AI Article Readings

Joseph Heath argues that Yuval Harari’s account of human evolution in Sapiens rests on an outdated, intelligence-first story: humans got smarter, developed language, learned to cooperate, and then built culture. Against this, Heath presents Joseph Henrich’s much stranger and more compelling inversion: culture came first, reshaping cooperation, language, and eventually intelligence itself. The result is a sharp, accessible guide to one of the most interesting live debates in the human sciences.
https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/harari-vs-henrich?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post, Ada Palmer challenges the familiar story that the Black Death “caused” the Renaissance, and that the Renaissance was a simple golden age after a dark medieval past. Instead, she uses the comparison with COVID to ask what history can and cannot tell us about crisis, recovery, myth-making, and the choices societies face after catastrophe. It is a thoughtful, bracing essay about why we should want something better than a new Renaissance—and why achieving that depends on human action, not historical inevitability.
* 00:00:00 - Introduction
* 00:07:56 - Part 1: Renaissance Life was Worse than the Middle Ages (super-condensed version)
* 00:35:12 - Part 2: Where did the Myth Come From in the First Place? (A Renaissance Story)
* 00:52:43 - Part 3: Why is the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age Retold so Much? (a post-Renaissance story)
* 01:18:40 - Conclusion: We Should Aim for Something Better than the Renaissance
https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/


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In this post, Dean W. Ball argues that America is drifting into a de facto frontier AI licensing regime without clear standards, creating both economic risk and democratic danger. He makes the case for a more stable governance model: federalized safety-framework requirements, independent technical auditors, and regulation aimed at frontier AI labs as institutions rather than at individual model releases.
https://open.substack.com/pub/hyperdimensional/p/what-should-be-done?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post, Gwern argues for “Guardian Angels”: deeply personalized LLMs designed not as generic chatbots, but as trusted extensions of a specific person’s values, style, preferences, and goals. It’s a wide-ranging essay about productivity, security, AI-mediated work, and what it might take for future AI systems to genuinely amplify individuals rather than merely replace or manipulate them.
* 00:00:00 - Introduction
* 00:06:27 - Chatbot Incentives Are Misaligned
* 00:10:03 - Chatbot Problems
* 00:10:44 - Mode-Collapse
* 00:13:09 - Laziness
* 00:13:52 - Brittle Because Fast
* 00:16:41 - Too Helpful
* 00:18:14 - Amnesiac
* 00:20:03 - Chatbot Fixes
* 00:20:07 - Cooperative RL
* 00:22:47 - Continual Learning
* 00:22:50 - Catastrophic Forgetting
* 00:23:48 - Generalizing
* 00:26:32 - Creative Writing
* 00:30:03 - Over-Parameterizing
* 00:30:30 - Extremely Large LMs
* 00:30:57 - Active Learning
* 00:33:14 - Preference Learning
* 00:36:10 - Brain Imitation Learning
* 00:37:05 - Personality Emulation
* 00:39:01 - Guardian Angels
* 00:40:48 - Principles
* 00:42:07 - Anti-Principles
* 00:47:06 - UX
* 00:48:23 - Use-Cases: Politics & Politics
* 00:51:17 - Hardware
* 00:52:57 - Cost
* 00:55:11 - Organization
* 00:56:18 - Startup Business Model
* 00:57:43 - Competition
* 01:00:20 - Initial Steps
* 01:01:35 - GBT
* 01:04:18 - For Writing
* 01:06:44 - Data Augmentation
https://gwern.net/guardian-angel


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In this post, Alice I. Cecile argues that hating AI is understandable but insufficient: the harms are real, the technology works well enough to matter, and neither boycotts nor bans are likely to make it disappear. Instead, she makes a case for “bitter hope”: targeted regulation, decentralised access, harm reduction, and a politics aimed at redistributing the gains rather than pretending the machine can simply be uninvented.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 04:35 - AI sucks.
* 06:47 - Boycotts, data centers and NFTs.
* 11:09 - Unfortunately AI does work.
* 17:05 - Hating AI that works.
* 25:15 - A budding Butlerian Jihad.
* 27:44 - The limits of boycotts.
* 32:28 - Regulation will save us!
* 34:36 - Regulation will not save us?
* 38:45 - A future worth fighting for.
* 42:13 - Regulation that works.
* 45:04 - Decentralization that matters.
* 48:15 - A future I believe in.
https://shaping.systems/blog/ai-sucks-hating-it-is-not-enough/


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