Parker C

The emotional stickiness

of conversational bots raises the question of manipulation. After all, the people making the bots have an incentive to keep people chatting for as long as possible, so they do things to make the bots as addictive as possible.

The only way

out, I believe, is to make big hard decisions that make all of the little ones for me.

Like switching your

phone. I can’t win against the iPhone but I can simply not play. And that’s powerful.

This moment has

been decades in the making. Six decades of Moore’s Law have given us the compute horsepower to process exaflops of data. Four decades of the internet (accelerated by COVID) have given us trillions of tokens’ worth of training data. Two decades of mobile and cloud computing have given every human a supercomputer in the palm of our... See more

But you’ll notice

what I slipped in there – I said we should focus first on preventing AI-assisted crimes before they happen – wouldn’t such prevention mean banning AI? Well, there’s another way to prevent such actions, and that’s by using AI as a defensive tool . The same capabilities that make AI dangerous in the hands of bad guys with bad goals... See more

Can two hours

a day chatting to a bot possibly be healthy? On the one hand, you’re spending those two hours talking to an imaginary friend, which seems a bit worrisome. On the other hand, the typical American spends more time than this watching TV—an average of two and a half hours a day—and TV is about as interactive as a brick. Your brain gets a... See more

In our culture,

waiting has a bad rap. After all, if you’re waiting, what’s to show off on Insta?

It’s ok to wait, and it’s definitely ok to de-wheel from the hamsterism of today’s productivity theatre. In fact, you might need to if you really want to dream up a monster story.