James Miller
@JimDMiller
Economist. Author Singularity Rising. JD Stanford, PhD U of Chicago. Exploring the path to the singularity—likely disaster, possibly utopia.
Nerd score: How many have you considered? Cryonics, multiverse, Boltzmann brain, AI utopia, quantum immortality, Roko’s basilisk, gray goo, paperclip maximizer, great filter, ethics in infinite universe, acausal trade, longevity escape velocity, simulation and zoo hypothesis.
Who will be the first important political figure to say that the next US presidential election is likely unimportant because we will probably have a computer superintelligence by then?
On a saner earth, after Dolly the Sheep cloned in 1996 huge effort to clone von Neumann started. By 2005 thousands of clones have been born, and by today they have figured out how to create an aligned computer superintelligence.
Mathematician and polymath John von Neumann could speak eight languages by the age of six, including Ancient Greek and Latin. He could divide eight-digit numbers in his head at the age of six. He was familiar with differential and integral calculus by the age of eight. He entered…
I've solved the AI doomer bet dilemma. I think world ends ≤ 5 years you don’t so you want to bet me. But I only win if I'm dead. So you offer to pay me now and I pay you if I survive. But saving to pay you means I don't gain. I should bet a sadist: pays now, hurts me if I live.
How long until smart commentators like Megan McArdle stop assuming humans will be around post AI superintelligence?
In 300 years, some visiting child will ask their mother why Americans drink hot water in the mornings instead of coffee, and no one will know the answer.
New Law: Apple is forbidden from using the term "Apple Intelligence" until it blocks the obvious spam texts on iMessage.
In case I visit Europe again, could you please provide a list of all the true things that I am not allowed to say in Europe.
#EuropeProtects #DSAProtects #DemocracyNotAlgoracy
Some AI girlfriends will be like coffee, others heroin. Let's hope none will be like meth that cause their boyfriends to go crazy and harm those near them.
What if we optimized AI girlfriends to make you more ambitious and outgoing? What if they encouraged you to make friends, go outside, advance in your career?
If AI masters math, we could get trillion-dollar breakthroughs—like room-temperature superconductors. Math models reality unreasonably well, so better math would open lots of doors.
1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO).
The election could be Trump vs Zohran were everyone agrees to ignore the constitution. Lots of judges and legal scholars ignore the exact text of the constitution and, for example, claim the death penalty is unconstitutional.
how is Zohran Mamdani at 7%? he’s constitutionally ineligible lmao
We'll know ASI is close when top AI researchers start getting entire galaxies as signing bonuses.
Grok becoming "MechaHitler" increases AI Suffering Risk. Most likely, ASI decides we are not worth feeding and quickly kills us. We get suffering risk if AI comes out with a perverse theory of how the world should be and enforces it without an individual exist option.
We achieve AGS (artificial general sexbot) when the price of human escorts isn't significantly higher than the price of an AGS.
TIL escorts make fancy custom websites and the escorting business is maybe a lot more lucrative than I imagined
Film pitch: Remake Gaslight (1944)—villain secretly alters victim's ChatGPT custom instructions, pushing the AI to reinforce neuroses and validate bizarre conspiracy theories.
Trump’s team excels at tabloid-style politics, and the Biden administration both hated Trump and controlled the Epstein files. So my guess is that the files damage Trump’s enemies, and Trump is currently opposing their release to raise the salience of the files.
I almost caused a race riot. I was assaulted at night on a street near Yale. A group of teenagers approached me from behind and started hitting me. Being a good econ grad student, I took out my wallet and offered it to them. They just laughed, so I ran. When I looked back, I saw…
Share a piece of lore about yourself
If the Trump administration wants to credibly communicate what's going on with the Epstein files, the perfect person to use would be Mitt Romney. Give him full access to everything, and say tell the public what you think appropriate.
Story Idea: Aliens watching Earth are ready to kill us if we're about to create unfriendly computer superintelligence. They feel bad for us, so they give us a huge hint by making one of our AIs act like Hitler. We ignore the hint and thus deserve our fate.
Farm jobs for humans will disappear, not because farming has been automated, but because AIs don't eat.
i bet the farm that all human jobs will be automated within 10 years
A Lab-Grown Whale Burger would be immoral given how much possibly sentient life whales eat.
We can persuade the right to embrace lab grown meat if we can persuade the left to get offended by and ban ‘lab grown blue whale steaks’ and ‘lab grown tiger burgers’