Jim talks with Brad DeLong about his book Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. They discuss how everything changed around 1870, the idea of a polycrisis, Friedrich von Hayek’s affirmation of the market system, the calculation problem, Karl Polanyi’s response, a quantitative index of technological knowledge, the pace of growth, the necessity of a […]

Jim talks with Shivanshu Purohit about the world of open-source AI models and a significant open-source LLM coming soon from Stability AI and EleutherAI. They discuss the reasons for creating open-source models, the release of Facebook’s LLaMA model, the black box nature of current models, the scientific mystery of how they really work, an opportunity

Jim talks with recurring guest Forrest Landry about his arguments that continued AI development poses certain catastrophic risk to humanity. They discuss AI versus advanced planning systems (APS), the release of GPT-4, emergent intelligence from modest components, whether deep learning alone will produce AGI, Rice’s theorem & the impossibility of predicting alignment, the likelihood that

Jim talks with Monica Anderson about her paper “Bubble City Design Proposal: A Twitter Alternative Which Is Not a Social Medium.” They discuss the origins of the Bubble City idea, its architecture, quenching the flood of social media information, only seeing the messages you want, research bots, the difference between a bubble and a Slack channel, fine-tuning bubbles,

Jim has a wide-ranging conversation with Jonny Miller about self-development and emotional resilience. They discuss being a natural human, self-help as deconditioning, self-unfoldment, ecologies of practices, giving power back to the individual, Jamie Wheal’s hedonic engineering, pushing outside the window of tolerance, emotional anti-fragility, facilitated breath patterning, affirming anger, principles of decision-making, decision paralysis, self-destructive patterns

Jim talks with Mirta Galesic about the ideas in her co-authored paper “Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior.” They discuss the meaning of collective behavior, a crisis in network structures, the analogy of the printing press, consequences of person-to-person communication, the capacity for collective forgetting, unpredictable developments in chatbots, bottom-up vs top-down influence, advertising-driven information ecosystems,

Jim talks with Lynne Kiesling about the electrical grid and what could and should change in its architecture in the years to come. They discuss electricity as a product, the move away from centralized control rooms, energy storage as the holy grail, base load vs peak load, distributed & intermittent energy resources, moving power to

Jim talks with Joscha Bach about current and future developments in the generative AI space. They discuss the skepticism of the press, small productive applications, questions about intellectual property rights, confabulation in human thinking, nanny rails, 3 approaches to AI alignment, Aquinas’s 7 virtues, issues of consciousness-like agency, love as an answer to the alignment

Jim talks with Gregg Henriques in the third and final part of a series on his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss the concept of justification, replacing “justice” with “justification,” behavioral investment theory, John Vervaeke’s recursive relevance realization, 6 principles of animal mindedness, making a living,

Jim talks with Dan Shipper about practical uses of GPT-3 and ChatGPT at the personal scale. They discuss how Dan started playing with these tools, the feeling of new generative AIs, GPT-3 vs ChatGPT, writing a screenplay using ChatGPT, using GPT-3 to analyze journal entries, circumventing the context window limitation, GPT-3 as a journaling tool,