Been receiving lots of questions about this from folks who expect AI engineers to result in a wave of mass unemployment. I think the crux of the question is whether there can be such a thing as "too much code" in the world. As farming productivity skyrocketed in the last few… Show more

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

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Bill and I have been frequently paired in a variety of venues as pessimist and optimist respectively. Recently a Noble Prize winning panelist dismissed Bill’s concerns, exclaiming that, “we’re not going to see self-replicating nanoengineered entities for a hundred years.” I pointed out that 100 years was indeed a reasonable estimate of the amount o... See more