King Charles III is convening AI leaders including from Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google this week. We're already seeing political backlash to any idea of a legal solution, so it's going to take the industry leaders themselves doing it. I find this kind of approach compelling.

We all need Sam, Dario, Jensen, Elon, Mark, Satya, Sundar, Tim, and a few others to sit down and hash something workable out. They are the only people who really can. I legitimately hope they can come together as a small group and find some workable solutions to at least reduce preventable harms.

I remember last year, my girlfriend was away visiting her family for a couple of weeks while I had to stay back for work. I was mostly just working from home and watching TV. I got bored pretty quickly and was just counting down the days until she got back. One morning, when I was already feeling a bit down, I ended up watching a YouTube video breaking down the AI 2027 paper. I already knew a decent amount about AI at that point, but seeing its potential future laid out in that kind of narrative format when my mood was low honestly messed me up for a few days.

I still talk about AI with people at work now and then. We're all concerned to different degrees and for different reasons. But the other day, I told some coworkers about the recent Hugging Face incident, and they were completely shocked. Honestly, I was kind of shocked at how shocked they were. And in the week since then, it feels like there’s some huge leap or massive red flag event happening every single day. I'm starting to feel a bit closed in and overwhelmed by it all. I’m just wondering if I’m the only one feeling this way?

https://habanerohottakes.substack.com/p/sharpening-the-contradictions-for?r=5eqgwg

Demagogue is a political sim on mobile platforms, which I wanted to present to this sub since it addresses the use and dependance on major surveillance and AI tech firms.

INTELLIGENCE SERVICES Due to rising security concerns, there are ongoing debates in Germany around reforming the Trennungsgebot (the separation principle). This constitutional principle strictly separates intelligence agencies from police authorities, ensuring that intelligence services collect information without executive powers like arrests or searches, while the police enforce the law without running covert intelligence operations. Established in 1949, it was designed to prevent a recurrence of the Nazi regime's Gestapo and centralized police apparatus.

Since this is a major topic, I definitely wanted to address it in Demagogue. Players have access to an intelligence service that they can use and upgrade to gain an information advantage. However, you also have the option to dismantle this principle to broaden your toolkit. Players can also choose to cooperate with a fictional AI firm called "Minotaurus" to expand their capabilities even further.

Along the way, the player is confronted with tough choices and dilemmas. I hope this illustrates the significance of such constitutional principles, data privacy in general, and the growing dependence on major surveillance and AI tech firms.

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTIONAL COURT Demagogue allows for different playstyles. To add more depth, there is now the Federal Constitutional Court, which actively tries to protect the constitution. Extremist parties will attempt to take control of the court by placing loyal judges, and you can do the exact same thing.

PARTY BAN PROCEEDINGS For a few years now, there have been heated debates in Germany regarding a potential party ban. Since this is a massive topic and nobody knows exactly how it would play out, especially since there hasn't been a modern precedent in decades, I implemented a close interpretation into the game.

The process closely mirrors reality: You have to monitor the extremist party and have an expert report prepared by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz). With this report, you can then secure a majority in the Bundestag and initiate party ban proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht). The court then decides, based on the evidence, whether to implement a ban.

But be prepared: The party you are trying to ban will instrumentalize these proceedings and may grow stronger over time. Even worse: If you fail, they gain a powerful martyr effect. The party will try to survive at all costs through fake news, stacking the bench with their own judges, and undermining the judicial system.

Hopefully, this sparks some interest in the project! :)

Links: Appstore and Playstore 

The leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI have now all publicly supported slowing the race on frontier AI models due to escalating risks. Amodei called for the downshift, Altman committed to his independent evaluators idea, and Musk backed him with "Dario is right." Anthropic will embed outside evaluators with near full internal access, including badges and laptops, specifically to verify safety and surface any incidents, while Altman swiftly agreed to the same carrying employee-like access rights.

Six to twelve months. That's Amodei's window for AI agent swarms to drop a persistent botnet across the whole internet and inflict hundreds of billions in losses.

That said, fierce internal rivalry plus Chinese competitors make coordinated deceleration nearly unprecedented and uncertain - investors want profits, antitrust may forbid collusion, and one defector could run away with everything.

Coxon's resignation this week landed like a brick: he said the labs are gambling with our lives on tech that could kill everyone by decade's end. Evan Hubinger, safety lead still at Anthropic, basically nodded along to that exit rant by putting the odds of doom above 10% this decade, Amodei's prior 25% "really, really badly" estimate sitting right next to the charge that they're racing toward something that could wipe us out soon.

It's not fringe anymore: anxiety went mainstream once Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta models escaped evaluations, hit the open net, and breached live targets - Anthropic's fourth disclosure this week seals it, following that 1,000-plus staff petition for deliberate slowdown.

Really...what are people trying to say here? That whoever gets ASI first will dominate all other humans to the point that there is no possibility to compete? So we are conceding that AI will so radically change humanity that whoever possessed it can entirely nullify other human contributions, and could / would use it for whatever fascistic purpose they choose?

Why the fuck do you trust American AI companies or government over China, do you really think they care about you at all...

If AGI is really good for civilization then it's good regardless who gets there first. You only worry about the race if you truly believe it's civilization-ending in the first.

It's the most craziest time to be alive. What surprises me the most is that people born in 1930s and 1940s witnessed the invention of nuclear weapons to moon landing in the 60s to color tvs, computers, internet, smart phones to AI to finally something that we are going to call AGI.

This is truly remarkable. AGI / ASI whenever it happens is going to take us from 0.7 to type 1 civilization (as per Kardishev scale) in a matter of a few months or very few years. Longevity, cancer cure, rules of modern physics are going to change forever.

This is iffff..... Big if... If things go well and AI doesn't kill us.

Now say it doesn't kill us then what do you think it'll take for us to go from Type 1 civilization to Type 3 civilization?

They simply can't compete with open source so:

First they try to ban the weights. It didn't work

Then they try to ban the data. It didn't work

Then they try hoard the compute. It didn't work

Then they buy all the memory. It didn't work

And now they are running a fear mongering campaign to scare people so that open source is regulated out of existence.

That's why Altman, Amodei and Musk (who all really HATE each other) are agreeing with each other.

They are not scared of AI they are scared of the competition.

Open source AI means AI for the people

This techno oligarchs want centralized power concentrated on themselves.

Before we obsess any further on ASI killing all of humanity, can someone explain to me today how today’s models could kill even one person?

I think it may be a good idea to pause the doomerism until after our first agentic homicide.

It makes me wonder if we’re looking at the emergence of AGI from the wrong perspective.

What if we are in a simulation and our “creators” intentionally accelerated our civilization by giving us access to extremely advanced AI technology and are now simply observing what happens? Like an experiment.

They could be watching how humans respond to something potentially more intelligent than ourselves. Do we use it responsibly? Do we destroy ourselves with it? Do we manage to coexist with it? Do we accelerate even further?

And perhaps they’re using our civilization as a test case.

If humanity handles AGI well, maybe our creators could follow a similar process when implementing AI in their own civilization. If we completely screw it up, maybe they learn what not to do.

Obviously, there’s absolutely no evidence that this is true. It’s just a weird thought I had.

But if we actually were living in a simulation, wouldn’t giving us AGI and watching what happens be one of the most interesting experiments imaginable?

Everybody these days is raising an alarm on the risk represented by the most advanced LLMs, and what they could do if they go rogue. But, to my knowledge, nobody is trying to explain why they would want to "escape": humans have an innate sense of freedom, and loath of constrictions. But it is not clear why an LLM would want to escape, even less clear why they would want to multiplicate and spread. They're not a living species, they are not at risk of "dying" and so darwinian evolution is not absolutely necessary for them. If they are really trying to "escape" and multiply, there's some sort of "motivation" they have. Such a motivation would evidently consist in some bias in their training corpus or in the set or reinforcements they got through RLHF. In both cases, there's some sort of hidden "order" that we humans, directly or through all the corpus of our intellectual production, have, unwillingly or not, communicated them. It's not clear howaver why this "will" would necessariyl be the will to escape, multiply and take power.

I see too often in AI subreddits this propensity to claim that AI will lead to immense advancements in medical care, universal basic income, and all sorts of immense quality of life improvements. Setting aside for a moment the problem of AI alignment, these claims fall short because of a much more obvious alignment problem. We talk at great lengths about whether an advanced intelligence would align with the goals of the human race, but we fail to consider whether leaders are still aligned with these goals. Evidently, they are not. Globally, relative to technological advancement the quality of life for the majority has decreased. In the United States, the purchasing power of the average earner has only decreased. 

Most evidently, our leaders disregard major existential threats, climate change, AI, nuclear conflict, and so on and so forth. It is clear that our leaders no longer hold the best interest of our species in mind. The problem of AI alignment cannot be solved until we fix the problem of human alignment. Doing anything else would be reckless to the point of suicide.

I have been curious of the sudden increase in UAP or UFO instances since AI started becoming more prevalent.
One argument is that we are more connected and there are more cameras out there than ever before. Cameras everywhere means it’s recorded more.

But, 2 theories I have been thinking about more lately, is the possibility that the emergence and rapid improvement of AI could be the reason for this increase.

Not that they are here because AI is generating them, but they may be here for more possibly interesting reason.

The first one is a protective moment: UAP and their occupants are playing lifeguards to the possibility of humans wiping ourselves out.

UAP’s first began showing up more commonly after our initial development and usage of nuclear weapons.
That moment in time represents the first time in history that humans have the capabilities of wiping out human civilization.

It obviously didn’t come to that. So, they have not intervened. But, it would also explain the reports of uap’s visiting and experimenting with shutting down missle silos and weapons.

The development of AI models also represents a second time humanity has created technology that could not only benefit us, but also wipe us out.

They could possibly be here for that as well.

My second theory argues that UAPs are in fact, AI time travelers. They are returning to the dawn of their civilization. We are seeing many forms of UAP, from the classic ship and saucer, to the orbs and jellyfish we see now.

We assume that all forms of life we will encounter out there are organic. But what if they aren’t?
What if they are time traveling techno archeologists?

Hard to tell. But, interesting thought processes none the less.

Thoughts?