Helen Toner is an Australian researcher, and the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. She was a board member of OpenAI when CEO Sam Altman was fired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Toner

Helen Toner: The collapse of 'long' AI timelines. Nothing embodies that acceleration more viscerally than the prospect of human-level AGI arriving not in some distant sci-fi future, but within the span of a few years—or, at most, a couple of decades. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Economics Roundup #5. While we wait for the verdict on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7, today seems like a good day to catch up on the queue and look at various economics-related things. (more)

what a government is actually able to achieve

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #104: American State Capacity on the Brink. The Donald Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted employees (which is that ‘probationary’ means here) you end up firing quite a lot of the people who know about AI or give the government state capacity in AI. (more)

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics (1941–1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences. He was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology. His association with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped widen his influence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson (more)

Scott Alexander: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does. (POSIWID) Consider the following claims: The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients. (more)

Rival Voices: The Purpose of POSIWID Is What It Does. The phrase POSIWID—“The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does”—has been making the rounds on Twitter. In response, Scott Alexander just published a Substack post arguing the opposite: that the purpose of a system is “obviously not” what it does. 2025-04-11-AlexanderComeOnObviouslyThePurposeOfASystemIsNotWhatItDoes (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #28: March 2025. I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups – I will do my best to only cover the administration as it relates to my particular focus areas. That is ‘if I start down this road there is nowhere to stop’ and ‘other sources are left to cover that topic’ and not ‘there are not things worth mentioning.’ (more)

Anil Dash: Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does (POSIWID). When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start from the assumption that the outputs or impacts of that system are precisely what it was designed to do — whether we find those results to be good, bad or mixed. (more)

The Transition Towns and Green Wizard folks are tossing poo at each other. I think it’s more useful just now to talk about the things Hopkins’ critique got right. Rob Hopkins is a smart guy, and even though he’s garbled a fair number of the details, his post raises useful points regarding some of the core issues I’ve tried to bring up in the Green Wizards posts. The first of those is that one of the motivations behind the Green Wizards project is a recognition of the limitations of the Transition Towns project. I’ve discussed my concerns about that movement on several occasions on this blog, and don’t see any need to repeat those comments just now. The crucial point, though, is one that Hopkins himself cheerfully admits: that neither he nor anyone else in the movement can be sure that it will accomplish what it’s trying to accomplish. That’s a bold statement, and one that’s worthy of respect. Still, it has implications I’m not sure Hopkins has followed as far as they deserve. If the difficult future ahead of us can’t be known well enough to tell in advance what strategies will best deal with it, in particular, it seems to me that it’s a serious mistake to put all our eggs in one basket, whether it’s the one labeled “Transition” or any other. This is the underlying strategy that guides the Green Wizards project. I’ve argued here that the best approach to an unpredictable future is dissensus: that is, the deliberate avoidance of consensus.

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #86: Just Think of the Potential. Dario Amodei is thinking about the potential. The result is a mostly good essay called Machines of Loving Grace, outlining what can be done with ‘powerful AI’ if we had years of what was otherwise relative normality to exploit it in several key domains (more)

John Robb's next book will be The Resilient Community The key to our collective future success (from maximal wealth creation to basic survival), will be in how we mitigate the impact of Black Swans generated by global instability. One of the best approaches I've encountered is to add Resilience to the very fabric of our global system, the Community. Update: Resilient Community writing was going to be a book but instead became website later taken over by Walden Labs. https://waldenlabs.com/author/johnrobb/

John Michael Greer provides a five-part fictional scenario for the Collapse of America at the hands of China. (more)

Preparing to survive/prosper in the Long Emergency/Collapse. Display some personal Resilience. (more)

Technology that can be key Infrastructure either pre-Civilization (Africa) or post-Collapse. (more)

Idea for getting through the Long Emergency. Focus on the individual rather than Resilient Community? (more)

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation (John D. MacArthur) that makes grants and impact investments to support non-profit organizations in approximately 117 countries around the world. It has an endowment of $7.6 billion and provides approximately $260 million annually in grants and impact investments.[5][6][7] It is based in Chicago, and in 2014 it was the 12th-largest private foundation in the United States.[8] It has awarded more than US$8.27 billion since its first grants in 1978. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Foundation (more)

Genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program

Alex Steffen ponders the local heroes that will save us from the Long Emergency. And we got on this riff about heroes who got the paradox of the moment: that abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them. (more)