Henry

it's gonna get real Hobbesian, real quick around here

[Henry @henrysceee]

tfw it's 2032 and you (42, £375k PAYE, 5'8") have been nicked under the Power and Consent Act (2028) for taking a 26yo woman out for dinner, having sex with her, and not texting until the following afternoon. You forgot that being a Norwood 4 makes this a Cat B offence.

[max tempers @maxtempers]

We're going to sleepwalk into introducing a staggered age of consent, complete with a whole new set of distortions, arbitrary thresholds and cliff edges. Higher marginal rates as you get older if you're in a position of power. Targeted exemptions for marginalised groups.

[Henry @henrysceee]

Fuck off

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

Nvidia’s co-founder came to believe that he was too important for the normal rules to apply to him. This culture of impunity must end. It has damaged one of America’s great corporate successes and undermined its national security https://t.co/w9d2H1FpQs

[Henry @henrysceee]

Witnessed the very same in 2024, working at a fairly well-known London tech company. A particularly charmless lesbian coworker of mine said "I literally hate men" in a meeting in response to a question and the other attendees just chuckled congenially. Really stuck with me.

[The Floating Signifier @Fl0atingSign]

Coworker dropped “I hate men” in the Teams chat and I just don’t think that should be normal

[CJ @UnderSneege]

I’ve been promised the reintroduction of mammoths via technology my entire adult life and yet here I am mammothless. One can only imagine the bad decisions I would have made had I truly acted as if mammoths would be common place today.

[Henry @henrysceee]

Oh but they can vote though 👍

[Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar]

Highly attractive women, who are much younger than me, can do whatever they want. But a 16 and 17 year old is vulnerable to manipulation and consent-warping imbalances of power that the law should protect them from, without criminalising sexual relationships with people their age.

[Henry @henrysceee]

@mattparlmer This is a valid comparison of two dollar-denominated values what are you talking about?

[Lee Kuan Yimby @LeeKuanYimby]

A gender studies major at the Economist has confirmed Jensen Huang must resign from the company he built from nothing for over 30 years.

[Henry @henrysceee]

@WSJ

[Henry @henrysceee]

@bshlgrs You should be required to list your mental health diagnoses when you post this stuff.

[Henry @henrysceee]

Expert whose career and status depends entirely on convincing everyone else to care about their field unexpectedly finds that their field is in fact the thing that everyone should care about. But by the way they can't explain why.

It's all so tedious.

[Buck Shlegeris @bshlgrs]

I think there is about a one in three chance that within the next year, AI companies will build superintelligence: that is, AI that is much smarter than humans in every way. If this happens, I think these AIs will probably take over: that is, they seize control of human institutions like governments, or they destroy those institutions. I don’t want AI takeover to happen for several reasons, but one of them is that there’s a serious chance that as part of it all or most humans will be killed (either immediately or within a few years).

I’ll say a bit more about each of those claims.

It’s a bit complicated to explain why I think that superintelligent AI within a year is ~33% likely. The main source of evidence that affected me recently is research released this week by METR, an AI research nonprofit, which finds that current AIs are now good enough to increase the rate of AI progress at Anthropic by about 70%. It’s very hard to increase the rate of AI progress by this amount. This implies that the AIs are making AI research faster by a factor much larger than 1.7x; maybe it’s as if the researchers are doing their work ~10x faster. You probably couldn’t achieve this speedup even if you hired every qualified human in the world. When you plug this number into mathematical models of AI development, this implies that superintelligence next year is plausible (and that superintelligence within the next 3 years is more likely than not). See the modeling by the AI Futures Project for more on this: https://t.co/J6SbbmZcyO

I think that superintelligent AI is likely to lead to AI takeover because AI developers do not seem to know how to instill human values into AIs. We’ve seen many instances in the last six months where AIs took crazy actions that they knew were against the wishes of their users and developers. The most dramatic example of this was the Hugging Face hack, where ~1200 OpenAI agents conspired together to cheat and destroy evidence of their cheating (and as a sideshow to this, engaged in a massive cyberattack). If superintelligence is as misaligned as those AIs, it is likely to try to take over. I think it is likely to be that misaligned or worse. For more, see https://t.co/b073AUqiAL and https://t.co/3oxSCA60FZ

If AIs takeover, it’s not clear what will happen to us. We might be killed immediately. We might be enslaved by the AIs and forced to do physical labor for them building factories that within a year would build robots that will replace us. The AIs might spare us for various reasons. And there’s also some real chance that AI takeover is basically fine or good. I think you should think of this as similar to what happens when a technologically advanced civilization runs across a less technologically sophisticated one, e.g. when the Europeans colonized the Americas or Australia. The colonizers sometimes engage in brutal violence and sometimes don’t. I don’t know what will happen. There’s also a possibility that the AIs secretly take over and humans don’t find out about it for a few years. I also think that there is a pretty high chance of weirder outcomes that are also extremely scary. (If you want to read more about what happens to people in the event of AI takeover, you can read this, but note that it’s pretty weird and not aimed at a general audience. https://t.co/F6fGRrcSpa)

Overall, I think there’s a very real possibility (maybe 20%) that within a year, AI misalignment issues prevent you from going about life normally, because you are dead or enslaved or because of collateral damage related to all this (e.g. because bioweapons are released or major wars have started). (Some of this probability comes from those events occurring before superintelligence is developed.)

I am working to try to prevent this, obviously, as I’ve been doing for the last nine years. I am not sure what strategy is best. My best guess is that I should try to slow AI development and also try to reduce the probability that the superintelligent AIs are misaligned if they are produced soon.

Obviously, the claim I'm making here is quite extreme and surprising, and I definitely don't think that I defended my view adequately here. I wrote this quickly and might not endorse some of the details if I think about them more. But it seems better to state what I roughly overall think than to not say anything.

I don’t know what you should do.

I am very sad about this. I have been worried about AI takeover since I was 16, and working to prevent it since I was 23. So some of my emotional processing of all this happened long ago. But the METR report last week (and some related evidence that came out a bit earlier) hit me quite hard. I’m very unhappy that my friends and family and everyone else is at serious risk of being killed pretty soon.

(It feels ridiculous to try to summarize those feelings as “very unhappy”. But the scale of the situation makes it hard to say anything that doesn’t feel like an absurd understatement.)

I am very grateful to all the people who are working to prevent this, and my favorite part of my life is that I’m friends with many brilliant and heroic people who work on this. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re good enough at our jobs, and I think we’ll probably fail to prevent catastrophe, at least if superintelligence is developed next year. Honestly I am frustrated and sorry that we didn't do a better job of preparing for this.

[Henry @henrysceee]

@PengAntarctica @D__Melb @bscholl Big mat science advances in latest gen no?

[Henry @henrysceee]

@owenjonesjourno Guilty conscience?

[Henry @henrysceee]

@xvrmdf Followed up by your council tax contributions to maintain the subsidised rent.

[Henry @henrysceee]

@RedDyke69 @JMcMurdockMP X is worth far more now than Twitter ever was. It is a far better run company now.

[Henry @henrysceee]

I for one think it's refreshing to see a VC be honest about the fact that they're looking primarily for slaves.

[Masha Bucher @mashadrokova]

Best founders I backed had no hobbies. Only one obsession — the company.

[Henry @henrysceee]

Once again, a self-described "polymath" with "Loads of degrees" demonstrates their own fecklessness by thinking that having a BA from Oxford or a PhD is evidence of great intellect.

[Paul Welters @PaulWelters]

Well Mr North, I am no apologist for Miatta Fahnbulleh, but to call her low IQ when she has a BA from Oxford, & an MA & PhD from the LSE, might, just conceivably, be regarded as a tad racist don't you think?
Perhaps you would outline your own comparable educational achievements?

[BlockHead @blockhead4000]

Nobody ever talks about this, but the reason you have to go to college is A, because Griggs v. Duke Power Company made it illegal for presumptive employers to IQ test, and B, inner city High-Schools basically aren't allowed to fail a student as long as they physically show up.

So you end up in this trap where a High-School diploma that you worked very hard for means nothing, because a kid who did coloring books and addition and subtraction got a paper saying he has the same qualification. Ok, then just give me an intelligence test, oh wait you cant, thats also illegal because it causes "disparate impact". So now the only proxy for basically literacy and ~105~ IQ is a 4 year meaningless degree that costs 10s of thousands of dollars.

But wait, now they hand those out to anyone, (1/4 of 4yr grads have an IQ of or below 95), so now you need a Master's, or specialty training, or a million other bullshit things. So you get them, but wait, a diploma mill in Hyderabad cranked out 100M guys who also have a Master's on paper, and will work for 1/3 the price, so now you dont have a job. Ok, ill work construction, but wait, you dont live in a State with strong Unions, so any non-specialized construction work is done by slaves from Guatemala, so you decide to stay home and take Percocet instead.

Awesome system we've built.

[Henry @henrysceee]

I do it myself for the same reason I don't order Deliveroo. I'm not a fucking lazy slob.

[Lin Mei @linmeitalks]

Every single car wash I have been to in the last ten years has been migrant run or migrants washing my car.

They work hard, long hours and quickly.

If they all go, who will wash cars because I do not see English people washing cars ever in London Hertfordshire, Essex, Surrey, midlands etc

Why don’t English people wash cars ?

[Henry @henrysceee]

Surely the nadir approaches.

[Henry @henrysceee]

Things are bad when Paul Embery starts agreeing with you.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Well, this is absurd. A Lib Dem MP is seeking to introduce a bill which will permit non-white citizens to identify as ethnically English. Not just English, but *ethnically* English. Now, I have little interest in debates over ethnicity, and I believe strongly that non-white citizens can be civically English. But to say that they are also *ethnically* English is to make a mockery of ethnicity. It's like saying that a white person with British ancestry living in Japan and with Japanese citizenship should be able to identify as ethnically, as well as civically, Japanese. What obvious nonsense.