escarpment

sentience & regulation

Nope, not what you think. ::chuckle::

But... we're heading in that general direction now given the weather of public discussion lately in certain key pointy-headed precincts.

What PH discussions? Well, an excellent exemplar of such is in 2 recent interviews Ezra Klein had in his NY Times podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. [NB: am not an EK newbie; I started following him during his early blogging in the American Prospect and later, Vox.]

Here's the one he had with Michael Pollan from 3 weeks ago:
The More You Study Consciousness, the Weirder It Gets

From the podcast summary:

Consciousness is this amazing, mind-bending riddle. It’s the only thing any of us truly knows. We experience everything else in life through it. And yet we barely understand it. We don’t know what it’s made of or how it works or why it exists.

But scientists and theorists have been trying to answer those questions, and have made some startling discoveries. The science writer Michael Pollan, known for books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind,” spent five years on the vanguard of this research. And his new book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” shows that the closer you look at consciousness, the weirder it gets.

I asked Pollan to walk through some of the places his mind wandered on this journey — including the role of the body and feelings in consciousness, fascinating studies that provide evidence for plant sentience, the researchers who have abandoned their old theories after trying psychedelic drugs, and the possibility that consciousness may not emerge from inside us at all. “I’ve entered this ‘never say never’ realm with this research,” Pollan told me.

And here's the one he had with Alex Bores (who I hadn't heard of previously) from just yesterday:
Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?

From the podcast summary:

Leading the Future, a super PAC whose funders include the founders of companies like Palantir and OpenAI, is spending millions of dollars this election cycle, and a considerable amount of that money is going toward attack ads against Alex Bores – even though Bores himself used to work for Palantir.

Bores is a New York state assemblyman who is running for Congress to represent New York’s 12th District. His campaign includes an extensive A.I. policy platform, including demands for A.I. companies to be more transparent about safety, and an idea for an “A.I. dividend” that would redistribute some of the profits of A.I. companies to the public. So his race has turned into a central battleground over the future of the A.I. industry and who has the power to shape it.

In this conversation, we discuss how Bores went from working for Palantir to running a campaign that would regulate the A.I. industry, the major issues he thinks A.I. policy needs to address, and his response to the attacks against him.