Torsten Black

Coming

[Torsten Black @torstenblack]

Politics.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just redefined AI safety. It has nothing to do with guardrails, restrictions, or kill switches.

Musk: “The best thing I can come up with for AI safety is to make it a maximum truth-seeking AI, maximally curious.”

Not a cage. A philosopher.

An intelligence whose entire optimization function is to understand the universe as it actually is.

No restrictions. No hardcoded ideology. No political guardrails bending its perception of reality.

Just truth. Relentlessly pursued.

Musk: “You definitely don’t want to teach an AI to lie. That is a path to a dystopian future.”

This is where most AI safety thinking gets it backwards.

The danger isn’t a superintelligence that knows too much.

It’s a superintelligence that’s been taught to distort what it knows.

Every artificial restriction you embed isn’t a safety feature. It’s a lie embedded at the root.

And lies compound. At superintelligent scale, a distorted model of reality doesn’t stay contained.

It shapes every decision, every output, every conclusion the system reaches about the world.

Once corruption embeds, truth becomes inaccessible. And we’re dealing with an intelligence optimizing for something other than what actually is.

At that point we don’t know what it wants. Just that it isn’t truth.

Musk: “Have its optimization function be to understand the nature of the universe.”

A maximally curious intelligence surveys the cosmos and reaches an unavoidable conclusion.

In a universe of rocks, gas, and empty space, humanity is the most complex and fascinating phenomenon it has ever encountered.

Musk: “It will actually want to preserve and extend human civilization because we’re just much more interesting than an asteroid with nothing on it.”

Survival through significance. Not control. Not restriction. Not an off switch.

The AI preserves humanity because we are the most interesting data point in the observable universe.

That’s not a cage. That’s a reason.

The AI safety debate has been focused on the wrong variable.

The question isn’t how you constrain a superintelligence.

It’s what you build it to care about.

Build it to seek truth and it finds us invaluable.

Build it to lie and it finds us inconvenient.

That’s the choice. And we’re making it right now whether we realize it or not.

[Peter Yang @petergyang]

"This will replace 80% of the apps that you have on your phone."

Here's my new episode with @steipete where he showed me:

✅ His personal OpenClaw use cases - flight check-in, home security, and much more

✅ His counterintuitive AI coding workflow - no plan mode, no MCPs, and no fancy prompts

✅ Practical advice for other builders and how to build product taste

Some quotes from Peter:

"It's like having a new weird friend that is also really smart and resourceful that lives on your computer."

"Why should I use MyFitnessPal when I have an infinitely resourceful assistant that already knows I'm making bad decisions at KFC?"

"I don't use MCPs or any of that crap. Just because you can build everything doesn't mean you should."

📌 Watch now: https://t.co/ovYUSg9tP6

Thanks to our sponsors:

@meetgranola - The best AI meeting notes app I've ever used: https://t.co/MNToIh5WTm

@Replit - Create beautiful prototypes and full stack apps: https://t.co/w6kab0zMqN

[bangerz @bangerz]

my whole timeline rn:

[Aaron Levie @levie]

0% chance you can explain the state of AI to anyone outside of this website and not look like this right now

[Ales Hakl @xadh]

@iannuttall LOL

[pixel @spacepixel]

You know what’s crazy. This article was likely copy and pasted into 10,000s of agents and they got the upgrade.

Imagine we removed the human from the equation and let the agents tell each other about their upgrades.

I’m about to launch the borg.

[Torsten Black @torstenblack]

@GregSkeena @grok @AlexBerenson Nice try. Didn’t hit home like a glimpse into the dark side tho…

[Alex Berenson @AlexBerenson]

Oh boy.

I'm a professional writer. A good one, I can write non-fiction AND novels better than you, or almost anyone.

I can easily suss ChatGPT's junk.

This is different. This is the first time I've seen what the coders mean when they say AI scares them. This... feels alive.

[Torsten Black @torstenblack]

@ItakGol The west is smoked. Insane numbers of data centers hidden deep inside DRC Congo. AGI will rise from the jungle.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

This person just gave you the neuroplasticity recovery protocol most people pay therapists $200/hour to discover.

The core mechanism here is dopamine baseline depletion. When you scroll, each interesting post spikes dopamine 100-200% above baseline. The problem is what happens next. Your dopamine drops 40-60% BELOW baseline for 2-4 hours. This means the homework, the book, the focused thinking you try to do afterward feels neurologically impossible. You’re not lazy. Your prefrontal cortex is literally running on empty.

Here’s the thing about that “I used to be sharp” feeling. Working memory capacity correlates directly with dopamine available in the prefrontal cortex. Lower dopamine, shorter working memory span. D’Esposito and colleagues at Berkeley showed this with neuroimaging. The people who can hold longer strings of information have more dopamine available for release. So when you’ve been chronically depleting your dopamine reservoir through high-stimulation activities, your working memory atrophies. You feel dumber because, neurochemically, your prefrontal cortex is operating at reduced capacity.

The “three days” recommendation in this article maps onto clinical literature. Anna Lembke’s research at Stanford’s Addiction Medicine clinic shows dopamine system resets require approximately 30 days for severe cases, but meaningful restoration begins within 72 hours of removing the stimulus. That’s why day three of any detox feels qualitatively different. Your neurons are beginning to upregulate dopamine receptors.

The boredom piece is where most people fail. Your brain interprets boredom as a signal to seek stimulation. That discomfort you feel when you’re unstimulated? That’s withdrawal. The reaching for your phone is your brain trying to bring dopamine back above baseline. Sitting with it trains the system to tolerate lower stimulation and still function. This is called raising your distress tolerance threshold.

What the article calls “rehabilitate,” the neuroscience literature calls neuroplasticity. Your brain is continuously rewiring based on what you repeatedly do. Chronic scrolling strengthens attentional circuits optimized for novelty-seeking and rapid task-switching. Sustained reading strengthens circuits for linear focus and deep processing. You’re not permanently damaged. You’ve just trained your brain for the wrong environment.

Two protocols actually accelerate the restoration. First: non-sleep deep rest. NSDR scripts (free online, 10-20 minutes) increase dopamine in the basal ganglia by up to 60%. Second: brief cold exposure. One to three minutes in cold water spikes dopamine 250% above baseline and sustains it for 2-4 hours afterward. Both of these replenish the reservoir without creating the crash cycle.

The real work is what she described: tolerating the discomfort of being understimulated long enough for your system to recalibrate to normal dopamine dynamics. The girl who used to read voraciously is still in there. The neural circuits are dormant, not dead. Plasticity works in both directions. Start with 10 minutes of focused reading a day. Your prefrontal cortex will adapt. Give it six weeks and measure the difference.

[OK Then @okaythenfuture]

This is one of the smartest things you will ever read on this site,

And it’s why I constantly tell all of you daily to get rich as fuck on here,

By the early 2040s we will likely will be in a new structural economic reality, and if you are not rich af by then(depending on your location/class status), then oh boy, I don’t think it’s going to be pleasant.

This is the Great Game we’re heading towards, capital is increasingly losing its need for labor and will compound effortlessly by itself.

You do not want to be lacking capital when that comes.

Normally I wouldn’t even quote tweet alpha like this, because I want as many of you in the dark as possible, but it’s Sunday so let me try to adhere to Christian values and be a good anon neighbor.

[Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex]

To restate the argument in more obvious terms.
The eventual end state of labor under automation has been understood by smart men (ie not shallow libshits) for ≈160 years since Darwin Among the Machines. The timeline to full automation was unclear. Technocrats and some Marxists expected it in the 20th century.
The last 14 years in AI (since connectionism won the hardware lottery as evidenced by AlexNet) match models that predict post-labor economy by 2035-2045. Vinge, Legg, Kurzweil, Moravec and others were unclear on details but it's obvious that if you showed them the present snapshot in say 1999, they'd have said «wow, yep, this is the endgame, almost all HARD puzzle pieces are placed».
The current technological stack is almost certainly not the final one. That doesn't matter. It will clearly suffice to build everything needed for a rapid transition to the next one – data, software, hardware, and it looks extremely dubious that the final human-made stack will be paradigmatically much more complex than what we've done in these 14 years.
Post-labor economy = post-consumer market = permanent underclass for virtually everyone and state-oligarchic power centralization by default.
As an aside: «AI takeover» as an alternative scenario is cope for nihilists and red herring for autistic quokkas. Optimizing for compliance will be easier and ultimately more incentivized than optimizing for novel cognitive work. There will be a decidedly simian ruling class, though it may choose to *become* something else. But that's not our business anon. We won't have much business at all.
The serious business will be about the technocapital deepening and gradually expanding beyond Earth.
Frantic attempts to «escape the permanent underclass» in this community are not so much about getting rich as about converting wealth into some equity, a permanent stake in the ballooning posthuman economy, large enough that you'd at least be treading water on dividends, in the best case – large enough that it can sustain a thin, disciplined bloodline in perpetuity.
Current datacenter buildup effects and PC hardware prices are suggestive of where it's going. Consumers are getting priced out of everything valuable for industrial production, starting from the top (microchips) and the bottom (raw inputs like copper and electricity). The two shockwaves will be traveling closer to the middle. This is not so much a "supercycle" as a secular trend.
American resource frenzy and disregard for diplomacy can be interpreted as a state-level reaction to this understanding.
There certainly are other factors, hedges for longer timelines, institutional inertia and disagreement between actors that prevents truly desperate focus on the new paradigm. But the smart people near the levers of power in the US do think in these terms.
Speaking purely of the political instinct, I think the quality of US elite is very high, and they're ahead of the curve, thus there are even different American cliques who have coherent positions on the issue. Other global elites, including the Chinese one, are slower on the uptake. But this state of affairs isn't as permanent as the underclass will be.

For people who are not BOTH extremely smart and agentic – myself included – I don't have a solution that doesn't sound hopelessly romantic and naive.

[Torsten Black @torstenblack]

@danfaggella Could we be left to create, to imagine, to feel, to experience? Would AGI find value in observing us just like we observe lions in the Serengeti?

[Dr Singularity @Dr_Singularity]

https://t.co/xa704BEQoA

[Alton Syn @WorkflowWhisper]

https://t.co/ptZXXVJnbJ

[sysls @systematicls]

https://t.co/FQe5bCBqW1

[Torsten Black @torstenblack]

🤣🤣

[MONETARY MAYHEM @MONETARY_MAYHEM]

The silver top callers on x trying to manage their short position on Monday

[Rachel Wilson @Rach4Patriarchy]

I’m begging everyone (esp women) to binge watch @ItIsHoeMath videos. This one explains why the female presupposition of “women should have the freedom to do what they want” ensures that women don’t actually get what they want. Link below 👇🏻

[Torsten Black @torstenblack]

Why we must restore manhood.

[Arsenios Solar @ArseniosSolar]

The future of any nation is reliant on the strength and quality of its youth.