Pro consultant | Amateur everything else | AI, Economics, Politics, Technology, Philosophy, Human Thriving | Longer: Clearly Intelligent | Left of Center.
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Joined March 2009
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Emergency gigachad needed
Let 1,000 @americanhousing factories bloom!
Well, for starters, he didn’t say that Anthropic is going to be the one to do it.
In all likelihood it will be an entity using AI as part of a larger workflow to do it. Maybe that entity is Anthropic partnering with a pharma company. Maybe it’s the pharma company using Claude via the API.
Can someone please explain to me the difference between saying this to juice your IPO vs Elizabeth Holmes claiming research progress during fundraising?
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We Love Life and Ourselves
We Can Govern
Very glad to see the NYT editorial board endorse BAAJA, the bipartisan permitting reform bill.
Key points from the article:
1. "Democrats who call climate change an emergency should not defend a permitting system too slow to build the clean energy that would address it."
2. "[BAAJA] would make it easier to build solar energy farms, battery storage, power lines and more. As a result, it would reduce energy prices. The status quo is expensive, dirty and unstable. The country needs to build a lot of big, new things to make its future cheaper and cleaner."
3. "The bill’s Democratic skeptics are making a mistake. President Trump would almost certainly veto a follow-up bill next year. And time matters, especially for the climate. Congress should pass this bill now. It can then return next year and pass other bills that would do even more good."
4. "Today, it typically takes between 5 and 13 years to build a long-distance power line, like the one that transports clean hydropower from Quebec to New England. That line took about a decade to finish, and opened in January. It has enough capacity to meet about one-fifth of Massachusetts’s electricity demand, and it’s projected to save consumers $50 million a year."
5. "A more robust, cleaner grid would make American energy more reliable and less dependent on hostile foreign nations. No country can embargo the wind."
6. "[BAAJA] would force data center operators to pay the full costs of the electricity they use, protecting the average electricity consumer."
7. "On net, the bill would cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by as much as 18 percent by 2040. It would do so in part by nearly tripling the construction of high-voltage transmission lines."
8. "Anyone who cares about climate change should cheer this bill. And a party that just won an election on affordability should not pass up a chance to start delivering immediately."
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Matty, like most people, is right about some things and wrong about some things.
It would behoove him and the rest of the wonk class to internalize that the slavish devotion to GDP (AKA corporatism) is probably not the best way to make the best world, and DEFINITELY not the kind of politics that will carry the democrats to the presidency in 2028.
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The tension between a large welfare state and low middle-class taxes is inescapable.
But it can be made smaller or larger. The more that Democrats want to increase demand, the less they can afford to reject policies that boost supply, such as the BAAJA
vox.com/politics/510291/demo…
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This conversation is vitally important but also not helped by the fact that people polling it are usually looking to get a pre-ordained answer.
See my earlier tweet about tradeoffs. When Third Way is trying to get people to scorn single payer, they put tradeoffs like higher taxes and republicans controlling healthcare decisions.
Similarly when progressive policies are polled (like rent caps), none of the negative tradeoffs that would result from this policy are included.
Thinking about second order effects doesn’t come naturally to most people, so it’s not surprising people see a “good” policy (who wants their rent to increase?) and simply do not consider what else might happen as a result of this.
Maybe this should be the conference I throw in February? Trade | Off
This is so good! We 1,000 more examples of this
Although there’s another big piece related to what I wrote about back in May
clearlyintelligent.com/2026/…
In Alex’s example (an example I have specifically used with friends actually) there are lots of indirect impacts of this too.
The people at Frito-Lay who are employed to make chips suddenly don’t need to make chips anymore, because the replicator can do this. So they now need to find a new job.
A 10% reduction in household cost does not sound so good when you have a 100% reduction in pay! So where will they find a new job? That’s hard to know, because their chip making skills might not be hugely transferable, and they are also going to be competing in the job market with people who previously made crackers, and pretzels, and other foodstuffs.
So we end up with a huge glut of labor that now needs to be reabsorbed into the economy. The speed that the labor can be reabsorbed seems like it would be hard to accurately model, and it’s not like the non-food sectors of the economy remain unaffected by AI capability.
This is probably my biggest worry for society over the next 15 years.
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Add to this:
The reduced demand for trucking (now that you don’t have food to schlepp around)
The impact of food advertising and marketing
The grocery store employees who no longer have things to put on the shelves
Now does this mean that we should STOP something like this from being invented? I don’t think so
If someone from an alien civilization made like Santa and dropped off a replicator on every doorstep, that would be good for everyone because it would create as much food as they wanted on demand. It wouldn’t necessarily NET good for everyone, especially if you earn your income in a way that’s related to food production
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I have always liked Ezra
LOL @ all the leftists defending Ezra Klein
They spent the last 2 years calling him a neoliberal shill and Abundance a corporate astroturfed political project but the moment hes in the same room as Hasan their programming kicks in and its glaze o'clock
0 principles, 0 values
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Olivia’s feed is like the inverse of found tape recordings in a post-apocalyptic game or movie
If we make it into the far future intact, people will be able to look back at things she surfaces, comments on, and works on as some of the reasons why
I’ll say that I would trust the political instincts of two extremely popular leaders who seemingly correctly weighed mounting a likely losing fight is not worth losing the insider influence they will need to move the party in a better direction and increasing the chances that they have a positive impact on the party in the far future
Very odd to me to think there are (literally hundreds of) people on this website who think that their political instincts are better than some of the most progressive elected a to hold office in recent memory
This speaker fight (it’s been one week by the way) will be a distant memory once the primary starts and when candidates are whipping support the bridges not burned will be just as important as the new relationships made
I don’t think EA is center-right
I would like to see an AI safety fund that is explicitly not aligned with EAs or rationalists or center-right politics. We have plenty of those now.
It’s time for new funding sources to enter this ecosystem. It’s an under-discussed problem—possibly because those outside of it don’t realize how pervasive it really is. And, yes, I see it as a “problem,” because these movements have a very specific set of beliefs that don’t necessarily align with those of everyone in this space or the general public.
If I was a multimillionaire I’d do it myself. I’m kind of just an average lady who cares a lot, though. If you have the means to kickstart this, I’d highly encourage it. A sponsored nonprofit under the umbrella of a larger non-EA org could be one way to go.
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Has anyone written about what an "intelligence explosion" would look like if it happened in an air-gapped, unmanned data center in the middle of the Pacific ocean?
FWIW I have no feeling one way or another about the likelihood (or impact) of an intelligence explosion unless and until there's real world tangible impact. And I think I'm probably not alone in that diagnosis.
I think if we're on the cusp of a software-only intelligence explosion the most important thing to do would be to harden the world to cyber threats.
Dare I say it might even be better to get an intelligence explosion before the vast majority of intelligence is embodied?
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This is so cool
In one of my favorite experiments, I told Fable 5.2 to build an endless, hands-off journey through 3D worlds linked by portals.
25,000 agents created over 450 worlds inspired by books, art, places, all in code.
Play: portals-endless-worlds.netli…
Github: github.com/emollick/ai-porta…
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