Links and tweets, 2023-06-07
Orwell against progress, the Extropian archives, and more
by Jason Crawford · June 7, 2023 · 1 min read
Announcements & opportunities
- UK Great Stagnation summit in July, apply to attend (via @s8mb)
- Help Bryan Bishop create an enzyme that makes DNA based on digital instructions
- The Cybersecurity Grant Program, $1M for AI-based cybersecurity (from @OpenAI)
- Foundations & Frontiers, a magazine about future technologies (via @annasofialesiv)
Links
- An dig through the Extropian archives (via @ATabarrok)
- Orwell against progress
- “Coasean democracy” is the solution to Britain’s sclerosis (by @s8mb)
Queries
- Is there a good summary of all the different proposals for how to regulate AI?
- Have any of you read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872)? I could use some exegesis
- A book about economic history that focuses on how technology was scaled?
- Is there a counterfactual world where we’re still pre-industrial?
- Are self-driving cars still using control theory, with AI used only for sensors?
- Has anybody made an actually good publicly editable database?
Tweets
- Most people have no idea how much retail has gotten better over the last ~150 years
- An urban planner responds to my post on regulation
- Many people think self-driving failed, but there are customers in driverless taxis now
- The meaning of mortality declines
- The oldest known depiction of a steam-using atmospheric engine? From 1654!
- Desalination was a big technological success story of the 2010s
- Rewarding AI for a correct thought process, not just the right answer
- Humans correctly guessed an LLM chat agent was an AI only 60% of the time
- LLMs will be units within larger orchestrated systems
- Environmental regulations are an all-purpose tool to indefinitely delay anything
- Should we build underground cities? (Maybe not, say @ConnorTabarrok and Casey Handmer). Related thread on underground apartments.)
- Is it virtuous to assign probabilities to all uncertainty?
Charts
