iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nice. But *does* Bostrom's definition mean that? It can mean anything you want it to mean, given that "virtually" and "of interest". And that was presumably his intention.

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It is, by the way. Looking at it again reminded me what a glorious book this is.

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i.e. "virtually all" - omitting what? "Of interest" - to whom?

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I love it how Bostrom's definition is wheeled out to imply (you don't do that here) that it already has a meaning: “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”. And all this really does is expose the shallowness of that definition...

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 13h

Nice! I didn't know about those 60s magazines. I take it that a "beat yogi" means a kind of hippy mystic, but before the late 60s.

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Saw this in the charity stop and thought "actually I don't think I have that one". But it was the cover that really sold it to me 😁

Caspar Henderson's book A New Map of Wonders

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Nathaniel Comfort @nccomfort.bsky.social · 22h

i’m so glad that @philipcball.bsky.social wrote about Conrad Waddington. Like Lamarck, he has been accused of believing evolution is purposive. Lately, ppl are finding that there can be direction in evolution w/o anything supernatural about it. Good to see Wad getting better press

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Lots of ongoing talk about "superintelligence", AI consciousness/feelings, and the like, so I figured it would be worth giving this another round. The AI industry is going to keep pushing its crappy narratives, but we don't have to do their work for them. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

prospectmagazine.co.uk

We’re all going to die, but not from AI

That artificial intelligence could destroy humanity is a story imposed by the AI industry itself. It’s time to challenge it

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James Gleick @around.com · 10/10/2026

When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Excellent! It's wonderful to have this full collection of commentaries openly accessible! 👏

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Do they believe that Claude "suffers" from such actions? I really don't know. But I do think there are folks in the company who are that deluded.

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Anthropic could've said that they adopted this policy because they feel it is not helpful to individuals to allow them to play out abusive behaviour even when interacting with a machine. That would've been fine. But with this wording they want to sustain a fantasy. www.anthropic.com/news/2026-us...

anthropic.com

2026 Usage Policy update

We’re publishing a new version of our Usage Policy. In this post, we summarize the changes we’ve made.

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Prospect Magazine @prospectmagazine.co.uk · 09/10/2026

“We can choose to stop seeing AI developers as untouchable geniuses. We can push back against their grandiosity, evasions and fantasies,” writes Philip Ball:

prospectmagazine.co.uk

We’re all going to die, but not from AI

That artificial intelligence could destroy humanity is a story imposed by the AI industry itself. It’s time to challenge it

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That's so interesting. Crick is asking some pertinent questions, but also seeming to want to use them as a way to avoid thinking about the issues. So I can understand Wad's impatience too.

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Adam Becker @adambecker.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Is there somewhere you can point me for that correspondence? I'd be very interested to see it.

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Intelligence is not a universal solvent. It doesn't fix everything. The people pushing these ideas only believe this is true because they desperately want it to be true. They want the world to be much, much simpler than it actually is. But we live in a complicated world, and that's a good thing.

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Adam Becker @adambecker.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It's important to remember that the AI doom scenario assumes not only that intelligence is a single well-defined thing, but also that intelligence solves literally every single problem, and that in every conflict overwhelming intelligence always wins. This is just not how anything works.

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In other words, there is no "there" to reach.

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We’re all going to die, but not from AI

The reason we should not be using "superintelligence" is not (just) to piss off Trump but because (as Melanie Mitchell says here) it does not really mean anything. It's an industry puff term - one of several. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

prospectmagazine.co.uk

That artificial intelligence could destroy humanity is a story imposed by the AI industry itself. It’s time to challenge it

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Adam Frank @adamfrank4.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Mathematics exists entirely within a domain governed by the formal rules of logic. It was always going to be susceptible to machines good at application of formal rules. But the rest of science lives in the very real, very messy very physical world. www.everymansuniverse.com/p/what-does-...

everymansuniverse.com

What Does AI Solving Hard Math Problems Really Mean?

Is this the dawn of

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It was a delight to work here on one of my favourite topics.

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No, I don't have much room in these pieces, I fear.

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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Yup. That's why I think it's important to remind what it actually means, and then discuss.

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Reposted by Philip Ball

Note how in all of this, Vance's comments are suffused with the rhetoric of 1930s Nazi eugenics, including the "elite human being" (in German, Herrenmensch or Übermensch). Straight from Curtis Yarvin, and Elon Musk, by the way. bsky.app/profile/atru...

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My little update on "Have your best baby" for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

thenewworld.co.uk

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What's she in Jon? I love her.

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So far the answer seems to be "to solve all disease". 🤷‍♂️

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Indeed, though not primarily for that reason.

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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Especially if they don't say which island and then just leave.

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I wrote up that thread on the new paper on Rosalind Franklin as a Substack post. matthewcobb2.substack.com/p/how-our-vi...

A DNA image with the title of the post on it.

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Might be interesting, at least.

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It has out-Bulwer-Lytton-ed us all.

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Well Jeff, here you're touching on a debate that goes all the way back to Plato... oh no wait, you had no clue about that, you were just being a spineless toady.

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Did any real person ever write as terribly, while as confidently, as this? If so, I'm not sure I've seen it.

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That AI has distilled from all human writing a voice that is so smugly blind to its own utter awfulness is really rather poignant.

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It sounds as though it can be rather harder than that to figure out if the writer is genuine, especially if they are first-timers.

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