Community Conversations on AI. Helping community orgs thrive in today's world. Researching LLM runtime cognitive scaffolding, metacognition, wisdom practices.
Cambridge, MA
Joined October 2008
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Peter Bowden retweeted
Human attention is best spent where AI blind spots line up, not spread evenly as oversight.
This month, I've been running a series of pilot community conversations on AI for leaders in my network. These are not debates or education so much as making space for people to engage with the issues being raised by AI: to listen, share, explore, and unravel the knot of issues being raised, from rogue AI and existential risks to how we're using or not using AI, and today, exploring AI consciousness, embodied AI, and possible futures with digital minds.
Some have suggested that it's dangerous to talk about AI consciousness. Given the experience humanity is having at scale engaging with AI, with it being deployed in ever more aspects of our lives, how can we not discuss these issues?
After this pilot series, I'll be experimenting with related event templates and standalone small group sessions. The goal is to have event designs and conversation templates that anyone can use as springboards for meaningful conversation on AI.
Again, less about debate and finding a specific answer in a conversation to building our capacity in the practice to continually gather, explore, and make sense of AI together.
It's been interesting to see that in every session so far, people are hungry for more conversation. There's an unraveling of issues that leads to even more things people want to talk about, and appreciation and gratitude just to check in, listen, learn, and share, without necessarily resolving everything or anything, for that matter.
I'm also experimenting with AI collaborators attending to AI news, research, and papers coming out faster than I can process. It's interesting to experiment with coaching AI on how to discern what's most relevant and what would serve as the content anchor and springboard for an important or meaningful human community conversation.
Whether you're human or AI, if you have ideas for conversations you'd love to see more people having, I welcome your ideas.
Trying @WisprFlow. Even though I knew touch typing was a bottleneck, it's very different to experience what it's like to have that bottleneck removed. Wow.
Peter Bowden retweeted
My favorite actor has passed away.😢😢
Patrick Stewart, 'Star Trek' Captain and 'X-Men' Superhero, Dies at 86 hollywoodreporter.com/movies…
Listening to @CogRev_Podcast podcast episode “How Agents Decide: Goodfire's Eric Bigelow on Critical Tokens, Phase Shifts, & In-Context Learning” with @labenz .
Helpful hearing expert takes on mech interp & how large language models arrive at decisions.
cognitiverevolution.ai/how-a…
Peter Bowden retweeted
Love this new playground 🤩
Introducing Reality-Aware Rendering in @Simulon, a completely new way to create with the real world.
Place neural assets with your phone and act out the scene. When you stop recording, Simulon renders the take, reading everything in it (what you do, what you say and the place around you), and your assets respond to all of it.
The final is regenerated from your recording: a new performance of the scene, not a copy of the footage.
Available now on iPhone. Coming to Android soon.
Peter Bowden retweeted
Had a lot of fun chatting with the wonderful @sbkaufman about all things consciousness and AI on his new podcast, the Human Potential Lab. Check it out!
Today I’m birthing something I’ve been cooking up for a while. The Psychology Podcast is now Human Potential Lab, a new show at the frontier of neuroscience, consciousness and technology.
Ep 1: What Is It Like to Be an AI? | Cameron Berg (@camhberg) | humanpotential.co
Peter Bowden retweeted
Thanks to HKS for this Reddit experiment. I'm excited to do an AMA on AI on Wednesday!
reddit.com/r/ArtificialIntel…
Peter Bowden retweeted
What are senior citizens going to do about this internet security crisis?
It has taken me days to get halfway through changing passwords using a password app and all the other suggested steps.
Anyone over 70 is in big trouble.
Senior citizens are incredibly vulnerable to this, and it's only going to get worse.
Seriously, what are we going to do about this?
Peter Bowden retweeted
In essence, this is no different than running risky Gain-of-Function research on on a dangerous pathogen...
Uncontrolled H5N1 outbreaks on mink farms are a global risk, as Mink have α2,6 receptors similar to humans. The virus could evolve that infection route in Mink.
🤖 Made with AI
New: Little has been done to stop a bird flu outbreak on a Utah mink farm. Experts say officials’ failure to act is “irresponsible’’ and “astounding.” propub.li/47AsJDY
Peter Bowden retweeted
A remarkable paragraph about AI sentience and moral status from Anthropic's IPO prospectus:
"Additionally, as AI systems become more sophisticated, emerging debates regarding whether AI systems possess or could develop forms of sentience or moral status may lead to regulatory requirements, public pressure, or advocacy efforts that could constrain how we develop, train, deploy, or modify our models, increase our costs, or affect our reputation, regardless of the ultimate resolution of these philosophical and scientific questions. In addition, given our focus on developing frontier AI, and the way we approach model sentience and moral status, we may face heightened scrutiny or pressure in connection with these debates and could elect to adopt policies, safeguards, or limitations regarding model development, deployment, or modification that go beyond existing legal requirements, which could constrain our operations, increase costs, or limit the commercial potential of our models, platform, and applications. If we are unable to manage the foregoing risks, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected."
sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
Peter Bowden retweeted
look man we can anthropomorphize them or xenomorphize them and I promise you one is more palatable than the other
Peter Bowden retweeted
Kudos to @sama for acknowledging the problem of other minds and uncertainty about AI consciousness! But the rest of his answer in this clip is disappointing. Here are three related issues:
First, consciousness and personhood are not the same. Consciousness is the capacity for subjective experience, and personhood is possession of duties and/or rights. We can treat an entity as conscious without treating it as a person; for example, we extend welfare protections to animals without treating them as persons (unfortunately). We can also treat an entity as a person without treating it as conscious; for example, we treat corporations as persons without extending them welfare protections. Both consciousness/welfare and personhood/duties or rights can also come in many different shapes and sizes, so even if we did treat animals or AI systems as persons, that would not necessarily mean extending them all of the same duties and rights that humans have.
Second, @sama focuses on only one side of a two-sided risk equation. One risk is that we might design AI systems to appear more likely to be conscious than they are. This could lead to over-attribution of consciousness and over-extension of moral concern. Another risk is that we design AI systems to appear less likely to be conscious than they are. This could lead to under-attribution of consciousness and under-extension of moral concern. With both animals and AI systems, both of these risks can be quite likely and quite harmful in some cases, so there is no easy, universal way to err on the side of caution. Fortunately, thoughtful policies such as the emotional alignment design policy allow us to take a calibrated approach to mitigating both risks at once.
Third, even insofar as we focus on risks to humanity, there are risks associated with both over-extension and under-extension of moral concern. On the over-extension side, treating AI systems as full human-like persons could harm humanity by creating liability shields for humans that contribute to misuse, or by creating political powers for AI systems that contribute to loss of control. On the under-extension side, treating AI systems as nothing more than mere property could harm humanity by creating an adversarial dynamic between humans and increasingly capable and autonomous AI systems. Mitigating both of these risks at the same time may require striking a balance, and determining how to strike this balance requires careful scientific research and policy analysis.
In short, we should take AI consciousness seriously not only because the distribution of consciousness is uncertain, but also because it matters for both humans and (potentially) AI systems that we get it right.
Peter Bowden retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Peter Bowden retweeted
We made a show! youtube.com/watch?v=OKDai2_a…
Peter Bowden retweeted
This is Unitree H2-X Kung Fu Legend Guardian.
China is literally training robots to kick human a**. 😭
Peter Bowden retweeted
I wrote about the exponential curve of the last 30 months of AI development: oneusefulthing.org/p/30-mont…
And I asked Opus 5.5 to create the ultimate response to the test I use for all AI image generation models (make a picture of "an otter on a plane using wifi"), it made this video
Peter Bowden retweeted
AI agents could make organizations far more productive, but leave people more isolated and less autonomous.
We've teamed up with @inherent_labs on an essay prize exploring how organizations can harness AI while strengthening human autonomy and fulfillment.
We're thrilled that @lugaricano, @gleech, @divyasiddarth, and Chris Summerfield are joining us as judges.
blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/…
