JSM 🏗️

Concerned about existential risk.
Interested in policy and incentives.
Build more housing.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

@AlanMCole I like breweries and it's a good result of brewery deregulation.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

Democrats' odds to flip the Maine senate seat now flirting with 50-50 across the markets. Pretty disastrous. Was 75% a couple months back.

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

I am honored to have signed on to this letter. This is an urgent priority for near-term action by Congress. Biotech is advancing rapidly on its own, and I—and many others—believe the “Mythos moment” in AI/bio is coming soon. It is time for action.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

@deanwball Did Anthropic state somewhere they they agree with the entire document? Is this not more a statement of how poor AI alignment discourse is that a Catholic encyclical stating AI can't have consciousness is worth engaging w/ because the policy engagement has been so bad?

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

Today, @BuchananBen and I co-author a piece in the New York Times with a simple message:

While we disagree on plenty, we believe AI has national security implications which deserve a careful and bipartisan government response. We can (and should) have partisan fights about all manner of AI issues, but catastrophic risk from AI shouldn’t be one of them.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

Most people communicate via shortwave radio. Credit cards are accepted only at companies who can afford the outrageous security budgets. Left wing activists continue to insist in their physically printed newsletters that it's just a stochastic parrot.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

The year is 2035. There is no AI slop anymore. Every scrap of compute is put into inference as the remaining software giants try desperately to stay ahead of the hacking capabilities of Claude Gargantua 11.5, which a daring North Korean hack unleashed onto the internet.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

It set itself up as a self-propelling AI worm, inserting itself into any storage medium it could hack its way into, which was essentially all of them. It's too omnipresent to put back in the box now.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

@MaciejGorgol @trevposts In the future, Baumol's cost disease and automation of commodity production will mean only the rich can hire human prostitutes, the poor will just use the super advanced lifelike sex robots.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

Lots of people just want to be mad at landlords, but if you want actually annoy them, just build tons of new market rate housing so they have to lower the rent.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

@arindube @mattyglesias "I have no substantive response to you question, so I will change the subject"

[Byrne Hobart @ByrneHobart]

Not just taxi drivers! EMTs, surgeons, and morticians are also at risk.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

So have any tankers crossed through the strait?

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

@deanwball So even if we are not worried about Anthropic or OpenAI creating an out of control superintelligence and we should be worried about the government, their policy proposal seems still to address a lot of this.

not saying I agree with them, but it seems like the status quo is bad!

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

@deanwball Yes, but what I mean is that the status quo is already very likely to be "the president takes over AI when there are military implications" leading to an arms race. Pause AI is suggesting an intl treaty to constrain govts, not just companies.

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

@deanwball Like maybe the specific "International Agreement to Pause" isn't perfect, but there's no world in which the US government doesn't have input. Today by default it will just be the President unilaterally deciding for everyone. Congress needs to provide some framework ASAP

[JSM 🏗️ @postlibertarian]

@deanwball This is a reasonable critique. But imagine Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepSeek agree to share alignment knowledge because they are concerned; if there's no change from current policy, the US govenment would prosecute them under antitrust law, Logan Act violations, etc.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

Old, tired, cooked, chopped: We feel bad about Native Americans, so give them exemptions from all gambling laws

New, goated, hype, locked in: We feel bad about Native Americans, so give them exemptions from all zoning and housing laws

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

A hypothetical:

1. In the 2028 election, a Democrat has won. Say that it is Kamala Harris.
2. Using frontier AI systems contracted by the Department of Homeland Security, President Harris orders the creation of a new program for AI to monitor social media and notify the social media platform about posts spreading “misinformation” that “harms homeland and national security by spreading dangerous falsehoods.”
3. Many Republicans see this “misinformation” as core policy positions of their political party.
4. The AI-generated monitoring and notification system described in (2) is designed to conform to the pattern of jawboning exhibited by the Biden Administration in Murthy v. Missouri, where the Supreme Court ruled that people whose social media posts were taken down due to government pressure have no standing to sue.
5. The social media platforms create AI agents that receive the government’s AI generated requests and make decisions in seconds about whether to take down posts, deboost them, deplatform the user, etc.
6. According to very recent Supreme Court precedents, everything I have described falls into “lawful use” of an AI system by all parties involved. A person whose speech was deleted by a social media platform at the request of government does not have standing to sue the government, so long as the government did not threaten policy retaliation against the social media company. And a social media company’s content moderation policies are protected expression. Thus a person whose speech rights were harmed in this context currently has no legal recourse.
7. This is “America’s national security agencies using AI within the bounds of all lawful use.” It is also a wholly automated censorship regime.

This is barely a hypothetical. Much of it already happened *under the Biden admin.* The only difference is the use of AI.

In the world where this happens, I’d be curious to know whether thoughtful people like @Indian_Bronson would object. If xAI were one of the companies used by the government for the social media monitoring, would you encourage the company to cancel their business with the government? Or would you say they have an obligation to provide their services to the national security apparatus of USG for all lawful use?

If you would encourage xAI to cancel their contract with the government, on what principle (not qualitative judgment—universal and timeless principle!) would you distinguish between the DoW’s current insistence on “all lawful use regardless of a private party’s qualms” and xAI’s hypothetical future insistence on “all lawful use regardless of a private party’s qualms”?

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages.

The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse.

I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee.

There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true.

But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.