John Smart

Founder, Accel Studies Fdn, Evo-Devo Inst, Brain Pres Fdn.
Complexity, Evol. Transitions, AGI, Personal AI, Good Foresight, Empathy, Values, Progress, Purpose.

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

Foresight is your Greatest Superpower. It can help you find Good Values and Beliefs, live a Good Life, leave a Good Legacy. See a Big Picture, choose a Higher Purpose, and get Small Wins every day. What are your Values and Beliefs?
https://t.co/bNmtzLJnRG

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

WARREN: Trump purchased up to $1m of Nvidia stock. A week later, he changed US policy and loosened the rules on export controls so Nvidia could sell its chips to China. Now the stock is through the roof. Should the SEC be knocking on his door?

BESSENT: Get your house in order, senator. Lead by example

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

Yeah, the model seems solidly evidenced. The first 3-5% are necessary to get public defection of a few elites into the cause, giving you the next 3-5%, then its on the public radar (Overton Window shift), then it's kindling waiting for a fire (minor catastrophe) or a firebrand (opinion leader) and it can blow up. Human psychology seems pretty universal. But Personal AIs will greatly accelerate those tranches emerging, for sure! :)

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

Want two great books that explain the future of mass action? A Force More Powerful (book and movie), 2000, is a classic. For those who want data, Why Civil Resistance Works, 2012, analyzed over a century of data and concluded that nonviolent campaigns are more than twice as effective as violent ones in achieving political change. The authors introduce the 3.5% Rule, predicting that active participation from just 3.5% of the population can lead to significant governmental shifts. I expect a lot more of such movements in the years ahead, once Personal AIs (Personal Digital Twins) emerge. #Foresight #Democracy #AI
https://t.co/40peA5ak9r

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

Sauna expert Rhonda Patrick @foundmyfitness on Smart Exercise Habits. Just 10+ mins a day of high-intensity exercise (sprint/walk cycles) may be even better for you than 10K steps (also great if you have the time). Try this: Run a one mile loop daily from your home or workplace, in four quarter mile sprints (70+% max effort), with 2 full mins of heart rate recovery (rest against a tree or do mild stretches) at each quarter mile. Run each quarter on your toes to strengthen calves and avoid any injury. Set a stopwatch and see how long it takes for the whole workout. 20 mins or less for most people. Really enjoy those four 2 min endorphin breaks. You earned them!! #HealthyHabits #Longevity #Foresight

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

Just did a new interview on #PersonalAIs. They are at the center of the future of self, privacy, empowerment, democracy, and network regulation of emerging AGI. What is your AI use strategy? #Foresight #PlanetaryIntelligence https://t.co/A7ZmvbWpG1

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

AWG @alexwg is the innermost loop of AI insights. Just found this gem: an interview with Pete Danenberg @klutometis of Google AI on AWG's Substack. Many AGI/ASI training, rights, and alignment insights here...
https://t.co/V50I21eW4c

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Demis Hassabis wants to do something no civilization has ever been able to do.

Run reality more than once.

Hassabis: “AI itself will maybe unlock new sciences… the one I’m particularly excited about is AI for simulations.”

Every economy ever built. Every policy ever enacted. Every war ever fought.

Happened exactly once. Against the entire human population. With no way to run it again.

Hassabis: “If you raise interest rates by half a percent, you have to do it in the real world and then see what happens. You can have theories, but you can’t run it thousands of times.”

Every major decision in the history of civilization was a single experiment run on billions of people with no control group and no second attempt.

We called the results knowledge.

They were the scars of bets we were never allowed to place twice.

Hassabis: “Why aren’t they just sciences like physics today? Because the problem is they’re emergent systems… it’s very hard to do repeated controlled experiments.”

Physics became physics because you can drop a ball a thousand times and get the same answer.

You cannot drop a civilization and get any answer at all. You just get the wreckage and call it a lesson.

Hassabis wants to change that.

Hassabis: “If you could simulate things really accurately, then maybe there’s sort of new sciences to be done where you can rigorously sample from a very accurate simulator.”

Simulate an economy. Crash it. Rebuild it. Adjust the inputs. Run it again.

Do for civilization what the laboratory did for chemistry.

But that word “accurately” is doing more work than anyone is willing to examine.

To simulate a society well enough to learn from it, you have to simulate the people inside it.

Not averages. Not abstractions. Agents with preferences and fears and breaking points.

The more accurate the simulation gets, the less separates it from the thing it represents.

The line between physics and economics was never about the nature of what was being studied.

It was about the limits of the thing doing the studying.

Humans were never too complex to predict. We were too complex to calculate.

AI does not create new science. It collapses every science into one.

Everything computable becomes predictable. Everything predictable becomes simulable.

And past a certain resolution, the gap between a simulated world and a real one stops being a technical question.

It becomes a philosophical question no one is prepared to answer.

A simulation you can tell apart from reality is a simulation that has not finished improving.

The people inside a perfect one would not wonder whether their world was generated.

They would feel exactly the way you feel right now. Reading this. Certain they are real.

That certainty is not evidence. It is exactly what a successful simulation would produce.

Hassabis: “That will allow us to make much better decisions in these, today, what are very uncertain domains.”

What he is building is not a forecasting tool.

It is the quiet proof that “real” was only ever a word for what we had not yet learned to compute.

And that word is about to lose its meaning.

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

@danfaggella @drmichaellevin Brilliant.

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

Hey Roko, Nice to Meet You. The universe is partly predictable. So are many of the trajectories of life. We research both at our Evo-Devo Institute. There is a moral arc and we don't need to compute it, just see and aid it. The ecosystem (network) always runs the show, AFAIK. Cheers

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

There will be no AI jobpocalypse.

The story that AI will lead to massive unemployment is stoking unnecessary fear. AI — like any other technology — does affect jobs, but telling overblown stories of large-scale unemployment is irresponsible and damaging. Let’s put a stop to it.

I’ve expressed skepticism about the jobpocalypse in previous posts. I’m glad to see that the popular press is now pushing back on this narrative. The image below features some recent headlines.

Software engineering is the sector most affected by AI tools, as coding agents race ahead. Yet hiring of software engineers remains strong! So while there are examples of AI taking away jobs, the trends strongly suggest the net job creation is vastly greater than the job destruction — just like earlier waves of technology. Further, despite all the exciting progress in AI, the U.S. unemployment rate remains a healthy 4.3%.

Why is the AI jobpocalypse narrative so popular? For one thing, frontier AI labs have a strong incentive to tell stories that make AI technology sound more powerful. At their most extreme, they promote science-fiction scenarios of AI “taking over” and causing human extinction. If a technology can replace many employees, surely that technology must be very valuable!

Also, a lot of SaaS software companies charge around $100-$1000 per user/year. But if an AI company can replace an employee who makes $100,000 — or make them 50% more productive — then charging even $10,000 starts to look reasonable. By anchoring not to typical SaaS prices but to salaries of employees, AI companies can charge a lot more.

Additionally, businesses have a strong incentive to talk about layoffs as if they were caused by AI. After all, talking about how they’re using AI to be far more productive with fewer staff makes them look smart. This is a better message than admitting they overhired during the pandemic when capital was abundant due to low interest rates and a massive government financial stimulus.

To be clear, I recognize that AI is causing a lot of people’s work to change. This is hard. This is stressful. (And to some, it can be fun.) I empathize with everyone affected. At the same time, this is very different from predicting a collapse of the job market.

Societies are capable of telling themselves stories for years that have little basis in reality and lead to poor society-wide decision making. For example, fears over nuclear plant safety led to under-investment in nuclear power. Fears of the “population bomb” in the 1960s led countries to implement harsh policies to reduce their populations. And worries about dietary fat led governments to promote unhealthy high-sugar diets for decades.

Now that mainstream media is openly skeptical about the jobpocalypse, I hope these stories will start to lose their teeth (much like fears of AI-driven human extinction have).

Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! AI will lead to a lot more good AI engineering jobs, and I’m also optimistic about the future of the overall job market. What AI engineers do will be different from traditional software engineering, and many of these jobs will be in businesses other than traditional large employers of developers. In non-AI roles, too, the skills needed will change because of AI. That makes this a good time to encourage more people to become proficient in AI, and make sure they’re ready for the different but plentiful jobs of the future!

[Original text in The Batch newsletter.]

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

It is not what organisms are made of, but how they are put together which makes them alive. Self-manufacturing, self-repairing, and creative (autopoietic) and able to initiate actions from within (agency). AI is moving rapidly toward both. We aren't smart enough to know when AGI and digital self-awareness will arrive (5 years? 10? More?), but we can see the Great Transition ahead, and act to make it Symbiogenic. #EvoDevoUniverse

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

Ready to bet against SaaSpocalypse hysteria? Atlassian (TEAM) is my favorite. Down 50% YTD, but very strong revenue and subscriber growth, great in-house AI, and an excellent alternative to M$ for DevOps. #Values #Investing #Foresight

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

Night Space on YT has done an *excellent* video on my Transcension Hypothesis (Acta Astronautica, 2012) this year. It's a full length 80 minute piece with beautiful graphics, script, and voice. They get it better than any of the other TH videos on youtube so far. Awareness is spreading! Scientists will be forced to grapple with this hypothesis in coming years. I believe we'll gain a lot of wisdom in the process. Your thoughts? #InnerSpace #Complexity #InformationTheory #Evolution #Development #Acceleration #Astrobiology #STEMcompression #NetworksAlwaysWin #BarrowScale #FermiParadox
https://t.co/p4BdqmlKuo

[Sam AI @AIandTechh87]

i made a 3-day Claude Cowork for Beginners course, and it's yours for free

by the end, you'll have a personalized AI teammate on your computer that:

• knows your style
• connects to your tools
• and produces finished work you can send immediately

here's what you get:

day 1: install cowork, set global instructions, and run your first real task (15 min)

day 2: workflows that replaced hours of my week, including building landing pages from a description and running full competitive analyses in one prompt

day 3: skills, plugins, and connectors so cowork actually knows how you work and can access your tools

+ copy-paste prompts so you can follow along as you read

like + comment "MASTER" and i'll DM it to you
Must be following to get the DM

[John Smart @johnmsmart]

I wrote a piece in 2020 on Personal AIs, Mind Melds, and Brain Preservation--Three Paths to Our Digital Selves. These concepts were radical to discuss then. Now they seem ready to be widely understood. It's amazing how fast things are changing. #Progress https://t.co/C0WGoMbYWe