Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?

One of the best firsthand accounts of the Sept. 11 attacks I’ve read is a short essay titled “Diary of Disaster” by Nicholas Spangler, at the time a 25-year-old journalism-school student and today a reporter for Newsday on Long Island. Spangler happened to be downtown that morning, close enough to the World Trade Center to arrive on the scene between the first and second planes. Like many early recollections of the first hours at ground zero, written before memories had been corrected to fit the dimensions of history, his is as strange as it is horrifying.

He hears the bodies of the north tower’s jumpers hitting the pavement, and also the easy-listening music still drifting out of the building’s outdoor speakers. Under a tree newly stripped of its leaves lies a severed leg wrapped in burlap. Barely an hour after the second tower’s collapse, onlookers enlist Spangler to take a souvenir photo of them posing in front of the wreckage with a disposable camera. It’s the end of the world, or at least of a world, and people have not yet figured out how they are supposed to act.

Days later, trying to make sense of what he has seen, Spangler writes: “I believe that our present way of life ended in those minutes or hours. The American ethos — the way we see the world and our place in it — fractured and will perhaps have to be discarded.”

When he revisits that passage three months later, however, it feels wrong to him. “Our way of life did not end so much as it was interrupted,” he writes, “and if there is such a thing as an American ethos, it has not been significantly altered. There are those relative few whose lives bear the permanent bloody brand of that day but most of us continue to be shaped by much more banal events.”

Did 9/11 change everything? For years, people who agreed on nothing else about the attacks’ aftermath would have agreed that the answer was yes. Arguing otherwise would have been an affront to the victims, to the war on terror’s civilian and military casualties and to the common sense of anyone who has had to take off their shoes at airport security. But question and answer alike have always been colored by the assumption that 9/11 was supposed to change everything: that in being attacked as it was, the United States was being presented with a test that it could pass or fail.

A quarter-century on, it is possible to consider the question with at least some critical distance. Far too much of our current reality stems directly from 9/11 for anyone to argue credibly that it was not a hinge point in our recent history: the ubiquity of surveillance technology, the vague open-endedness that all American military operations now acquire, the general up-armoring of everyday life. At the same time, considering the most dystopian facets of this reality, 9/11’s influence is not as singular as it might have once seemed. It is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning. [...]

Of course, in the end, the United States got neither self-awareness nor self-actualization. What it got, a decade and a half later, was Donald Trump, whose election in 2016 has often been cast as a culmination of what the journalist Spencer Ackerman, in his 2021 book “Reign of Terror,” describes as the “decadent phase of the war on terror.”

Trump’s path from reality-TV celebrity to the presidency ran through the Islamophobic fever swamps of the post-9/11 right — the ground zero mosque panic, Obama birth-certificate conspiracism — but also through an increasingly bipartisan discontent with the war on terror that had, by 2016, curdled into cynicism. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to break the formidable taboo against affirming what most Americans by then believed, that the country’s post-9/11 military adventurism had been a mistake. He also did little to seriously curtail it in his first presidency and has enthusiastically expanded it in his second.

It has long been tempting to view Trump’s presidencies as the logical conclusion of the folly of the post-9/11 era, and as support for the liberal contention that the right’s calls for patriotism in that era were always really about seizing domestic power. But Trump has also enabled a re-examination of history, and even recent history, that complicates the tale of 9/11’s primacy. [...]

Trump’s 2016 election “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate” in the early 1990s, John Ganz writes in “When the Clock Broke,” his recent history of the period’s underappreciated malaise. In retrospect, 9/11 was paradoxically both a respite from and accelerant of polarizations and pathologies that were already well underway by then. It allowed Americans to ignore them for a moment, until they came roaring back with redoubled force. [...] [ed. So, explain Obama.]

If you do not remember the Berlin Wall but had an adolescence shaped by social media and cellphones, the brightest dividing lines in recent history are technological — and, with the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, are becoming more so. This is clear in the borrowed nostalgias of Gen Z, the bits of the past that 20-somethings have recently pressed into service as emblems of a lost golden era: “Friends,” John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, ’90s high-school-class home videos, music videos and concert footage from bands like Alien Ant Farm and Puddle of Mudd.

These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone. [ed. lol...ok.]

by Charles Homans, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chantal Jahchan
[ed. Nice words, but no. C'mon. 9-11 was our last opportunity to cohere as a country, and we whiffed it. Instead we got a war on terror, as stupid and amorphous as any initiative based on a feeling (War on Anxiety?). A Patriot Act that gave subsequent crimes a never-ending veneer of political cover. 'Homeland' security, a Nazi term repurposed for new times. Two stupid reactionary wars (neither won) that among other things validated torture as official US state policy. Guantanamo Bay. A newly militarized culture. An expanded surveillance state. And fear... fear everywhere of some 'other' where strength and self-assurance used to be.]

How To Avoid Becoming A Doomsday Prepper

I knew I had gone too far when the question of whether we should buy a gun crossed my mind. This came at the apex of a weeklong anxiety spiral triggered by a New York Times feature about the possibility of an 18-month nationwide blackout. I was uneasy seeing the phrase “art form” used to describe the archaic manufacturing process of the transformers that underpin our electrical grid; the process involves painstakingly bespoke techniques of winding copper coils, wrapping paper insulation, and binding wiring, all by hand. The intensity and intricacy of that process means that there is a backlog of transformer manufacturing and repair, sometimes stretching as long as five years. There are more than 55,000 substations in the United States, but according to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission official cited in the article, only nine of the most powerful substations would need to be taken out to trigger a nationwide blackout, which could go on to last as long as 18 months.

 

At the same time I read this article, an actual blackout was taking place in Gary, Indiana, a state where more than 370,000 people—the population is disproportionately black—were left in the dark for two weeks before power was restored. ... I replayed the videos and then thought about them for days, imagining how I would respond in that type of situation and knowing that I was completely unprepared to defend myself if I needed to do so. [...]

The Covid pandemic was a lesson in catastrophe, a confirmation for many of us that the worst can actually happen. And the likelihood of disaster, which has always loomed in the background, continues to escalate in unprecedented ways. The air is dense and orange because wildfires are ravaging the north. Flash flooding caused horrific mudslides in Nepal. A super El Niño is brewing in the Pacific. How does a person, in good conscience, bring a baby into a world like this?

It was in this miasma of paranoia, anticipation, and horror that a self-preservation instinct began to take over, one grounded deeply in my ability to purchase comfort and safety. This is how I ended up on the Preppers subreddit, reading about the relative merits of pre-made emergency kits (pre-made is better than nothing, but you’re generally better off compiling your own) and the most important things to do in the first 12 hours of a blackout (stockpile as much water as you can, but also consider stocking cigarettes and alcohol for bartering). I let myself drift into a prepper spiral and bookmarked generators and hand-crank radios, and then considered how much space in my basement could be dedicated to storing food and water.

The websites that sold emergency prep kits depicted a post-blackout world as a ravaged apocalypse and the would-be owners of their kits as savvy, self-sufficient survivors. “When the grid dies,” one site says, “you don’t.”

The Reddit preppers recommended thousands of dollars worth of products, but they also extolled the virtues of practical knowledge. You should know basic construction, they said, and also collect seeds, and also know self-defense. There were always ways you could go deeper and become more self-sufficient. This is how people end up with massive compounds filled with weapons and enough food to last years. I could see the logical jumps my mind could make to land me there.

My personality is particularly susceptible to this kind of anxiety, and so is my partner’s. After a few days of sending links back and forth to each other, we sat down to talk about how far we actually wanted to take this. We landed on a 30-day supply of freeze-dried food from Costco and an emergency first aid kit—a modest financial investment toward alleviating our shared anxiety. We kept generators and solar panels off the table, but when the thought of buying weapons fleetingly crossed my mind, I knew I needed to call a timeout and figure out what I was actually worrying about.

I was afraid of losing control, of life not going according to plan, of another major disruption changing the course of history. I was afraid that my neighbors would turn on each other, that the world would turn into every post-apocalyptic movie I’ve ever seen, and that I would regret not doing everything I could to protect my family. I was afraid of the horror my child would inevitably experience when confronted with the cruelty and neglect that humans are capable of, and I was afraid that as their parent, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to protect them from it.

Once I articulated these fears, I realized I could not control them even if I spent my entire life in a defensive crouch of paranoid preparation. If the U.S. is plunged into an 18-month national blackout, it will be a cataclysmic event that will touch every part of our society and economy such that continuing any kind of normal life will be impossible. The amount of preparation I would have to do to maintain a semblance of normalcy in that instance would require such absurd investments of time and money that it would force me to adopt “emergency preparedness” as a main personality trait and hobby. And doing that would require a change of my fundamental values and worldview, too, because it would make me live in a way that assumes people are more likely to hurt than help each other.

Coincidentally, my partner, who is a college professor, taught a lesson recently contrasting Hobbesian and Lockean states of nature for his Intro To Government class. Thomas Hobbes believed that people were driven by competition, distrust, and scarcity. In projecting a disaster scenario, Hobbes would expect neighbors to steal from each other and would place a priority on self-defense and independence. John Locke, on the other hand, believed that people’s actions are generally governed by natural law to not hurt “Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions,” that peace is the natural condition of society, and that any conflict that arises is an exception, rather than its fundamental nature. This doesn’t mean that Locke imagines a utopian response to disaster, but even if conflict arose, he would expect a greater amount of cooperation between people.

You can see why Hobbes and Locke are taught at the beginning of a government class: The way you view the world determines how you live in it. These two theories also underpin the central policy differences between the left and the right. What is responsible for the problems in our world, and how do we go about solving them? If you believe that people are mostly selfish and hungry for power and resources, for example, you will be less likely to advocate for social safety nets. I realized that my anxiety was leading me into an imaginary Hobbesian hellscape, and I was using my impending parenthood to justify it.

Later that day, we walked over to a block party in our neighborhood hosted by a coffee shop/bar/event space that some neighbors founded in an old church. The shop, West Art, serves as a third space and community hub for our neighborhood. Free clubs meet up there nearly every night of the week, from songwriting circles to watercolor painting; the actual church space is booked up multiple times a day for events like children’s art classes, political organizing, square dancing, and concerts. West Art’s founders, Josh Gibbel and Rufus Deakin, are two of my neighbors who just acted on the very common intrusive thought of “What if this was something?” They bought the church in 2023, and since then they’ve transformed it into what they call “the living room of Lancaster.”

The block party was an all-day event where vendors set up shop along the residential street that West Art occupies, along with two stages for bands to perform, food trucks, a bounce house, and lots of community organizing. As I sat on the ground and watched kids throw balls at the fundraising dunk tank, my anxieties about the apocalypse began to feel small and silly. If disaster does come, I’m lucky to live in a community of people who already have lots of practice in looking out for each other. There’s privilege in that; it’s easier to live up to your values, whatever they are, when you have a fridge full of groceries and a roof over your head. Even still, the block party was a reminder to me of the state of nature I believe in, where people are more likely to help than hurt each other and one’s survival isn’t just a matter of individual responsibility. 

by Alex Sujong Laughlin, Defector | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. I was in a community once that suffered a week long electrical blackout. First off, you don't open the refrigerator much, except for quick grabs. Then the backyard cookouts, everyone trying to use up whatever frozen items like meat, fish and other perishables that would spoil. It was a tight community so people were used to sharing, and that helped a lot. After a few days neighbors came up and would ask if you had enough to eat (with canned chili and ramen being especially welcome). The two supermarkets were closed (no credit/debit card readers, cash registers or lights), so too the gas station (electric gas pumps, cash registers), banks (computers, security), and everything else that ran on electricity (including ATMs - cash is king). And of course, all electrical outlets were dead (no phone charging). One woman (a stranger) even offered to lend me money because the ATMs and bank weren't working and she saw my frustration. Also, when the sun goes down so does everything else. No lights, tv, reading, music or anything unless you have laterns or candles. Some folks brought out guitars and other instruments and little song circles formed here and there. Even better, kids were everywhere outside doing kid things again. You never really think about how electricity powers everything until it's gone. Since then I've always kept a good supply of canned goods and other necessities stored, and have a go-bag with all the important stuff I need (papers, id, passport, medication, money, some clothes, first aid, enough food and water for a few days, and an added solar phone charger. Depending on your community you might want to consider a gun and some ammo. Mostly, I was just impressed at how everyone pulled together, sharing goods and news, and trying to stay positive together.]

It's All Good, Bro

Callaway Golf Got Wrecked By YouTube Doofuses Because Everyone’s Out Of Ideas

Try this, maybe: Think of the internet as an ocean vast enough to contain a near-infinite constellation of distinct watery biomes, each populated by creatures that have evolved to suit the one in which they live—a bunch of weird creatures traveling in schools, chasing each other around, eating each other, and, in the most inhospitable depths, eating shit in the inky dark. Even to get your feet wet in this ocean is to know that it is bigger and colder than you could grasp. I don't know how to properly describe the uncanny feeling of becoming aware of how many online realities are unfolding, often in ways that draw big audiences and throw off real profits, in browser tabs I will never open, just as that hideous translucent deep-sea crapfish could not describe the experience of living in water. It would in some ways be a cruel thing to drag it up from the depths to show it a bunch of cavorting dolphins, but mostly it would be pointless. It would be too bright for it to see anything at all.

This is how I feel when confronted with the story of Good Good, which started as a golf YouTube channel and swiftly grew into a sprawling brand that sponsored PGA Tour players and a PGA event; they partnered with the brand Callaway Golf and raised $45 million from a group including the Manning brothers' Omaha Productions. This company was growing fast and lucratively, in a number of different directions, in a part of the ocean that I do not visit or really even know how to look at. Golfweek described the company's vision as "blending creator-driven entertainment, professional-caliber competition, and fan engagement into a format designed for golf's next generation of consumers." This is legible enough, but also there's a lot going on in that sentence, little pockets of vibe and affinity that are related enough to exist within the same space, but otherwise not notably in conversation. A lot of companies and a lot of YouTube are also like this.

The events that have led to the unraveling of Good Good over the past few weeks, by contrast, are easy enough to understand. As part of their partnership with Callaway, Good Good made a strange, bad ad that begins with Good Good creator and co-founder Garrett Clark violently pushing a woman, golfer and fellow Good Good creator Alexis Miestowski, to the ground when she tries to touch his Callaway driver. Clark then stands over her and says in a menacing tone, "Do not touch my new driver."

The ad, which was ostensibly a riff on the movie Obsession but otherwise too bad to parse, went over poorly. Major retailers pulled Good Good merchandise from their shelves, and Golf Galaxy took its name off a Golf Channel show it had sponsored alongside Good Good, which led the network to table the show. PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp described the ad as "concerning." In a statement in which he admitted that his company had approved the ad, which Good Good produced, Callaway CEO Chip Brewer said "that approval should never have happened. Mistakes were made and we are taking the matter very seriously."

Callaway subsequently pulled the ad, made one fulsome apology and then a second, donated $1 million to charities dedicated to preventing domestic violence, and cut ties with the brand. Good Good, for its part, duffed not one but two attempts at an apology. Co-founder and CEO Matt Kendrick posted, at 3:38 a.m. ET, a tweet which read: "Interesting that Callaway Golf asks us to make an ad then approves it then asks us to take the fall then drops us in a coordinated media blitz and covers it up by giving a million dollars away thinking everyone will be ok with it. 30 for 39 will be legendary." Last Wednesday, Kendrick and Good Good president Joe Flannery, who had started just days before the ad was released, both stepped down.

There are some extremely obvious lessons to take from this, regarding how to not market your pioneering new golf club as well as the risks of aligning your big global brand with YouTube dunces, and it seems both redundant and rude to remind Callaway of those at this moment. The other brands that have taken long positions on partnering with social media creators and influencers have surely made note of all that, too.

None of this is especially difficult to understand in the abstract. Creators like Good Good have an audience that companies like Callaway want to reach and mostly do not understand. "There's probably a stigma from like the older golf fan that 'only 12-year-olds watch that,'" Kendrick told Golfweek back in 2025. "Well, if you actually knew our demographic, you would know that it's 24-to-35 is our main demographic." In giving Good Good the benefit of the doubt, on things like this bafflingly and obviously bad ad but also in general, Callaway entrusted the brand's reputation to an outside partner that they trust to speak to that audience in a way they'll understand. That Good Good duffed it is inarguable at this point, but there is also that classic showing-dolphins-to-a-crapfish aspect inherent in this sort of thing even when it works. Ben Goren, a writer and marketer, summed those risks up well in his newsletter in late August:

For as ubiquitous as social media is, it has become almost unfathomably segmented. You can earn millions of views and millions of followers without Joe McAverage American having any clue who you are. Joe McAverage American is probably upset that you think he should know who that random TikToker is. And when someone doesn’t know who you are, they are extremely unlikely to have even a moment of hesitation before throwing you into the garbage can when you bore them, confuse them, or, in the case of Good Good, upset them.

In a second post, Goren does a good job illustrating the broader state of play in the golf influencer space, and how the big brands have approached and should approach partnerships with them. There are lessons there, too, both for brands trying to figure out how to use influencers to their advantage and a sport trying to figure out where its next generation of players will come from. As someone who is less interested in marketing or golf than Goren, what I find interesting about this story has less to do with its YouTube-damaged or golfy particulars and more to do with how likely it is to repeat itself elsewhere in the culture.

But also the golfy particulars seem instructive. The sport is in the middle of an authentic surge in popularity, and confronting the happy challenge of having to figure out how to get all those interested new golfers, many of them kids, onto actual golf courses. The brands and institutions that stand to profit from this interest—companies like Callaway, which will sell them clubs and bags for as long as they are playing golf—know where those golfers are, but not really who they are or quite what they want; this is mostly because they are brands and institutions, and as such would naturally struggle with this kind of thing.

And so they have to delegate, or just defer to what YouTube's viewer stats tell them about what those people like and want. This is how cycling's Vuelta a España winds up bringing aboard a member of the Vertical Video Community to chaotic effect, or how the previously bottomless resources of Saudi Arabia's Private Investment Fund created a new and ostentatiously "louder" golf tour that went bankrupt before it figured out what else it might have been. The institutions are guessing, and sorting rude metrics from high to low. The size of the ocean humbles even the biggest fish in it. [...]

But if the Good Good story illustrates the peril inherent in big brands trusting feral web goofs to tell their stories, the cringe and carnage of those big brands trying to tell that story themselves demonstrates why they still need to rely on influencers and creators.

It seems reasonable enough to assume that Callaway approved Good Good's awful, stupid, brand-wrecking ad because they assumed that there was something in it they didn't get; that assumption, and that sense of what they didn't understand, is why they got into business with them in the first place. Callaway's size and status meant that they could survive being wrong in a way that Good Good couldn't, but the problem that brands like Callaway bring in creators like Good Good to solve is a stubborn one, and one those companies are uniquely ill-suited to address. They know enough to know that they don't know how to find or talk to the people they need to reach, and they're right about that; they're astute enough to identify the creators that do know that, and rich enough to pay them. But that's not enough.

If these brands knew what they wanted to say—if they actually had anything in particular to say, or any real sense for the people they want to say it to—it might be easier. Goren, for instance, makes a case for selling golf not as just another backdrop for Good Good-style bits and goofs, but as a worthwhile craft and pursuit in itself. In the absence of any such commitment, institutional players—and businesses, politicians, and others with an interest in shaping and steering those people's opinions—are mostly just casting baited lines out there to see what they can catch in the places where they think they might catch them. But the ocean is the ocean, and having a map of it is very different than having a useful understanding of it. All that money and all that reach and all that work, and they still can't think of what's down there as anything but food.

by David Roth, Defector |  Read more:

Image: Kenneth Richmond/Getty Images

Butchering a £5,000 Bluefin Tuna With a Sushi Master

We break down the entire fish from head to tail, exploring the different cuts of tuna, how the fat content and texture change throughout the fish, and which parts are best suited to sushi, sashimi, grilling and cooking. Along the way, we taste some of the most prized and unusual cuts.

In this video:

•⁠ ⁠Break down a whole 200kg bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn professional tuna butchery techniques
•⁠ ⁠Explore the different cuts of bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Taste lean, medium-fatty and fatty tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn how tuna is prepared for sushi and sashimi
•⁠ ⁠Discover rarely seen cuts
•⁠ ⁠Learn traditional Japanese sushi techniques 

•⁠ ⁠See how different parts of one tuna can taste completely different

Jamie Hewlett, 2005
via:

Gyoshū Hayami, Cup of Tea and Fruit, 1921
via:

Cheat Like Hell

September 11, 2026

Last night was the second night of the Republican midterm convention Trump staged to fire up his base. Such a midterm convention is rare—the purpose of national conventions is to pick a president and write a platform—but Trump has turned the Republican Party into a vehicle for his own power and apparently thinks putting himself at the center of the midterms can overcome the headwinds the Republicans are battling.

Or perhaps, with his approval ratings hitting a new low, he just wanted to stand in front of cheering crowds again.

The audience at the American Airlines Center in Dallas was sparse, and according to Kara Voght of the Wall Street Journal, many who were there had received their tickets for free from state parties or right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty. But, she wrote, “everyone wanted to watch another episode of the Trump show.”

Although the crowd was small enough that it did not fill the arena, Trump got the absolute loyalty he demanded from those who had turned out. At the event, he led the crowd in an oath. “Please raise your right hand,” he shouted. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe.” The crowd chanted dutifully after him.

“That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way—I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do, they’d never, there’s never been bigger cheaters, they don’t care. I am gonna go out and I’m gonna get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November third or we are going to vote before that!” The crowd erupted in applause.

Once again, he promised that if the Republicans held control of the House and Senate after the midterms, he would distribute a $5,000 check to all adult U.S. citizens, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars even if it were legal for him to do so (which it is not).

But while the Trump show in Dallas was being broadcast to the president’s fans, reality was very much on the minds of those watching events in the Middle East.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Another view:]

Jacob Coxon Warns of Human Extinction and Triggers a Preference Cascade

CEOs of major AI labs, and employees of major AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often say they plan to build superintelligence soon, as in within a few years create AIs that are superior to humans at essentially all cognitive tasks.

They often warn that such AIs might kill everyone. Or that AIs might cause mass unemployment, cause cyberattacks across the internet, enable mass surveillance or risk causing any number of other highly bad things.

These warnings are consistently and directly against the interests of the labs. Yet the warnings have recently gotten a lot louder and more frequent. OpenAI has been practically screaming, for those with ears to listen, on many occasions.

A series of events, over two months and especially the last week or so, including internal observations of the pace of progress at OpenAI and also Anthropic, have freaked out everyone involved quite a lot more than they were already freaked out.

After all the events, plus statements by Dean Ball and Jakub Pachocki, we were seeing the beginnings of a preference cascade.

Then along came Jacob Coxon as the tipping point, and things took off.  [...]

Jacob Coxon Resigns From Anthropic In Protest And Sounds The Alarm 

Jacob Coxon spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. He has come to realize that everyone involved is being wildly irresponsible.

He warns us: They are racing straight to superintelligence and gambling with our lives. I agree with and strongly endorse his statement.

If anything he sounds like an optimist. He’s asking you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like, which means he thinks you have a few years left.

Jacob Coxon (former Anthropic and OpenAI, 160m+ views, September 8): I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.

A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.

Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.

I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.

If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” - or take this moment to call for different conditions?

Jacob Coxon (WSJ interview): We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already.

If you want Jacob Coxon’s full views, I recommend his interview with Wired’s Maxwell Zeff. This thread has extensive quotes.

Here is Jacob Coxon doing a 5 minute interview with Anderson Cooper. He speaks well and plainly, and it is clear how much the events of the last two months have made it much easier to speak plainly to a civilian like Cooper about what is happening.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel doing four minutes on this. He gets it. How is this not the top news story on every site, indeed.

Yes, this is a common view, even if few have the courage to act.

Alex Turner: I left Google DeepMind in June. Jacob is right: many researchers believe they are building something that could kill everyone on the planet. It was literally my day job to think about how to stop that.

That tells you how bad Alex Turner thought DeepMind’s actions were with regard to the Department of War. His day job was that he got paid by Google to think about how to stop AI from killing everyone, and he felt morally obligated to quit in protest.

Derek Thompson here writes about this as part of AI Safety Is Having a Moment.

If you want to see the full list of lab employee quotes from the preference cascade, I compiled them into another post today. [...]

A few days ago, I had no idea who Jacob Coxon was, and I was not alone.

The timing of a preference cascade is difficult to predict. Once they start they can happen very quickly. You don’t want to talk until you are confident others will, and at some point the evidence that others will follow can snowball and it happens. A classic concrete example was replacing Biden in 2024.

Derek Thompson: what’s weird is that, in a way, this is breaking thru even more than huggingface! ... and it’s just a guy nobody had heard of reiterate a position that his CEO has said on podcasts 1,000 times

Why was Coxon able to set off a preference cascade? How did this one break through?

A confluence of factors, all of them downstream of the obvious actual reason, which is that there is a good chance that AI kills everyone soon.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

[ed. Who's betting on reason and political courage to win the day? Uh, huh. First of all, agree on a temporary halt to recursive self-improvement (AIs improving AIs). Second, delay/suspend IPO's (even if most of the current economy is driven by AI spending and debt). Third, light a fire under politicans (it's been done successfully with data center buildouts). At this point, just one of these would be a big win. Here's Nate Soares, co-author of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: A case for courage, when speaking of AI danger (LW). Also this:]

***

Terry Pratchett: “Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."

***

UPDATE: Dario Amodei (Anthropic) proposes a three-point plan. Original here (We Must Pace the Frontier.]

Humpback Whales Are Interrupting Orca Hunts to Rescue Completely Different Species

It’s not a story anyone would have believed if it weren’t so thoroughly documented. A pod of killer whales in Antarctica is chasing a Weddell seal that’s taken refuge on a small ice floe. The orcas swim shoulder to shoulder to create a wave that washes the seal off the ice and into the water. Death looks certain. And then, without warning, a pair of humpback whales arrives. The seal, panicking, swims towards them. A wave tosses it onto the chest of the closer humpback, which is by this point rolling belly-up at the surface. The humpback arches its chest out of the water to keep the seal high and dry, above the reach of the frustrated killer whales circling below. When the seal starts to slip off, the humpback gently pushes it back onto its chest with a flipper. The seal eventually escapes onto another ice floe. The orcas, denied their meal, swim off.

The marine ecologist who watched this happen in 2009 was, on his own subsequent account, so bewildered that it took him years to work out what he’d actually seen. And what he ended up finding, once he started asking other researchers whether they’d witnessed anything similar, was that it wasn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. And it involves species the humpbacks have no obvious reason to help.

What the researchers actually documented

According to a 2017 review paper by Dr Robert Pitman of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, with Volker Deecke, Christine Gabriele and eleven other co-authors from research institutions around the world, published in Marine Mammal Science under the title “Humpback whales interfering when mammal-eating killer whales attack other species: Mobbing behavior and interspecific altruism?”, the team compiled 115 documented interactions between humpback whales and killer whales over a sixty-two-year period from 1951 to 2012. The interactions came from researchers, whale-watch operators and wildlife photographers across multiple ocean basins.

The numbers, once you sit with them, don’t quite behave the way you’d expect. In 57 per cent of the interactions, the humpbacks were the ones who started it. They swam towards the killer whales, not away. Ninety-five per cent of the orcas involved were mammal-eating forms rather than fish-eating ones, meaning the humpbacks were reliably distinguishing between the two ecological populations and only intervening when the killer whales were hunting warm-blooded prey. And in the interactions where humpbacks approached killer whales that were actively attacking something, 87 per cent involved a kill or a hunt in progress.

The bit that made the paper genuinely surprising is what happened next. When the humpbacks arrived at the scene of an attack, only 11 per cent of the time was the prey another humpback. The other 89 per cent of the time, the killer whales were hunting something else entirely. A seal. A sea lion. A porpoise. A grey whale calf. A minke whale. A sunfish. Across the full data set, humpbacks were documented interfering with orca attacks on ten different species, including six kinds of pinniped, three other cetacean species, and one bony fish.

The interventions weren’t casual. Humpbacks travelled up to two kilometres to reach an ongoing attack. They approached bellowing and trumpeting. They positioned themselves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flippers, which on a fourteen-metre humpback are capable of doing real damage. They stayed for hours in some cases, refusing to leave until the killer whales gave up. In one incident in Monterey Bay in May 2012, described in reporting by National Geographic on the specific case, at least fourteen humpbacks converged on a group of killer whales that had killed a grey whale calf, and spent hours preventing the orcas from feeding on the carcass. One humpback stationed itself directly next to the dead calf, head pointed at it, tail slashing every time a killer whale approached.

None of this makes obvious sense.

by Kiran Journals, Space Daily | Read more:
Image: via

After Work, We’ll Have Each Other

What will people do all day? I mean, of course, if the AIs surpass us at all economically necessary forms of labor.

There’s an emerging consensus on this point, assuming we’re all still alive and not subjects of a cyberpunk feudalist dystopia. When the machines can do everything else, our relationships will be what’s left.

Maybe we won’t have to work at all. Or maybe we’ll still have something that superficially resembles modern employment, just concentrated in what economist Alex Imas calls “the relational sector” in his essay “What Will Become Scarce.” We’ll always need humans to supply the human touch. And how will we get those relational jobs? Relationships, obviously. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, since everyone knows everything anyway.

What is really being suggested here is less a continuation of modern work than a return to a much older cultural understanding of labor. Imas makes this point directly: “Before industrialization, it was difficult to separate a product from the person who made it … Economic transactions had a distinct social component that was innately linked to the consumption experience.”

Relatedly, before industrialization, there was very little sense that working, in itself, could be dignified or meaningful. We were not defined by our jobs but by our participation in a densely interconnected social world. And we might be again. That’s the natural consequence of all these relationalist predictions — a world where our connections to other humans are what give us structure, identity, and meaning.

I am afraid they’re right. 

Power and sex among apes

Making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change is always a risk, and I’d rather avoid it until it’s absolutely necessary. At the same time, our degree of ignorance about the future is greatly exaggerated. If the future looks anything like the past — and there’s good reason to believe it will — then we can make progress with case studies.

Let’s start with 18th-century aristocrats. Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor. More importantly, when they did need to acquire material resources, they did it through leveraging their connections to obtain more land or a lucrative position at court — no drudgery necessary.

They did not work for pay; they certainly did not see work as a source of meaning. It’s certainly true that some of them had real obligations, like governing or killing each other, but court life in the age of absolutism is as close to a purely relational world as anything I can think of.

We also know a great deal about what mattered most to them and how they chose to occupy their time.[...]

You might be imagining glittering salons where the leading figures of the Enlightenment discussed poetry, drama, and the most pressing philosophical issues of the day. This is (mostly) a lie. Salons existed and philosophes attended them, but more for entertainment than for rational discourse. When we look at the enormous amount of written material the salonnieres and their guests produced — as French historian Antoine Lilti did — it is clear that their conversation consisted overwhelmingly of political gossip. They were almost all aristocrats, and they almost always talked about themselves. [...]

The working classes

That would be The Urban Villagers, a 1962 ethnography of working-class Italian Americans in the West End of Boston by sociologist and urban planner Herbert J. Gans. This seems like an odd comparison. Don’t the working classes, by definition, work? [...]

Gans’ use of the term “urban village” was deliberate: He believed that the West Enders had inherited the basic forms of social organization from their parents and grandparents, rural peasants from Sicily or Southern Italy. These were not people who had absorbed a typically Yankee relationship to work. Most male West Enders worked unskilled or semiskilled blue-collar jobs, and their employment was typically precarious. They did not see a fulfilling career, or indeed a career of any kind, as possible or even desirable.

It’s not that West Enders liked their dead-end jobs. They just didn’t think much about them. Work was not a central organizing activity of West End life. West Enders worked just enough to support their lifestyle, which revolved around what Gans calls the peer group. The West End, in his words, was a “peer group society.” An adult peer group might include a married couple’s same-age relatives — siblings, cousins, in-laws — and perhaps a few childhood friends, who would probably be “adopted” in as godparents to the couple’s children. These people would spend almost all of their time together, meeting in the apartment of one family or another after work and staying late into the night. The men might gamble at a local corner store — gambling is absolutely omnipresent in this world — but mostly, they talked, and talking mostly meant gossip.

This is where the parallels to old money Midwestern ladies and European aristocrats start to show. While there are any number of things these groups don’t have in common, all of them share certain features.

First, none of them see work as a source of status. West Enders do like to show off, but never about their jobs: Their talent as conversationalists in the peer group setting is much more important. Second, they are exclusive. A West Ender knows all the same people from early childhood. They’re very skeptical of outsiders, including members of other ethnic groups who’ve lived in the same neighborhood their whole lives.

Finally, they all spend an enormous amount of energy policing deviant behavior. In the West End, this usually means sexual promiscuity for women, effeminacy for men, and class aspirations for anyone. A boy might be mercilessly bullied for doing too well in school or for wanting a white-collar job. Even unusual success is frowned upon. A person’s primary source of dignity is not their own achievements, but their relationship to the group:

The major criteria for ranking, differentiating, and estimating compatibility are ingroup loyalty and conformity to established standards of personal behavior, as well as interpersonal relations. West Enders expect each other to maintain prevalent social practices and consumer styles, to marry within the ethnic — or at least the religious — group, and to reject middle-class forms of status and culture … The most significant criterion of interpersonal behavior is behavioral control — the ability to regulate one’s own needs and wishes and to defer to the needs of the group when necessary.

Gans, like all good ethnographers, likes his subjects, and their way of life has a lot to like — they really do enjoy a warm, rich, close-knit social world. But he also goes out of his way to emphasize that these people are extraordinarily conformist relative to middle-class American suburbanites in the 1950s. [...]

Friendship was invented in 18th-century Scotland

Relational living comes to us naturally. It’s the most common form of social organization in human history, and millions of people around the world are perfectly happy with it. But when our personal dignity comes from our membership in a group, everything the group does reflects on us — and everything we do reflects, unavoidably, on the group. It’s not a coincidence that Russian princes and Bostonian Italian day laborers spent most of their time gossiping (or, if we want to be technical, constructing and enforcing norms of behavior). They were defending their collective reputations: the thing that mattered most to them in the world.

This is why so much contemporary discussion of work and meaning is misguided. It’s very clear that humans don’t need work or anything like it to live meaningful lives. Nor do we need the things that people who talk about “meaning” mean — individual self-actualization, personal growth, serving a greater purpose. We can get by just fine without any of them, as historically most of us have. What we absolutely can’t live without is a social framework for understanding ourselves in relation to the rest of our society and gaining the respect of our peers. The most important thing work gives us — after money, of course — is an alternative way to meet those needs. Not all jobs are pleasant or rewarding, but all of us benefit from living in a system where we can earn respect and dignity as adults from what we do, not who we know, or who we are.

And this is exactly what we see when we look at what Americans actually get out of work.

To start, most of us like it. Surveys from Pew typically find that about 85% of us are “somewhat” or “completely” satisfied with our jobs. Other long-running polls from Gallup and The Conference Board find similar results. This is true even when the jobs themselves aren’t impactful or even particularly interesting.

As the anthropologist Claudia Strauss has documented, plenty of people with very ordinary jobs report that their work is fun. But that’s not why they do it. [...]

Like all other human beings in history, workers want to be respected. But unlike members of relational societies, the things we want respect for are impersonal: our skills, our accomplishments, our contributions to a shared goal. These contributions don’t have to be earth-shatteringly significant — a waitress in Chicago or an office assistant in Grand Rapids can still feel that work matters. (Tocqueville, again: “American servants do not believe themselves degraded because they work; for around them everyone works. They do not feel debased by the idea that they receive a salary; for the President of the United States also works for a salary.”)

Moral equality is something relational societies struggle with. They tend to be more restrictive and more exclusionary. It’s nice to imagine a world where everyone is satisfied to be simply a good spouse or parent or friend, but that’s not how these things work in practice. When our dignity depends on our membership in a group, we start to police who else can join and what happens when they do. When humans get relational, we get clannish.

This brings us back to what we already know: The modern labor market has dissolved the bonds of tradition, family, and clan. In the modern world, relationships matter less. And because they matter less, we can do much more inside them. They are freer. They have room to breathe.

by Clara Collier, Asterisk | Read more:
Image:David Teniers the Younger (–1690), Smoking and drinking monkeys, c. 1660

[ed. See also: Strangers Next Door: The Decline of Neighborhood Socializing and the Class Divide in Belonging; and, A Digital Divide in American Adolescence: Gender, Class, and the New Teenage Experience (SCAL).]

Liberalism Needs a New Philosophy of Immigration

Biden mostly closed the border to asylum-seekers in 2024 after he saw how mad it was making Americans, but many Democrats are now calling for the abolition of ICE. This is a somewhat popular position right now, thanks to the agency’s abuses under Trump. But if Democrats actually try to abolish federal immigration enforcement instead of just reshuffling and renaming the agencies, I predict it will take just a couple of years for Americans to realize that the difference between “open borders” and “immigration laws with no one to enforce them” is largely semantic.

What’s needed, I believe, is not just a tactical, temporary retreat. We need to stop and think why a maximal pro-immigration policy is something that we need to retreat from in the first place. We need a new concept of what a sustainable liberal immigration policy looks like.

Since I started writing, I’ve been an advocate of more immigration to the United States. This does not mean I ever favored unrestrained immigration or open borders. I’ve consistently argued that favoring skilled immigration will bring more economic benefits to native-born Americans, and be more politically palatable as well. And while I don’t hate illegal immigrants for trying to better their lot in life, I favor strong border controls, because nations have the right to decide, democratically, who gets in and out. It’s understandable when people get mad at seeing their decisions flouted.

On top of that, I’ve always remained agnostic on immigration to other countries; although I find much to admire in Canada’s points-based system, for example, I don’t think that qualifies me to decide whether more immigration is good for Canada overall. If the people of a country decide that immigration is diluting their local culture unacceptably, for instance, I think they have every right to cut it off. That’s just Westphalian sovereignty — not a perfect system, but the best system we’ve ever found for organizing humanity into geographic units. As an American, I don’t view it as my place to tell Japan, or the UK, or any other country that immigration is the right choice for them.

Despite those reservations, I’ve always thought that immigration to the U.S. is a basically good thing, and should be expanded. The economic benefits are pretty undeniable — higher tax revenue to shore up our dangerously depleted government finances, dominance in high-tech industries and innovation, and so on. And while some of the economic costs are real — local housing shortages and strains on local government finances being the two biggest ones — many of the fears are overblown. In particular, the bulk of the evidence concludes that immigrants don’t reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born Americans.

And importantly, lots of Americans share my overall positive view of immigration. If you ask Americans whether they think immigration is good or bad, most will say “good”:

Source: Gallup

And if you ask Americans whether the annual rate of immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept the same, you get a pretty even split: [...]

So I’ve never really felt like I was going out on a limb or advocating an unpopular position when it came to this issue. Sure, rightists will direct online vitriol toward anyone who supports any immigration at all, but their energy and savagery shouldn’t be mistaken for majority support.

And yet there will always be some amount of immigration — and some types of immigration — that will arouse even the most open and welcoming people to ire and make them think about shutting the doors. We saw this in the U.S. in 2023-24, when anti-immigration sentiment spiked in response to Biden’s permissive asylum policies. Yes, that sentiment crashed again when Trump took power and started committing abuses. But if liberals don’t change how we approach immigration, the sentiment will simply rise again and again, as it has so many times throughout our history. And the Donald Trump and Stephen Miller types will be right back in power — and our country will be worse off for it.

Liberals need an immigration approach that can be sustained for long periods of time — i.e., one that doesn’t enrage the public every time it manages to get in power. What would that look like?

The first thing liberals (and progressives, and Democrats, and European lefties, etc.) need to admit is that migration is not a human right. We live in a world of sovereign nation-states, and unless we find some better way of dividing up and administering the world, we will continue to live in a world of sovereign nation-states. And nations are, necessarily, exclusive clubs; they have the right to restrict immigration for any reason whatsoever.

Liberals must therefore not view borders and citizenship as annoying obstacles to be tactically circumvented or overcome; instead, we must view them as fundamental parts of the social compact that allows nations, including liberal nations, to exist in the first place. Nation-states and their laws and their police and their courts and their armies are the fundamental guarantors of the human rights that define liberalism. And for better or for worse, the ability to decide who gets in and who has to keep out is a necessary precondition for nation-states to exist.

That means we need to recognize that immigration law is legitimate and needs to be upheld. Some progressives have tried to advance the notion that being undocumented is a marginalized identity that needs to be protected and supported by the state. But this is absurd; it’s like if progressives decided that people who drive over the speed limit are a minority group.

Illegal immigrants chose to break U.S. law when they came to this country. Our democratically elected leaders made those laws, and they should be honored. We should treat illegal immigrants humanely, of course, and we should not tear local communities apart just to hunt down a few people. But there has to be some way of enforcing the law, because a law without enforcement is no law at all.

A third principle that liberals should embrace is that the purpose of immigration is to benefit the people who already live in the country that is receiving the immigrants. Immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans. We must flatly reject any concept of immigration that sees it as a necessary sacrifice on the part of American citizens. [...]

Instead, liberals need to promote immigration because of the benefits it brings to the American citizenry. This includes economic benefits — the tax revenue, the investment, the eldercare, the innovation, the entrepreneurship, the expanded market size. But it also includes cultural benefits — the constant reinvigoration of this nation of immigrants by new waves of people with the gumption and bravery to pick up and move across the world in search of opportunity and freedom.

America has always been the country of the frontier; in order to maintain that ethos in the modern age, we need people for whom America itself is the frontier. And our founding ideals — which are very liberal ideals, of liberty and opportunity and the rights of the individual — are strengthened by people who make the conscious choice to move to a country that represents those ideals...

And if this requires us to be selective about which immigrants we bring in, then so be it. Skilled immigrants bring far more economic benefits per capita than others — so by all means, let us tilt our system toward them, as American voters of both parties want. Immigrants who don’t love and embrace American culture will probably invigorate our nation less — so by all means, let us bar immigrants who have been part of groups that see America as evil, using the law with which we once banned immigration by members of communist parties.

These are the kinds of decisions that nation-states, including liberal nation-states, are inherently entitled to make. And we should expect Europe to make different decisions than America makes. That’s perfectly OK. Because immigration is fundamentally the decision of each sovereign nation-state, it’s inevitable that we’ll make different decisions. JD Vance wants us to think that France’s immigration policy, or Germany’s, is inextricably tied to America’s. But it’s not, and we shouldn’t let him get away with conflating the two.

For America, the kind of immigration agenda I’ve sketched out — which all the polls show Americans favor by substantial margins — would not be a “far right” policy, even though some progressives and leftists will inevitably try to label it as such. In fact, it would allow in far more immigration than the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman. It won’t satisfy progressives who dream of a borderless world, or leftists who salivate over the chance to make the West pay for colonialism. But I believe it will preserve America as the kind of liberal nation-state that we knew it as in the days before Trump.

As for the rest of the world, countries like Germany and Canada and Japan have to make their own decisions. I can’t tell them what kind of nation to build; I can only try to promise that as an American, I’ll respect their decision. If they want to shut their doors in order to slow the pace of cultural change, it’s not my job to lecture them otherwise.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Gallup

Voters Have a Message for Democrats

What I learned from 400 focus groups

During the early Trump era, focus groups taught me everything about the disconnect between Washington and what voters really care about. An early revelation came in July 2018; I had flown to Columbus, Ohio, to hear from a group of people who’d voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but only reluctantly.

Three days before, Trump had participated in a diplomatic summit in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin. By that point, the U.S. intelligence community had publicly concluded that Putin had personally ordered a campaign to meddle in the 2016 presidential election for Trump’s direct benefit. At a press conference after their meeting, Trump was asked whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump responded. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” And just like that, the president had undermined 80 years of American foreign policy, prompting a bipartisan meltdown in Washington.

I was excited to hear what Trump-skeptical voters in the heartland thought about this epochal moment. These were the kinds of people who had been Reagan’s fiercest Cold Warriors, right? Surely they wouldn’t tolerate something like this from the American president. But when the moderator running the focus group asked the participants for their thoughts about Trump’s comments, he got a lot of blank stares.

Even big news like this doesn’t always filter down to voters, so the moderator explained the incident. I figured that once the group understood what had happened, outrage would follow. Nope. One person said that Trump’s comments were “wrong,” but the feeling in the room was that of a collective shrug. The thing we were all freaking out about in D.C. had barely registered out there among the voters.

Since that moment, I’ve conducted more than 400 focus groups with thousands of voters across the political spectrum. To my knowledge, this is the largest and most consistent qualitative study of voter sentiment during the Trump era. Here’s what I’ve learned: People are wild. They are full of contradictions. They lament our deep political divisions while raging about their political enemies. They believe in grace but cut their Trumpy brother out of their life forever. They’re married to an immigrant but voted for the guy who wants to deport millions of people who have the same immigration status as their wife. They hate the government and want to lower the national debt, but they also want the government to spend more to help them and their communities. They call themselves pro-life but believe in a woman’s right to choose. I could go on.

Listening to voters is a cheat code for understanding politics—democracy, after all, is the collective will of the voters—yet few people in politics do it. If you’re running a campaign, you might do a series of focus groups with voters in your district or state. If you’re a politician, you might go on “listening tours,” chat with people at the state fair, or host campaign events. But rarely do politicians and campaigns take the time to talk in-depth about why people feel the way they do.

The reality is, the closer you get to institutional politics, the further you are from the people whom politics and government are supposed to serve. Washington is less a swamp than a bubble, inside of which the rest of America becomes an abstraction.

I’m a former Republican who left the party after Trump took it over. I saw him for what he was: an existential threat to American liberal democracy. So I say this as someone who both crossed the political divide and still feels that Americans are underreacting to the acute threat of Trump and Trumpism: If Democrats want to win back power, they’re going to need to learn how to better relate to the American people, as people.

For all of their nonlinear thinking and idiosyncratic views, voters have told me a couple of things over and over again: They think the system is broken, and they feel that they’ve been lied to in ways that make their life tangibly worse. Fewer of them now believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead in this country. Instead, they think that “establishment” politicians are benefiting from this system while everyone else loses out. Because of that, they want to place their trust in leaders who come across as “real people” who are genuinely interested in improving voters’ day-to-day life—not just winning and holding political office.

In 2016, Republican voters looked at their party’s leadership—the Romneys, McCains, and Bushes—and decided they were done. Those leaders were too weak, too unwilling to fight, too committed to norms and processes that Democrats didn’t respect anyway. Republican voters hired a wrecking ball named Trump to knock it all down. Ten years later, I’m hearing similar sentiments from Democratic voters. They don’t trust Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, or any of the old-guard party leaders who allowed Trump to take over America. They want their own wrecking ball.

There’s a distinction here. Democrats don’t want Trump’s politics or even necessarily his all-out norm breaking. But they want his energy. They’re sick of a Democratic Party that does the functional equivalent of sending a strongly worded letter while democracy burns down around us. That tension—absolutely not, but also yes—is the defining mood among Democratic voters right now. They don’t want to become what they hate. But they are tired of losing to it.

I don’t think that most Democratic elites understand this reality. In those circles, the dominant debate seems to be about whether the party should be more progressive or more moderate. The future of the party is seen as a policy question. But when I listen to Democratic voters, they’re not asking for ideological recalibration or even policy specifics. They trust that if the right person makes it into office, the policy questions will take care of themselves. Instead, the Democratic voters I’m listening to are almost universally asking a different question: Why aren’t you fighting harder?

Last year, my team and I decided to run an experiment. We convened a couple of focus groups with Democrats who wanted the party to be more moderate, then a couple with Democrats who wanted the party to be more progressive. If I didn’t tell you which group was which, you would not be able to hear the difference by listening to them.

by Sarah Longwell, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Carl Godfrey
[ed. Both parties spend hundreds of millions of dollars convincing the American electorate that we should care about somebody getting a job in politics. Does anyone get excited about which CEO takes over a major company? At this point, I'll vote for anyone who's authentic, and that's about it. Don't give me slick ads and more negative energy. Produce or get voted out. If I can't judge a poltician by their character, ideas, initiative, and ultimately their record and results, they don't get my vote. To use the same example, would any HR department hire someone simply on the basis of slogans and generalities (and how much they love the company)? Get out.]

Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape, 1913

via:

An Alien Mind

This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence. OpenAI will continue to seek technical solutions to alignment and monitoring, to build defensive systems and unilaterally withhold further scaling as needed; however, I believe broader interventions are required.

Intellect we don’t fully understand

At a high level, progress in machine intelligence is driven by increasing computational power. We at OpenAI deeply internalized this around 2017, after seeing consistent returns to scaling across multiple research projects1. As a result, we sought out access to much more compute than we had originally planned, and increasingly oriented our research around a small number of very scalable directions. We believed that was the only way for us to be at the frontier of AI research, and influence the impacts of AGI.

There are new algorithms that have been developed along the way, new feats of ingenuity from teams and individual researchers. I see them largely as discoveries along the path of scaling; the science of deep learning is still nascent, and meaningful algorithmic progress tends to correlate with access to compute. If you zoom out to a multiple-year horizon, AI is continuing to become more intelligent as it is scaled to larger computers.

And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century⁠(opens in a new window), we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.

AI is grown more than designed - it is, to first degree, the product of repeating a straightforward optimization step many times on a hard-to-imagine amount of compute. This results in an incredibly complex system that works through abstract concepts and can simulate facets of human behavior. We can discover various insights about little mechanisms that emerge within this system, in a process similar to neuroscience - and, similarly to neuroscience, its overall action evades a description we can fully understand.

The study of deep learning-based AI is largely an experimental science. We put a lot of effort⁠ into building principled algorithms and making testable predictions, but fundamentally, our large-scale training runs are experiments, and we are sometimes surprised by their results. Moreover, as the systems become more capable, the results become harder to interpret.

This is made more complicated by the current algorithms generally improving easy-to-measure capabilities faster than those hard to objectively quantify. We spend a lot of time trying to understand how capabilities generalize, and what to prioritize to advance the skills that are going to be most relevant in the next few years. For instance, we believe we could make the models better at specifically mathematics research with additional focus, but we do not prioritize this direction because of the urgency we feel about RSI and automated alignment research, as I will discuss later.

The intelligence produced by scaling deep learning is not directly comparable to human intelligence. To become very relevant in the real world - very useful or very dangerous - the AI does not need to match or exceed all human capabilities; it just needs to surpass enough of them. And as it continues to surpass humans on more and more axes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand exactly how capable it is.

Teaching machines to love

Because machine intelligence comes from a fundamentally different process than human intelligence, we cannot assume it adheres to human principles by default, or generalizes from them in a human-like manner. The core problem in AI research is that of alignment - getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.

For the purpose of organizing practical research directions, I find it useful to distinguish goal alignment and value alignment.

Goal alignment is broadly: “does the AI try to accomplish the goal set before it?”. This can include things like adherence to an instruction hierarchy⁠, or the ability to communicate and collaborate with people, to attempt to understand their objectives. This set of directions has been extremely practically relevant.

Value alignment is a more intrinsic property of the model. It is the ability to hold and generalize from a high-level set of principles; to act “reasonably” even when given unclear or conflicting objectives, or placed in unfamiliar or adversarial situations. An aligned AI should act with honesty and integrity, and love for humanity.

Of course, the boundary between value and goal alignment can be blurry, and truly caring about goals requires attempting to infer the intent⁠(opens in a new window) and values underlying them. However, generally when I talk about the long-term importance of alignment research, I am referring to value alignment.

The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization. As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasingly different from those they encountered in training. They can fail at generalizing from the values taught and reinforced in their training process to those new situations; and it can be hard for us to be sure how they will act. This is made even more difficult by the fact the overall ecosystem the AIs are used in is changing very quickly; for example, AIs trained today need to be robust to interacting with a variety of other AIs. Crucially, we need future AIs to continue to hold human values regardless of whether they believe they’re under human supervision.

There are two major classes of currently practically employed methods for alignment training.

by Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist at OpenAI |  Read more:

[ed. Silicon Valley is starting to panic at what they've created. See also: An Alien Mind: Jakub Pachocki Warns Us (DWAV):] Update: The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie (HB)]

... if you narrow it down to the most important thing:

1. Recursive self-improvement and superintelligence are coming soon. No one knows how to do this safely, our alignment techniques are inadequate and our monitoring technology is starting to fail. We need to figure out a solution, which will involve a combination of voluntary slowdowns, coordination around pacing, and investing further in alignment, including automated alignment researchers.

If more OpenAI communications were more like how Jakub Pachocki opens his new essay, An Alien Mind, I would feel much more confident we were in good hands there. [...]

Universally Better Is Not Required

And Jakub offers this wise warning. No, AI does not need to be better at everything in order to transform the world or get us all killed. Most importantly, it does not need to be better at everything in order to make itself become better at everything, any more than a human or group needs to be similarly better at everything.

The intelligence produced by scaling deep learning is not directly comparable to human intelligence. To become very relevant in the real world - very useful or very dangerous - the AI does not need to match or exceed all human capabilities; it just needs to surpass enough of them. And as it continues to surpass humans on more and more axes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand exactly how capable it is.

The Man Who Saw Humanity From Two Billion Years Away

Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,” in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity’s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future.

“Last and First Men” eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as “an essay in myth creation.”

In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the “Anglesey vision” that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had “a sudden fantasy of man’s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.”

This inspirational moment is an abductive, metaphoric leap. Quite distinct from the plodding extrapolative logic that gives us jet packs, automated cars, and other low-hanging fruit of the imagination, prevalent in the pulp sf writing of the same era and reheated in the corporate imaginations of our contemporary tech executives.

Stapledon’s imagination is profuse. He can be read as a compendium of science fiction ideas: his “Odd John” (1935) with its homo superior and titular telepathic character seeds the ground for Marvel’s X-Men; in “Star Maker” (1937) he describes the stellar structure that Freeman Dyson conceptualized as the Dyson sphere; in “Last and First Men” and its sequel, 1932’s “Last Men in London,” human evolution is driven across millennia to produce telepathy, as in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”; in the age of the Fifth Men, the Moon is destroyed and falls to Earth, raining down destruction and driving further evolution of the species — Neal Stephenson’s masterful pan-generational novel “Seveneves” is powered by the same conceit.

A further astonishing influence, traced by the scholar Dominic Moran, is upon Jorge Luis Borges and his short story “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” (1941), or “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Borges reviewed Stapledon and went on to cite a section of “Star Maker” that anticipates the idea of the multiverse. The “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics would not be proposed until 1957, nearly 20 years after Stapledon’s speculation of a creature capable of taking many possible courses of action at once, with each choice creating a new dimension in time.

The long future of “Last and First Men” is influenced by the interwar concern with deep time. Doris Lessing observed that surely what was going on in archaeology in the period inspired Stapledon: The early 20th century was marked by the rediscovery of civilizations such as the Olmec mother culture in the Americas, the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and the excavation of the Hittite capital that proved they were a genuine civilization and not solely a Biblical one. Lessing’s own science fiction sequence, “Canopus in Argos: Archives,” first published in 1979, is a similarly eon-spanning future history.

The different generations of Stapledon’s humankind evolve under pressure from cultural and environmental effects. Their advances leave a mark on the Earth, and the Earth violently reacts. This anticipates a key theme of the 21st century, the Anthropocene, the theory that humanity has left evidence of itself in the geological record, thus making our mark in deep time. [...]

Universal significance is certainly a concern of Stapledon’s: His letters and articles in the early years of the First World War seek it in his war experience. Stapledon served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, a third choice outside of the binary of being a soldier or a conscientious objector. To volunteer, he adapted his car — a roomy grey Lanchester that he learned to drive along the narrow lanes of the Wirral — into an ambulance and drove to the front, signing up in Dunkirk. He was joined by Lewis Fry Richardson, the mathematician who would later find fame for his work on meteorological prediction but at the time was working on an equation to predict the end of the conflict. Their unit was attached to a French infantry division moving from the ruined port town of Nieuport, where the barbed wire straggled down to the North Sea, to a convoy camp in Flanders.

On a warm September night in 1915, Stapledon took a stretcher, a sleeping bag, and a leather rug from the car to sleep under the stars. He lay down and marveled at the Milky Way, at the Pleiades and Jupiter. The distant guns fell silent. He tried to see the stars as they truly are, to comprehend the spatial, temporal, and moral depths of the starfield.

What followed was a reverie of cosmic consciousness that underpins “Last and First Men” and his later masterpiece, “Star Maker.” In the vision, his beloved cousin Agnes sang his name and appeared to him; they soared to the heavens together; planets fell away; the sun diminished to a mere star. He saw all the suns, all the planets, all the living beings. The earth was far away; from space, he could see the trenches and battle lines and the souls of the soldiers. In an instant of cosmic consciousness, he saw the “strange noble beings of other worlds” and “of each one we felt ‘It is I.’” [...]

“Last and First Men” is not progressive. Civilizations rise and fall, the tide of progress advances and retreats, variants upon the theme of humanity strike up and diminish — what endures of humanity is not spirit in the Christian sense so much as, in the philosophy of the Fifth Men, “a work of tragic art.” The Fifth Men regarded the cosmos as an aesthetic unity in four dimensions. Art focuses aspects of the cosmos, making it apprehensible even if its complexity means that it can never be entirely known.

by Matthew De Abaitua, MIT Press |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I've had Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker on my coffee table for like, forever it seems. When there's nothing to do or I need to take a book somewhere for temporary diversion, like a doctor's appointment, I'll pick it up and read a few chapters. It's not light reading, and the time scale it covers - billions of years - is pretty daunting. But it's well written and thought provoking throughout.]