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Bangalore
Joined February 2008
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During the Bangalore floods, an area that was badly affected was Outer Ring Road i.e ground zero of tech companies.
In all the footage, you'll notice a red skywalk appear again and again.
There's a story behind this skywalk.
And it's a metaphor for the city's urban governance.
6183 teams from 303 campuses fought it out for 20L in cash prizes to build personal AI assistants to solve some of the most Indian problems (my favourite is called 'Madam OTP?')
More here: the-ken.com/case-competition…
Praveen Gopal Krishnan retweeted
Eagerly waiting for the plethora of solutions suggested and built by the young builders. @peegeekay Looking forward to your insightful analysis and takes on what India wants from personal AI agents.
To read more about what this is all about, read
the-ken.com/case-competition…
Personal AI agents are suddenly in the conversation.
Three months ago, The Ken decided to find out how personal AI agents will rewire India. We threw the problem to students all across India with 20L of cash prizes up for grabs.
This is the story of how we did it.
Browse through a glimpse of how personal AI agents will rewire India here:
the-ken.com/case-competition…
It's finally here.
2 hours 40 minutes on TCS, the accidental crown jewel of the Tata empire.
Oh, also, apart from the podcast, the team has created an interactive, immersive microsite that tells the story of TCS from the beginning to the end, which you can read for yourself
Podcast (Watch) : youtube.com/watch?v=giV753IL…
Microsite (Read) : the-ken.com/intermission/the…
Praveen Gopal Krishnan retweeted
Good morning.
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Did it a month ago.
the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-…
@peegeekay Please cover this in Ka-Ching or the Ken! This needs attention and another pair of eyes from NPCI, RBI, Ministry of Finance.
If you're a subscriber of The Ken and a listener of Two by Two, you'd have already heard all these arguments a month ago when I did an episode who really wins when MDR is levied on UPI, and the new UPI equation.
Listen today at least. Still not too late.
the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-…
Pretty surreal to see video on the main of The Ken, plus an incredible, immersive microsite about ITC, which is the topic of the latest episode of Intermission.
Easily some of the best work we've ever done.
Praveen Gopal Krishnan retweeted
Today we're launching The Great Rewiring - the first definitive account of how AI agents will remake India.
The answers are not easy, which is why we've constructed a unique method to find out how this unfolds.
One of the most interesting and exciting products from @TheKenWeb
Some of the most interesting stuff that Indians are saying they'll gladly handover to agents are...uniquely Indian problems.
These responses are from The Great Rewiring, a project on how agents will change India. If you want to tell what you want, and read more confessions, here is the link:
the-ken.com/the-great-rewiri…
Are you a founder or CEO of an Indian company who has moved away from Claude to other open-weight models recently?
Today we're launching The Great Rewiring - the first definitive account of how AI agents will remake India.
The answers are not easy, which is why we've constructed a unique method to find out how this unfolds.
One of the most interesting and exciting products from @TheKenWeb
