Curating Content To Support Learning About Humanity's Transition

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Currents 090: BJ Campbell and Patrick Ryan on Egregores

Jim talks with BJ Campbell and Patrick Ryan about understanding the present moment through the concept of egregores. They discuss the meaning of the term, its roots in early occultism, social media as the fertile ground, an analogy with neural nets, measuring egregores with grammar velocity, LLMs as a Broca’s area for tech, how guns have won the culture […]

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EP 183 Forrest Landry Part 2: AI Risk

Jim continues his conversation with recurring guest Forrest Landry on his arguments that continued AI development poses certain catastrophic risk to humanity. They discuss the liminal feeling of the current moment in AI, Rice’s theorem & the unknowability of alignment, the analogy & disanalogy of bridge-building, external ensemble testing, the emergence of a feedback curve, the

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Currents 088: Melanie Mitchell on AI Measurement and Understanding

Jim talks with Melanie Mitchell about her critique of applying standardized exams to LLMs and the debate over understanding in AI. They discuss ChatGPT and GPT-4’s performance on standardized exams, questioning the underlying assumptions, OpenAI’s lack of transparency, soon-to-be-released open-source LLMs, prompt engineering, making GPT its own skyhook to reduce hallucinations, the number of parameters in

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Marina Gorbis & Jerry Davis

Executive Director of the Institute for the Future Marina Gorbis and Institute for the Future Equitable Enterprise Initiative Advisor Jerry Davis discuss how to change the register from industrial values to collaborative commerce. 🎙 In his monologue, Rushkoff explains how denaturalizing power reveals the constructed landscape. 📰 You can read a written version of Rushkoff’s

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EP 182 Brad DeLong on An Economic History of the 20th Century

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

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Currents 087: Shivanshu Purohit on Open-Source Generative AI

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

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EP 181 Forrest Landry Part 1: AI Risk

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

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Alissa Quart

Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and author of Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream Alissa Quart helps us dispel the myth of the self-made man once and for all. 🎙 In his monologue, Rushkoff explains why he believes we’ve hit peak billionaire mindset. 📖 Alissa Quart’s book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from

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Currents 086: Monica Anderson on Bubble City

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,

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