2025 - 08 August

On Agency

Impact, Agency, and Taste

More on agency, but focused on doing good work within some organization. Part of it read like Richard Hamming’s “You and your research”

The Gods of Logic: Before and after artificial intelligence

I really enjoyed Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World — “historical fantastical realism”, as I call it — about the mathematicians and physicists behind some of the most impactful inventions of the previous century. Seeing a recommendation for it from my friends’ podcast made it a no-brainer to read, though I was still nervous from seeing other writers whose books I loved come out with sloppy, half-baked critiques of AI.

This was not the case for Labatut’s article. He carefully danced along all sides of the current debates, introducing the “doomers” ideas with a touch of dismisal, but ultimately given an even-tempered, serious warning:

we can never fully give ourselves over to these mathematical creatures, these beings with no soul or sympathy, because they are neither alive nor conscious—at least not yet, and certainly not like us…

I think that if machines do become conscious, then

1. Most people will be very slow to acknowledge it
2. They will be so different from us that it would be a terrible mistake to assume that the default outcome will be “raining down miracles unlike anything we have seen before”.