Parker C

This moment has

been decades in the making. Six decades of Moore’s Law have given us the compute horsepower to process exaflops of data. Four decades of the internet (accelerated by COVID) have given us trillions of tokens’ worth of training data. Two decades of mobile and cloud computing have given every human a supercomputer in the palm of our han... See more

The Lump Of

Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning tha... See more

If only the internet was a thing, it would have been tempting to bleed off the anxiety, and swoon into an infinite doomscroll.

The tipoff to

the nature of the AI societal risk claim is its own term, “AI alignment”. Alignment with what? Human values. Whose human values? Ah, that’s where things get tricky.

Can two hours

a day chatting to a bot possibly be healthy? On the one hand, you’re spending those two hours talking to an imaginary friend, which seems a bit worrisome. On the other hand, the typical American spends more time than this watching TV—an average of two and a half hours a day—and TV is about as interactive as a brick. Your brain gets a l... See more

In our culture,

waiting has a bad rap. After all, if you’re waiting, what’s to show off on Insta?

The direction language models indeed prompt you to follow (pun intended) often leads you somewhere boring — to the land of averages