Ben Cuan

The world until recently was overflowing with onramps of opportunity, even for children, and we seem to do poorly at producing new ones. Modern complexity may have erased some avenues for agency (no boy can meaningfully learn the telegraph), but I suspect how we have oriented the world, not technology, is the main problem.

Task-negative cognition on the other hand, is what your brain does when there is nothing in particular it has to do; when the situation has no demanding urgencies to attend to

Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem excessive in... See more

AI companies certainly want to train AI systems to follow human instructions (perhaps with the exception of dangerous or illegal tasks), but the process of doing so is more an art than a science, more akin to “growing” something than “building” it. We now know that it’s a process where many things can go wrong.