Mitchell_Porter

Requiem for the hopes of a pre-AI world

A few months from now, I turn 55. I've been a transhumanist since my teens in the late 1980s; since I got online in the 1990s, I have participated remotely in the talking shops and virtual salons of Internet transhumanism and, later, rationalism. The upheavals of 21st century politics have provided many distractions, but I have never abandoned the view that it is possible and desirable to reach for something more than the natural human condition. At the very least, one should try to reverse the aging process and remove the arbitrary bound on lifespan that it imposes. Beyond that, one is free to aspire for a world as idyllic as possible; and there are also multitudinous unknown possibilities of being, beyond human form and life on Earth, waiting to be explored. More than that, I didn't just hope these vistas would open up, I wanted to play a part. And I surely had a chance to contribute; I was academically promising, I can write, I can give a speech... In retrospect, I think I can identify a few factors that impeded the achievement of whatever potential I had. First, I had no "social capital". I didn't come from the middle class, I had no relatives in academia or the professions, so I didn't have that kind of support network or model of industrious sobriety to fall back on, when I found the world wasn't interested in what I had to offer. Second, I came of age on the pre-cloud, pre-corporate Internet, whose potlatch ethos naturally encouraged an anarcho-communal outlook, where again something more careerist or even capitalist might have given me more options later. But instead, I was to become familiar with what seems to be the graduate student lifestyle, without actually doing a higher degree: living in share houses, and working-for-money for as few hours as possible, while you dedicate yourself to whatever fever dreams or higher tasks or intellectual activities really animate you. Through the years of living like this, I tried a number of times to "work with socie

100May 27, 2025

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A research agenda for the final year

Since the start of 2026, I've been thinking, suppose this is the final year before humanity loses control to AI. What should I do, where should I focus? I now have an answer. The plan is to tackle three questions: What is the correct ontology? What is the correct ethics?...

Feb 1216

Another glimpse of the Chinese AI scene: Z.AI

Yesterday I had my first conversation (in English) with Zhipu's GLM-4.7. It was cool because I got to talk with an actual Chinese AI about topics like: the representation of Chinese AI in "AI 2027"; representations of AI in the "Culture" SF series versus the "Wandering Earth" movies; consequences of...

Jan 2734

How do you read Less Wrong?

My method of reading Less Wrong is to scroll back through all recent comments and posts, which the front page spontaneously presents to me in reverse-chronological order, until I arrive at posts and comments that I recognize. Along the way, if I see anything that I might want to read...

Nov 14, 202520

Understanding the state of frontier AI in China

In this post, I will not be giving an authoritative review of the state of frontier AI in China. I will instead just be saying what I think such a review would cover, and then share such scraps of information as I have. My objective is really to point out...

Sep 25, 202511

Value systems of the frontier AIs, reduced to slogans

This emerged from curiosity as to the emergent utility functions of the current AIs, and what they would do if they became superintelligent while possessing their current value systems. I had a conversation with ChatGPT-o3 about some of the issues, and at the end asked it to summarize the values...

Jul 15, 20254

Requiem for the hopes of a pre-AI world

May 27, 2025100

Emergence of superintelligence from AI hiveminds: how to make it human-friendly?

"Hive mind" may not be the ideal term. What I'm really envisioning is something modelled on the existing relationship between human users and frontier LLMs, but with the "users" actually just being LLMs too, or simple programs that mediate between LLMs. But first, consider OpenAI's o-series models, and their human...

Apr 27, 202512

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Requiem for the hopes of a pre-AI world

Rationality, Singularity, Method, and the Mainstream

On Leverage Research's plan for an optimal world

Debugging the Quantum Physics Sequence

Mitchell_Porter

A research agenda for the final year

Another glimpse of the Chinese AI scene: Z.AI

How do you read Less Wrong?

Understanding the state of frontier AI in China

Value systems of the frontier AIs, reduced to slogans

Requiem for the hopes of a pre-AI world

Emergence of superintelligence from AI hiveminds: how to make it human-friendly?

Requiem for the hopes of a pre-AI world

Rationality, Singularity, Method, and the Mainstream

On Leverage Research's plan for an optimal world

Debugging the Quantum Physics Sequence

A research agenda for the final year

Another glimpse of the Chinese AI scene: Z.AI

How do you read Less Wrong?

Understanding the state of frontier AI in China

Value systems of the frontier AIs, reduced to slogans

Requiem for the hopes of a pre-AI world

Emergence of superintelligence from AI hiveminds: how to make it human-friendly?