Building

Without neurosymbolic AI that is more deeply integrated in systems as a whole, with rich world models as a central component, generally following the approach I laid out five years ago, I just don’t see how agents can work out. Reliable agents may not require “artificial general intelligence”, but they surely require what I called in 2020 “robust”,... See more

The goal hadn’t been wrong. It had just been handed to me, implicitly, by a world that measures progress in forward motion and not in depth.

That was the moment I began to question the entire architecture of ambition. Not whether it worked, but whether it asked the right things of a person. Whether a life could be constructed from milestones rather... See more

Trustworthy, general artificial intelligence, aligned with human values, will come, when it does, from systems that are more structured, with more built-in knowledge, and will incorporate at least some degree of explicit tools for reasoning and planning, as well as explicit knowledge, that are lacking in systems like GPT. Within a decade, maybe... See more

There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.

Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to... See more

Resistance requires intention and specialization. So we're more likely to find it in opinionated, verticalized tools designed with constructive friction. Yes, designing for friction sounds antithetical to growth, but we must optimize for cognitive sweat equity over time spent (short of pharmaceutical aids to save us from our susceptibility to our... See more

Charlie Munger once said the test of a good business is whether a truly stupid person could run it, because someday a truly stupid person will. Nietzsche's version is more perverse: could you run it, over and over, with no prospect of relief?

You might be a genius.

Can your genius tolerate stasis?

The physicist Carlo Rovelli observes in "The Order of Time" that our relationship with temporal experience is fundamentally shaped by our degree of agency within it. When we automate away our active participation in scheduling decisions, we reduce our temporal experience to passive consumption rather than active creation.

This matters because... See more

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”