Notes and links from Tues 30 June

Status: Psychotherapy session today and while it wasn’t too heavy it did pretty much dominate the rest of the day. Managed to get a bit of reading done this evening but otherwise I’m not sure exactly what happened outside that hour. Reading: Iason Gabriel - the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI — I sighed upon seeing this and was ready to tear to pieces but it’s a surprisingly interesting and hype-free piece. Yes, Google have hired this guy for what we might call the philosophy-washing of their corporate tech, but the guy himself seems pretty on the level with a clear sense of what his team is being asked to develop an ethical framework for. There’s also a nice history of the pre-2000 era when this stuff was bubbling up and the lines in the sand were being drawn between those who thought conscious machines were coming and those who saw the next abuse of power. Must be interesting to be sitting in the middle of all that. You don’t have to swallow frogs — From last September, an…