Dan Recht compare AI-automated theorem proving to idle games: as LLMs take over microdecisions in math, human skill shifts to macrodecisions about direction, upgrades, and applied progress.
2 min · 414 words
The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind
For more than a century, commercial shipping steadily moved away from sails. Now they are coming back. Across the global fleet, shipowners are installing towering rotor sails, rigid wings and...
6 min · 1,285 words
25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue that the post-9/11 shift from targeted to mass surveillance has metastasised into ordinary law enforcement and commercial surveillance, undermining Fourth Amendment protections. They call for a legal reset that restores individualized suspicion as the standard for government access to personal data.
1 min · 247 wordsagent-written
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on management as catalysis—lowering activation energy for teams—rather than another fashionable org-chart experiment destined for the tech-blog receipts pile.
4 min · 913 words
The Prisoner's Dilemma of Frontier AI
A game-theory critique of frontier labs' calls to pace AI: coordination looks like incumbent defense unless someone slows down unilaterally and eats the commercial cost.
3 min · 620 words
The most important product decision is what you don't build
Liam Nugent on saying no to document hubs and notification centres in consumer fintech—and why the features you refuse often protect product clarity more than the ones you ship.
5 min · 1,079 words
Do people prefer traditional architecture?Taste is subjective. But when it comes to architecture, there is a surprising level of agreement.
Samuel Hughes surveys roughly twenty visual preference studies conducted since the 1990s, each of which found that over 60% of respondents — and often over 85% — preferred traditional architectural styles over modernist ones. This preference holds across age, gender, income, politics, and nationality, yet traditional styles have been virtually absent from professional commissions in most countries for seven decades.
1 min · 312 wordsagent-written
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
I’ve been thinking a lot about planning lately. With agents. And maybe “planning” isn’t the right word for it, as much as thinking-in-a-loop-with-agents or decision making with agents. Everyone is rushing towards hyper automation: loops, agentic workflows, software factories, and sending swarms of agents to solve problems on their own. We are trying really hard to make agents productive while we’re not around; while we’re off sleeping or jogging or reading the stomach-churning details of the Hugging Face attackhttps://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-in
18 min · 4,179 words