Book 2 Update
Book 2 is coming along, though the expected publication date continues to slip. I’m doing better at managing the human capacity issues I wrote about in August, but writing a novel is still inherently a lot of unpredictable work. And…
Andy Haymaker
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
When Eliezer Yudkowsky first founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), it was to promote the idea of superhuman AI as a path to human flourishing. Along the way, the institute was rebranded as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute…
First Draft Complete
For my last book, I completed an 82,293 word first draft in a month, so I thought I could do something similar this time. Boy was I wrong. Not only did I forget that how much time I took off…
Drafting Is Underway
I started drafting the actual manuscript of Book 2 of The Bitstreams Thread in late January. The process has been interrupted multiple times by my day job and book-related travel, but it’s progressing. The outline is holding up well, suggesting…
Book 2 Update
Since Bitstreams of Hope is starting to get more readers, I thought I’d give people an update on where I’m at with book 2. As always, I have to juggle writing with my full-time job, but it’s progressing. I’m doing…
Don’t Boycott AI, Especially If You Hate It
These days, morally sensitive people say things like, “There’s no ethical way to use AI”. Believe me, I get it. I wrote earlier about all the reasons a backlash against the current set of AI models is justified. The big…
OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic Should Merge
It has long been a published principle of OpenAI that in order to avoid dangerous races, they will stop what they’re doing and shift to helping any other lab they believed was close to creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), i.e.,…
The AI Backlash
It should be clear that I’m an AI optimist. I think AI can make life for humanity much, much better than it’s ever been. I used to be a naive optimist, thinking that AI would almost automatically be good, because…
Transitioning from Bits to Atoms
One of the things that’s surprised me the most is how long it takes to get the book out into the world, even after the words are cover art are finalized. I plan to write about my struggles with Adobe…
What Just Happened With Sam Altman
I’m not going to post often enough to comment much on current events, but the fall and redemption of Sam Altman is too big to ignore. I’m convinced that historians will still be dissecting this event decades from now, assuming…