(Adapted from a post on my Substack.)Today, Pope Leo XIV released his long-awaited encyclical letter about artificial intelligence, addressed not just to the Catholic Church, but to all people of good will, all over the world.
This post does not represent the best arguments that different sides might produce, and I don't claim to pass anyone's ITT here; I write this to start a discussion I think is important for LW to have.America’s First Amendment protections often give people in the US a right to call for violence, except specific calls likely to produce imminent action. Social media platforms converged on banning specific calls for violence.
I don't actually think the program described below is a good idea. Take it more as a plot setting for a hard science fiction world if you want.I want to live forever. Failing that I want to live for longer than 80 years, and in good health till just before I die.Lots of people want the same and, are trying to work out how to make our body stay healthy longer. This is difficult, because all of our various body parts start failing around the same time for different reasons.
Pope Leo XIV has released a new, 42k-word encyclical laying out the Vatican's position on many AI safety topics.
Continuous distributions are everywhere - for virtually everything we care about, a little more is a little better (or worse), and a lot more is a lot better (or worse). This presents a problem - we need to create rules that reasonably and fairly apply across these continuums, where the degree to which a thing possesses a trait makes a difference to the reasonable treatment of it.
TL;DR: Applications are now open for the Secure Program Synthesis Fellowship, powered by Apart Research and Atlas computing. Apply by Sunday the 31st of May.This fellowship offers part-time research opportunities on mentor-led projects at the intersection of formal methods, AI systems, and security.
The first fully-developed formulation of general-purpose prediction markets originated with Robin Hanson's Idea Futures (1990), a technology "intended to aid the evolution of a wide range of ideas, from public policy to the nature of the universe" that "should be able to help us predict and understand our future".
TL;DRCharacter training holds up in chat but degrades in agentic settings. Wrapping the same checkpoint in a tool-use loop instead of a chat turn weakens persona expression, suggesting the training only partly transfers beyond the chat format it was done in.SummaryMaiya et al.
Epistemic Status: I wrote this for an application then realized it might be of interest to others or spark a conversation. Yoshua Bengio and LawZero are important players in AI Safety, so I think we should have a conversation about their ideas.I have two substantial concerns with Yoshua Bengio’s Scientist AI. One is that it fails to think through the consequences of success, and will fall into the same kind of alignment failures as agentic AI.
AI ‘time horizons’ are mostly not about time (I think it’s mostly ‘data’, but you’ll see where I’m unsure).One chart from 2025 has become perhaps the most (in)famous in modern AI commentary.For those in the know, ‘the METR graph’[1] is unusually compelling because it achieves what so few measures of AI progress have achieved: a somewhat meaningful Y axis (‘time horizon’[2]) as well as a somewhat predictable trend over time!
As AI systems become more capable, the cognitive security of humans will be increasingly at risk.
(This one's a double-header on the tightly-linked senses of smell and taste, especially pertaining to foodcraft; it comprises both The Space of Olfaction is δ-Hyperbolic and A Partial Theory of Flavor Pairing in Foodcraft. You could read them in either order. I've chosen to put the more widely-appealing one about food phenomenology first and the less polished and more abstract and speculative one about olfaction second.
August 3 to October 2, 2026 in London | Applications close June 2 (AoE)TL;DR: We're running our first Frontier Biodefense Fellowship at pivotal. Nine weeks, fully funded, 1:1 mentorship from Blueprint, SecureBio, SynX, Coefficient Giving, CLTR and more. Open to applicants from a wide range of backgrounds, including those without prior bio experience. Apply at fellowship.bio.This post is the short version.
Cars and trucks are getting bigger, and I had a vague sense that fuel
This post records what I've learned while studying a bit of Fourier analysis. I used this PDF, which is the lecture notes for this Stanford course. The only thing in here that is really changed from there is the derivation of the Fourier transform, where I tried to explain the way I made sense of it. (That explanation may or may not make sense.) Fourier SeriesFourier analysis starts with the study of periodic functions.
Julia and I had been giving half