It’s been such a crazy week. I don’t “feel the AGI” only because I am mired in the give and take of living in America where we still have businesses to run and a lot of regular people committed to actual civics. Progress is fast but implementation is slow.
And then above our daily lives we are actively in the middle of a kinetic war that our population is only dimly watching. The information environment being irradiated by foreign propoganda. I am astonished to read regular blatant campaigns that no one questions. I get ads for Chinese phone companies on Twitter.
It doesn’t even need to be about any of the active campaigns maybe a New York Times reader would pay attention to. Lots of regional political issues go uncovered. The impolite “nobody reads the Africa pages” is a very indelicate joke for readers of international newspapers. Americans often don’t even get them delivered.
As an example. What does an American understand about Mali anyway? I’ve got like a half dozen friends who care about French colonialism (and the sins of Nicholas Sarkozy) so it’s a niche Francophone thing. The stuff you maybe picked up from those who lived abroad.
No real tangible value there that isn’t social, but lots of Americans used to study with French families so you might be dimly exposed.
You’d be shocked at how much we’ve cut back on education in the liberal arts. Just as America has her very own Sicilian expedition we stop bothering to teach Thucydides. I’m in my Allen Bloom season.
I have been trying to keep my cool as a week of progress is just so fast in very real world situations. I am relishing the success of Valar Atomics as they continue own progress. We are going to need a lot more power to meet needs and meet them cleanly so I am honestly wishing for a boom in nuclear.
All the pissing and moaning about the ethics of artificial intelligence misses the point that we need to supply a lot more power for both consumer and defense needs so we might as well suit up. We have to manage what might happen with our physical reality. Like physics bro.
So this week was wild to watch as the labs stand off with fast releases. It’s very herky jerky the progress from OpenAI. The enthusiasm around Codex is very real even as no one entirely trusts the even management. Still it was fun to have two new models from OpenAI in a week. It’s funny how running a big startup is still largely product management.
Which sounds cute I realize. That I am charmed by progress in energy and algorithms while we test being under a kind of network attack with a very naive and easily swayed online population.
I like to think Americans are independent but we are not doing as much as we could to enable good governance. Americans have a say and plenty understand “right to compute” just as they did the “right to repair” but somenof government is actual hard power types. Did no one do any of the reading? I thought everyone was all about the Powerbroker for like a decade.
But we seem to have some real second order effect issues being missed entirely by the labs. Like maybe we are bad at politics? I know it’s a cheap shot but I spend so much of my private time as a citizen doing mop up companies whose management is under stress.
And being transactional with people isn’t very effective for revealed preferences. You can’t buy people and Americans don’t like the implication it sends about being treated like you can.