AGI podcast episodes - early 2025

Here's my recent diet of podcasts-about-AGI:

• ForeCast​
•  Will AI R&D Automation Cause a Software Intelligence Explosion? (with Tom Davidson)​
• Core Memory​
• Dwarkesh Patel Wants People to Learn Things​
•  80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin​
• Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” – and how we're completely unprepared​
•  Dwarkesh Podcast​
• Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer – 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI​
• Tyler Cowen - the #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans​
• Leopold Aschenbrenner - China/US Super Intelligence Race, 2027 AGI, & The Return of History​

Obviously a bunch of panic inducing thoughts in here. My general feeling is: the hype is real, the next five years will be wild, we're headed for almost unimaginable abundance, but there's a bunch of turmoil between here and there.

Only marginally related, I was thinking about copyright / IP / piracy and the nonsense phrase: "You wouldn’t backpropagate a car." came to me.

And completely unrelated, in our house we've been interpretive dancing to La Casa Giratoria by Octavio Paz. Tom asked if "caminan y no tienen pies / miran y no tienen ojos" referred to self-driving cars.

Your System Prompt

An LLM's "system prompt" is like a mantra or personal mission statement. Imagine that "system prompt" becomes such common parlance, so that when future self-help authors write about self-talk / motivation / personal codes-of-ethics, they call this "your system prompt".

It is the case that we use the language from cutting-edge science and engineering to describe the non-scientific. For example, new-age "vibrations" or corporate "DNA". A more extreme language shift would be if English mostly dropped the word "word" and just said "token" instead.

Modernism Re-enactors

The Amish are (sort of) re-enacting a previous era of technological development. It seems to be hard work.

Imagine that the people who idealize the 1950s were to build re-enactment towns where they would have picnics on gingham and hand-wash red Thunderbirds. Or that postmodernism re-enactors would rebuild historical Xerox machines for period-accurate zines in a reconstructed Olympia, Washington.

Two challenges to living in a world that is technological and yet far from the leading edge of technology: 1) finding replacement parts is a challenge, 2) everything is more expensive because of the lack of economies of scale. Both of these seem surmountable in a post-scarcity economy, where dexterous robots can craft one-off replacements parts for old Thunderbirds or Xerox machines.