Fabian Waechter

Medical Doctor (GP), Epidemiology & Health Policy | Executive MBA | traveler | proud father |🖖 🤙 ✌️| from Vienna, Austria | Tweets are mostly my opinion |

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

As a guy who only holds a meagre Master of Science in Epidemiology from HSPH, I look forward to all you wise people receiving honorary doctorates in Epi for your profound contribution to this field I love. After you took a self-study class (?) and started to tweet... #Covid_19

[Jesse Tinsley @JesseTinsley]

Imagine telling someone in 1999…

The year is 2026.

The President is Donald Trump in his second non consecutive term.

The richest man in the world is PayPal cofounder Elon Musk… but not because of fintech or Paypal. Because of rockets, electric cars, AI, satellites, brain chips and something called “Boring Company”.

Apple is worth trillions but its main business isn’t computers… its selling glass rectangles everyone stares at for 9 hours a day.

People don’t watch TV. They watch teenagers explain geopolitics, finance, and relationship advice in ~60 second videos.

The biggest taxi company owns no taxis.
The biggest hotel company owns no hotels.
The most powerful media companies are social networks where everyone argues with strangers for free.

Kids are making millions filming themselves playing video games.

AI Robots write emails, code, legal memos, songs, essays, and breakup texts.

The internet is mostly bots arguing with humans who are trying to prove they aren’t bots.

You can summon a car, groceries, a doctor, a date, a private jet, or a dog walker from your phone.

People pay real money for invisible currencies, digital monkeys, AI girlfriends and pictures that disappear after 24 hours.

The richest companies in the world don’t sell oil, steel, or cars. They sell attention, compute, data, and addiction.

And somehow, after all of that everyone is still using Excel.

[Stephen King @StephenKing]

It will be at least 40 years before our loved and lovely America recovers from the wounds this selfish, stupid, and ego-driven man has inflicted. That it will recover seems certain to me, but it will leave scars.

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

Lieber @ORF, da eine hohe Anzahl von Dienstleistern gleichzeitig Geld bei mit abbuchen wollte, war mein Konto leider überlastet. Es war daher leider nicht möglich die ORF Gebühr abzubuchen. Dieses Problem tut mir sehr leid. #orfon #orf #treaminggate #oesterreichjordanien

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

[blue @bluewmist]

Something I wish someone had told me ten years ago:

You can be genuinely good at work that is completely wrong for your nervous system.

Capability and compatibility are not the same thing.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's what you should be building your career around.

The question isn't "can I do this?"

It's "how does my nervous system feel living inside this every day?"

[Sarah Longwell @SarahLongwell25]

“A mythomaniac is a clinical and literary term for an extreme pathological liar. It describes someone whose lies are grand, deeply embedded in their identity, and told with complete, unbenched confidence.”

[profil @profilonline]

Würde man jedem Haushalt eine Million Euro vor die Tür legen, wären genauso viele Menschen armutsgefährdet wie am Tag zuvor. https://t.co/z7THxX71uL

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

A post about Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI. Why the Pope is right, but perhaps not right enough.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the world in front of our eyes: how we communicate, how we access information, how we work, how income and status are distributed among us, and soon how we fight and kill each other. Yet the public conversation about AI remains stuck on the minutiae of competition between labs, or on a false dichotomy between AI as a “stochastic parrot” with no real capabilities and AI as an alien superintelligence poised to take command of humanity.

The more important questions are about what we want from AI, and whether our current mindset, institutions, and control mechanisms are equal to the task of steering it toward our welfare.

It is refreshing, then, that a bold and powerful voice has weighed into this debate: Pope Leo XIV. As an economist who has long argued that technology is a matter of choice rather than fate, I find Leo’s intervention welcome and, on most points, on target. But on the most consequential question of what AI should actually be designed to do, Leo stops short.

Secular readers may bristle at the encyclical’s opening invocation of the Tower of Babel. They would be mistaken to stop reading there. Leo goes much further than most pundits, journalists and policymakers in the United States by recognizing that what happens to AI, and hence to humanity, is a under our control. There are multiple possible paths for AI, and which one we take will have sweeping consequences. He is also ahead of many commentators when he writes forcefully and unequivocally that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.”

These were the central themes of the book I wrote with Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity. It is heartening to hear them taken up by a voice with Leo's reach.

The Pope is also right to question the current trajectory of AI in warfare and law enforcement. What was taboo only a few years ago – AI-driven mass surveillance, algorithms selecting targets for killing – has become routine. Many in Silicon Valley are now calling openly for a new military-algorithmic complex centered on AI as an instrument of American hard power. Leo captures something deep and too often ignored: “Any technology that facilitates attacks without seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.”

His call for the “disarmament of AI” follows directly from these observations. As he explains, disarming AI means “freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.” His moral clarity in stating that “there is no algorithm that can make war morally acceptable” should be a warning to technologists rushing to design new weapons of mass destruction.

Underneath these specific concerns lies a more fundamental claim: that what is technically feasible is not the same as what is good for humanity, and that the difference depends on who controls the technology and what ideology and interests guide them.

Leo edges toward what I take to be the most important point about AI's future when he observes that “while AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than designing machines to work with those who work.”

But here he does not go far enough. He stops short of questioning the prevailing design philosophy of AI itself: a philosophy centered on mimicking human capabilities and automating human tasks, with the ultimate goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can do everything a person can.

This philosophy rests on a mistake. It assumes that artificial intelligence and humanintelligence are fundamentally similar, and therefore machines should naturally take over whatever humans currently do. Yet these intelligences are fundamentally different.

Humans are “one-shot” learners. We form hypotheses from a few examples, mentally simulate possibilities, and refine our understanding through a social process of trial and error. This is how children learn language - imitating a few words, generalizing, and adjusting based on how others respond. We are not, however, very good at absorbing massive volumes of information or sifting through unstructured data for relevant patterns.

AI models are almost the opposite. They thrive on enormous training sets and excel at pattern recognition at scale. But they have, as yet, no genuine creativity, no real-world embodiment, and no capacity for trial-and-error learning grounded in interaction with the physical and social world.

When two things are different – you shouldn’t, and typically you couldn’t – use one to mimic the other. If you did, you would end up with suboptimal, disappointing results. It would have been a colossal mistake, and the Chicago Bulls’s legendary coach Phil Jackson would have gone down in the annals of basketball as one of the worst coaches in history, if he decided in the 1990s that because Michael Jordan was the better player, Jordan should mimic everything that Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman were doing in the team. The team went from championship to championship because these players worked together and complemented each other.

The same applies to AI and human skills.

The more productive path is complementarity – using AI to do what humans cannot, so that humans can do what they do best. An electrician aided by AI diagnostics, a nurse supported by AI in interpreting symptoms, a teacher using AI to personalize instruction for each student; these are the contours of a different AI future, one that raises rather than displaces human capability.

Optimists and industry insiders will respond that automation-first AI can still benefit everyone, provided redistributive policy keeps pace. But this argument has a poor track record. Forty years of digital automation have already concentrated gains at the top, hollowed out middle-skill work, and produced disappointing aggregate productivity growth. There is little reason to expect that an even more powerful round of automation, deployed by even more concentrated firms, will end differently. We can and must demand a different design.

The global stakes from the future of AI are even larger than those we can see around us in the United States. For the developing world, where billions still depend on the prospect of decent jobs as a path out of poverty, an automation-centric AI agenda is not merely suboptimal. It is simply transferring to foreclose the most important route to broad-based prosperity.

The biggest failing of today's AI industry is its refusal to recognize any of this. It is guided instead by an ideology of control (the industry’s own over humanity) and by a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans.

As Leo rightly notes, this failure is enabled by the fact that a handful of companies now command the future of AI.

What we need is a combination of moral clarity and a serious, society-wide debate about what AI can do and what we want it to do. That debate must move beyond exhortation toward concrete choices: antitrust action against the dominant platforms, public investment in human-complementary AI, regulation of surveillance and autonomous weapons, and meaningful rights for workers and citizens over the data on which these systems are built.

The Pope's intervention makes such a debate a little more likely today than it was before.

It is now up to the rest of us to carry it further than he was willing to go.

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

This is funny beyond redemption. Ever more the more you have followed what the guy did.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

This is it.
Everything learned spending millions on longevity.

From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie.
To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews.

0. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug.
1. Be in your bed for 8 hours
2. Same bedtime every night, any time before midnight
3. Don’t eat right before bed
4. Calm foods for dinner
5. No screens 1 hour before bed
6. Avoid added sugar (be aware it’s in everything)
7. Avoid all things in an American convenience store
8. Avoid fried foods
9. Shoes off at the door
10. Eat whole foods, particularly veggies fruits nuts legumes berries
11. Walk a little after meals or air squats
12. Get your heart rate high routinely
13. Lift heavy things
14. Stretch daily
15. Water pik, floss, brush, tongue scrape, morning and night
16. Make an effort to drink water
17. Get sunlight when you wake up (UV is low)
18. Protect skin in midday sun
19. Stand up straight
20. See at least one friend once a week
21. Avoid plastic where you can (in all things)
22. Circulate air in rooms
23. When stressed, breathe, learn to calm your body
24. Go to the dentist
25. Avoid sitting for long times
26. Protect your hearing, the world is too loud
27. Alcohol is bad for you
28. Finish coffee before noon
29. Avoid bright lights after sunset
30. If obese, look into a GLP
31. Sleep in a cold room
32. Texting while driving is dangerous
33. Turn off all notifications
34. Limit social media use
35. Don’t smoke anything
36. If you struggle to sleep, read a physical book before bed
37. 1 hour before bed have a calm wind down routine: bath, read, light walk, listen to music
38. The body is a clock and loves routine. Have a daily morning and evening schedule.
39. Avoid long distance travel where you can
40. Baby steps first: incorporate new things slowly
41. Do less… most things don’t work.

Bonus points if you get your blood checked.

Start here, it will change your life.

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

Why does #Trump not brag more about #Artemis2?
First: he likely does not understand how great an achievement it is.
Second: the crew might just seem far to DEI for him. With 1 female, 1 black and - God forbid - 1 Canadian Astronaut, in his world view that can’t be merit based!

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

I lack the expertise to judge wether this is real or fake. But I believe it, mainly because it goes well with my intuition about current AI/LLMs. They are extremely good at some things. But still nowhere near an AGI.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Novel environments, no precedents or plagiarism possible. Humans 100%, AI <1%.

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

I think the next Nobel Peace Price is in the pocket

[Federal Reserve @federalreserve]

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: https://t.co/5dfrkByGyX

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

Pretty comprehensive

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

6000 Years of World History in 1 Picture

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

Never write what you can say, never say what you can nod, never nod what you can wink, and never wink what the other fellow knows already.

~ American proverb, various versions and sources (heard on Making Sense with Sam Harris)

[Legalitätsprinzip @art18bvg]

⚡️FAKTENCHECK MONDSEE⚡️

Ich erzähle jetzt eine traurige Geschichte über den ö. Journalismus, anlässlich der Causa #Mondsee. An einer eigentlich simplen Recherche sind alle namhaften Medien in Österreich gescheitert. Die Frage:

▶️ Wem gehört der #Mondsee?

Kein einziges Medium schafft's

#Thread

1/11

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

Viel österreichischer wird es heute nicht mehr: “Wir waren nie böse, sind aber wieder gut”

[Martin Thür @MartinThuer]

Es gibt zur Zeit knapp 8 Milliarden Menschen auf der Welt. Die USA schaffen es dennoch einen 19jährigen in Ternitz zu beobachten und relevante Hinweise an die österreichische Polizei weiterzuleiten.

[Fabian Waechter @fabilogic]

@ElonMNews A

[Martin Thür @MartinThuer]

Das sollte im Wahltrubel nicht untergehen: Nächste Woche wird die Koalition eines der härtesten Datenschutzrechte für Journalismus in Europa beschließen. Ab 1. Juli wird es für investigative Arbeit - im besten Fall - mühsamer, im schlechtesten ungemütlich https://t.co/fOndD1Zlfr