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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

New essay: “Which Future?” michaelnotebook.com/whichfuture/... On how to wisely navigate risks from transformative technology, especially artificial superintelligence (ASI). This condenses much of the key thinking from my more extended essays

michaelnotebook.com

Which Future?

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Thanks. Bsky didn't seem to be going in a great direction, so I only check briefly once or twice a month. I was quite irritated by this comment: bsky.app/profile/bnew...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

I enjoyed this thoughtful account of how Open Phil approach progress: support technical and scientific advances, but keeping a thoughtful eye on safety, too, viewing it as part of progress, not competitive with

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Actually, it might be in the Barenco et al 1995 paper (the one with 9 or so authors, on gate universality). I suspect that's a good spot to check!

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Wrote it down? I'm not sure. IIRC I learned it from Manny Knill in 1996, but my memory is very fuzzy

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Reposted by Michael Nielsen

Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

I surprised myself by writing a blog post about religion this morning 🤭 statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/01/a... I thank (blame?) @economeager.bsky.social and @michaelnielsen.bsky.social for inspiring me with their recent essays

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

Atheism is like a point null hypothesis and other thoughts on religion | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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Reposted by Michael Nielsen

Grace @gracekind.net · 09/07/2025

Reminds me of this paragraph from @michaelnielsen.bsky.social about human willingness to delegate to world-ending authority automated systems (whether because oversight is impossible or just inconvenient) michaelnotebook.com/xriskbrief/i...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

"Maybe if we add another rule / consultation that will help fix the decay" is kinda an attempt at distilling the inverse philosophy...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Good choice (I just listened to Serkis read "The Silmarillion" and "The Lord of the Rings", and it was great!)

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

A few thoughtfully-chosen excerpts from my "How to be a wise optimist..." essay:

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Do you know what happened with this? I missed that Cremieux was invited (and would likely have declined to participate had I known)

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Yeah, I had people like Ostrom, Mancur Olson, Schelling, Axelrod, and even Fukuyama in mind - really, the whole game-theoretic foundations for the evolution of co-operation

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Working notes on Joe Carlsmith's notion of "deep atheism": michaelnotebook.com/deepatheism/...

michaelnotebook.com

Notes on deep atheism

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

At some point I realized that everything online breaks, so what you want is handwritten static files hosted in the most stable place you can think of. GitHub Pages will eventually die, but I think that site is safe for a while...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Thanks. I'm certainly never going to be known for my design skills...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

ChatGPT, took 10 seconds for me to type the prompt

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

You might well be able to write quite a funny paper about "Emergent stupidity" ("we trained it to be anti-woke, and everything else got worse too...")

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

This is a really interesting speculative thread:

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

I mean two people who think they're working on homework at school, but are actually talking about shampoo. One of them just expressed surprise that their work is taking so long. I refrained from commenting "That's because you've only worked 10 mins over 2 hours..."

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

I find it oddly irritating when people think they're working but are actually hanging out. Like... just own that you're socializing, and do it well, rather than working totally ineptly...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

The use of the term "real world" to mean participation in primate social hierarchies is simultaneously tremendously misleading, and also a real testament to just how right Darwin was...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Exactly. "Imp" might fit better - there's not much malice in it, but it is a little annoying...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

I always find Socrates a little annoying. He's putting up a show of being interested in truth, but he never seems entirely honest himself

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

It's the single most helpful feature on Twitter for maintaining high quality conversation in one's mentions

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

The lack of softblocking drives me crazy. Bsky is great in so many ways, but the inability to remove followers makes the experience much worse...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Which are relatively unsycophantic? I want one that is broadly sympathetic, but 4o just seems crazy with "you're so awesome!"

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Curious: what is the next world reserve currency going to be? And why and when?

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

This graph (via @albrgr.bsky.social ) is one I think about regularly: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

People working on AI aren't going to be greeted as a saviour by hundreds of millions of people who fear losing their job

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

It's going to happen at a far more enormous scale than Google caused, very soon, I expect, and faster. And in best case it is not going to be pretty, and the people who work on things like RL and AV are not going to be heroes to everyone...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

... and her husband had had a kid assuming things would get better or stay the same. And she told me they were worried sick about paying for all the expenses coming down the line (college etc). And she knew it was Google etc. I think a lot about that conversation

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

People don't like losing their careers. And there's likely to be a lot of that the next few years I talked to a journalist at a major publication in ~2012 about her prior 10 years. She said (w/o rancour) that she'd gone from fulltime w/ benefits at 90k (and awards!) to contract making ~25k. She...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

I expect people who work on autonomous vehicles in particular will be especially popular with truck drivers. Not to mention all the people who are going to be killed by robots on the battlefield. Militaries aren't funding autonomous vehicles to help consumers...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

There's gonna be several orders of magnitude more ire than that, I rather suspect...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

I'm sure your intentions are good. Joe Weizenbaum wrote a great piece on this phenomenon, 39 years ago dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... He missed a lot, but that piece is still terrific. Much may be summarized as: intentions don't count for much, think about the systemic outcomes you contribute to

dl.acm.org

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

You are working on a technology that a lot of people fear is going to be enormously damaging to their lives. Some (maybe all) of those people are going to be correct...

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