Astral Codex Ten

AI

27 min read

AI

Article

AI is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 47 times across 47 issues between April 30, 2021 and March 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “AI will eventually, not-too-distantly-from-now destroy everything”; “to recognize the tangible costs that AI is imposing right now”; “fear of superintelligent AI”. It most often appears alongside OpenAI, China, Elon Musk.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 47
  • Issue count: 47
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: March 01, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
..., hairier systemic problems. Half the people I know in the Bay Area are convinced that democratic socialism is the true path forward; the other half are pretty sure that AI will eventually, not-too-distantly-from-now destroy everything, so other kinds of long term systems tinkering probably aren’t even worth worrying about. (It’s interesting to me that the realm of AI research is populated by highly ed...
Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We?
July 27, 2021 · Original source
Almost all of the progress in artificial intelligence to date has little to do with the imagined Artificial General Intelligence; instead, it has concentrated on narrow tasks. AI capabilities do not involve anything close to true reasoning. Still, the effects can be pernicious.
How do you write an entire article dismissing fear of superintelligent AI, which doesn’t contain a single argument against fear of superintelligent AI? Daron Acemoglu is a smart person and I doubt he did this by accident. I think he just didn’t care about the topic at all. He wanted space to make his argument that narrow AI is pernicious and that somebody needs to do something. Pitching it as “instead of worrying about superintelligence, worry about this!” seemed like a cute framing device that would probably get the article a few extra eyeballs.
Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
August 06, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
April 04, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle
July 22, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 234
July 25, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 236
August 08, 2022 · Original source
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Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune
August 13, 2022 · Original source
The Jihad is barely explained in the books, but seems to have involved a crisis of artificial intelligence; man rose up against the machine and won out, but the victory was either so costly or uncertain as to drive a universal ban on machines that imitate the complexity of human thought.
22
August 16, 2022 · Original source
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Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
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From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
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Can This AI Save Teenage Spy Alex Rider From A Terrible Fate?
November 28, 2022 · Original source
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Perhaps It Is A Bad Thing That The World's Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs
December 12, 2022 · Original source
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Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
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Trying Again On Fideism
February 15, 2023 · Original source
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OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
March 01, 2023 · Original source
Is this too cynical? I’m not sure. On the one hand, OpenAI has been expressing concern about safety since day one - the article announcing their founding in 2015 was titled Elon Musk Just Founded A New Company To Make Sure Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Destroy The World.
Inline links: Elon Musk Just Founded A New Company To Make Sure Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Destroy The World
Kelly Bets On Civilization
March 07, 2023 · Original source
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Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
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The Extinction Tournament
July 20, 2023 · Original source
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Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
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We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
July 25, 2023 · Original source
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Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
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In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
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Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
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24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
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In Continued Defense Of Non-Frequentist Probabilities
March 21, 2024 · Original source
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Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
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Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty9. As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted! No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton received a life sentence, only to mysteriously die in prison, perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up executed herself. Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have no rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for telling troops not to attend Trump rallies and for ruling against Donald Trump in court. Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel10 can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened within five minutes. Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve tormenting the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons: The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.” Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall. And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows. “You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed. “Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied. […] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips. She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later. “Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said. During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it. “Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]11. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said. But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said. As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by firing squad. But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or thrown overboard. The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes. The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence. The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance12. What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, Nothing Ever Happens. But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice. Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope. The World’s Laziest Conspiracy One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are un-conspiracies. Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events. But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for total inaction. RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even vote. The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen. It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent. Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee. Trump Will Never Die But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory? That’s right, this review is actually about AI13. The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation? Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s experience machine – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives? But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible. Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this. But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the real body camera footage, and it does show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together. In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with no evidence at all. Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously. But in a sense, all of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the same event caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise. So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for any story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads. Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same? 1 “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?” Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers: A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
Inline links: 9, Jeff Sessions, received a life sentence, die in prison, executed herself, telling troops not to attend Trump rallies, ruling against Donald Trump in court, 10, within five minutes., tormenting, 11, firing squad, thrown overboard, 12, Nothing Ever Happens, 13, experience machine, 1
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
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24
September 17, 2024 · Original source
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Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
October 24, 2024 · Original source
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Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
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Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument
November 22, 2024 · Original source
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Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
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Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
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Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
8: A Conservative rabbinical assembly has released Halakhic Responses To Artificial Intelligence And Autonomous Machines, ie guidelines for how Jewish law should treat AI. Mostly boring, but it does cite Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi’s 18th century ruling about whether you can include a golem in a minyan.
Inline links: Halakhic Responses To Artificial Intelligence And Autonomous Machines
It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism
January 02, 2025 · Original source
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The Colors Of Her Coat
April 01, 2025 · Original source
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Now I Really Won That AI Bet
July 08, 2025 · Original source
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In Search Of AI Psychosis
August 26, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 402
October 06, 2025 · Original source
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ACX Forecasting Contest
November 14, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 415
January 05, 2026 · Original source
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Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
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"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 01, 2026 · Original source
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