jasoncrawford

What Ja­son has been read­ing, May 2023: “Pro­topia,” com­plex sys­tems, Daedalus vs. Icarus, and more

Who reg­u­lates the reg­u­la­tors? We need to go be­yond the re­view-and-ap­proval paradigm

Ja­son’s links and tweets, 2023-05-03

Quote quiz: “drift­ing into de­pen­dence”

Ja­son’s links and tweets, 2023-04-24

Bos­ton event: Learn­ing Night at Aero­naut Brew­ing, May 1

• jasoncrawfordApr 23, 2023, 1:54 PM

  1 point

  on: Machines: Global Village Con­struc­tion Set

  Related: The Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilization

  “What books would you want to restart civilization from scratch?”

  The Long Now Foundation has been involved in and inspired by projects centered on that question since launching in 01996. (See, for example, The Rosetta Project, Westinghouse Time Capsules, The Human Document Project, The Survivor Library, The Toaster Project, The Crypt of Civilization, and the Voyager Record.) For years, Executive Director Alexander Rose has been in discussions on how to create a record of humanity and technology for our descendants. In 02014, Long Now began building it.

  The Manual For Civilization is working toward a living, crowd-curated library of 3,500 books put forward by the Long Now community and on display at The Interval.

  See also Lewis Dartnell’s book The Knowledge.

The Com­mis­sion for Stop­ping Fur­ther Im­prove­ments: A let­ter of note from Isam­bard K. Brunel

• jasoncrawfordApr 17, 2023, 9:15 PM

  3 points

  on: When will Au­toGPT like soft­ware be able to write En­vi­ro­men­tal Im­pact Assess­ments?

  I bet GPT-4 could already do a lot of this work, perhaps with some fine-tuning and/​or careful prompt engineering.

  The problem with automating compliance documents is not just the time/​effort to prepare them. It’s also the time spent waiting to get a response, and in some cases, “user fees” paid to the government to review them. If everyone started using GPT to do compliance, I suspect that the various agencies would just start to build up an ever-growing backlog of un-reviewed applications, until they’re all like immigration and they have decade-long wait times.

Ja­son’s links and tweets, 2023-04-12

In­ter­view: “Make the fu­ture bright again”

What Ja­son has been read­ing, April 2023

• jasoncrawfordApr 11, 2023, 2:57 PM

  6 points

  on: AMA: Bryan Bishop, Bio­hacker & Founder of Cus­to­dia Bank

  Why do you think we don’t have more people starting ambitious genetic engineering projects?

• jasoncrawford 11 Apr 2023 14:42 UTC

  4 points

  on: AMA: Bryan Bishop, Bio­hacker & Founder of Cus­to­dia Bank

  What are the best near-term/​foreseeable applications of genetic engineering? What is the low-hanging fruit here that we can see and define and should go after first?

Do we get bet­ter or worse at adapt­ing to change?

Ja­son’s links and tweets, 2023-04-05

• jasoncrawford 4 Apr 2023 19:49 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Wizards and prophets of AI [draft for com­ment]

  Thanks.

  Rather than asking how fast or slow we should move, I think it’s more useful to ask what preventative measures we can take, and then estimate which ones are worth the cost/​delay. Merely pausing doesn’t help if we aren’t doing anything with that time. On the other hand, it could be worth a long pause and/​or a high cost if there is some preventive measure we can take that would add significant safety.

  I don’t know offhand what would raise my p(doom), except for obvious things like smaller-scale misbehavior (financial fraud, a cyberattack) or dramatic technological acceleration from AI (genetic engineering, nanotech).

Wizards and prophets of AI [draft for com­ment]

Four lenses on AI risks

• jasoncrawford 27 Mar 2023 13:45 UTC

  1 point

  on: AMA: Mark Khu­rana, au­thor of The Tra­jec­tory of Dis­cov­ery, cre­ator of Un­told Health

  Are we winning the war on cancer? Is it reasonably fast/​steady progress, or has something gone wrong?