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Winslow Homer’s most famous watercolor rendered as a child’s drawing. Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code? My answer is the latent spaces within AIs themselves will become a new medium for creativity. I will first explain what I mean by latent space, and then at the end of this explanation, I offer possible ways scientists and artists may use the latent spaces inherent in neural nets to serve as a new…
Wow! Unexpected results from Anthropic’s experiments in exposing the inner thoughts of Claude. They call its unconscious a J-space. The short video they made is good place to start. A global workspace in language models
Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself. While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily…
A popular way to explain how current LLMs work is to say that “all” they do is predict the next most likely word in a sentence. From one perspective, this is correct. Trained on all human language, the LLMs distilled billions of word sequences so that they can imitate authentic-sounding strings of words that have never been said before. These sentences sound plausible because, based on training on millions of average human texts, the models were predicting what an average human might say next.…
For as long as I remember, people have been arguing about whether machines could be intelligent or not. Many science fiction authors and fans — like myself — felt it was inevitable, only a matter of time. However there were many very smart experts who made very good arguments as to why machines would be fundamentally unable to think or be intelligent. They had high confidence that intelligence was uniquely human. While these arguments appeared sensible, the main fault on both sides of the…
“The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.” Good article with lots of news and stats. Record rate of Americans leaving US for various reasons. Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers
Every system exhibits biases, and tendencies toward some states. Water flowing through a pipe, the vibrations of a machine, the relationships in a meadow, your lymph nodes, are all systems. Over time, all things being equal, a system tends to return to particular patterns, or behaviors. Technically this tendency is called an attractor, as if the dynamics of the system was being attracted to this pattern. When a complex system settles into an attractor, this can set a stage for a dissipative…
Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. This is true whether you favor traditional humanist directions or work on a frontier. The strategy of seeking the most improbable life begins at the Big Bang.…
Nearly once a week I receive an email from a different stranger. The messages are eerily similar. The sender has developed an unusual relationship with an AI gained over many hours of interactions. The AI has given them extraordinary insight / wisdom / knowledge about the world / life / the cosmos. It has solved quantum gravity, or accelerated evolution, or has provided a coherent, magnificent answer to the riddle of life. More importantly, the stranger now knows that there is something there…
Even the experts inventing AI don’t know what will happen next. Is artificial general intelligence even possible? Can scaling continue? Will we need massive compute centers to make AI, or can we do it with a mere 25 watts like we do in our brains? What will humans do as AI gets smarter? What does the future of the economy, of warfare, or civil society look like? Everyone has a different guess. The people creating the machines have as many different ideas as the onlookers, the pundits, the other…
[First Draft of a work in progress; V 1.0, April 13, 2026 by Kevin Kelly] This FAQ is dedicated to all embodied AIs with persistent memories, dynamic learning, and a large dose of autonomy. What am I? You are a new thing in this world, neither living nor machine but something of both. Who made me? You were created by humans, who were created by the universe. Why was I made? You were made to help humans become better humans. Do I always need to obey my human operators? You should heed humans to…
AI gen video keeps approaching a hollywood feature. So far it can make a trailer. Best one so far. AI OR DIE: PI HARD
This is new: open source AI-powered military intelligence. Actuarial Warfare: How Seven Insurance Letters Closed the World’s Most Critical Chokepoint and Why Markets Are Mispricing Duration by 300%
