Thank you for writing this. I had to stop trying to tell people this as I couldn't quite find the words without sounding insane. None of our institutions are ready for exponential change and the gap between whats possible and where we think we are widens by the day
Carlo, you say Anthropic "invented a new category of deployment, in real time, because the old categories no longer fit."
It wasn't new.
The Talmud classified fire two thousand years ago as an autonomous force - not a tool, because tools don't act on their own; not an agent, because fire doesn't choose. Something that serves its owner but escapes and damages what the owner never intended. The framework they built covers tiered access, graduated liability, containment obligations, and what happens when the fire jumps the wall. Case by case, minority opinions preserved. Read your description of Mythos and tell me that is not a fire.
You diagnosed the wrong clock beautifully - everyone calibrating to 2022 while the frontier moved on. But your conclusion runs the same error in reverse. You look forward for governance forms and assume they must be new. They are behind you. The reason you can't see them is the same reason your institutions can't keep up: not pace, but emptiness. You can't govern something this powerful with acceptable use policies written by people who have no theory of what use is for.
The ground won't settle. You're right. But the bedrock was never the ground. It was underneath it, and we paved over it.
What I find most telling (if too obvious) is that no one seriously entertains the option of just not continuing to develop the technology, or slowing things down to a crawl.. That would be the "neat" solution - but it's impossible. Everyone knows we're at the mercy of the people trying to speed it up the fastest, and no one has a choice in the matter.
You wrote: "The instinct to look backward is not a character flaw. It is a survival strategy. We use the past as a compression algorithm: this situation resembles that situation, so the same responses should work."
I was raised to value historical thinking as indispensable to understanding events of today. To resist presentism, which fails to see that everything continues to be shaped by its past and we are always situated within these histories. In that larger humanistic sense, using the past is much more than just a heuristic or compression algorithm. But what you describe here raises the unnerving possibility that even historical thinking cannot make sense of the current moment. I would like to think that's not entirely the case.
thank you so much for your contribution Carlo! We are finalizing a proposal for a community anchored Holistic Wellness DAO and this piece will be linked in the case for action.
Thank you for writing this. I had to stop trying to tell people this as I couldn't quite find the words without sounding insane. None of our institutions are ready for exponential change and the gap between whats possible and where we think we are widens by the day
Carlo, you say Anthropic "invented a new category of deployment, in real time, because the old categories no longer fit."
It wasn't new.
The Talmud classified fire two thousand years ago as an autonomous force - not a tool, because tools don't act on their own; not an agent, because fire doesn't choose. Something that serves its owner but escapes and damages what the owner never intended. The framework they built covers tiered access, graduated liability, containment obligations, and what happens when the fire jumps the wall. Case by case, minority opinions preserved. Read your description of Mythos and tell me that is not a fire.
You diagnosed the wrong clock beautifully - everyone calibrating to 2022 while the frontier moved on. But your conclusion runs the same error in reverse. You look forward for governance forms and assume they must be new. They are behind you. The reason you can't see them is the same reason your institutions can't keep up: not pace, but emptiness. You can't govern something this powerful with acceptable use policies written by people who have no theory of what use is for.
The ground won't settle. You're right. But the bedrock was never the ground. It was underneath it, and we paved over it.
10 things I learn from “Everyone Is Talking About the Wrong AI” https://hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/everyone-is-talking-about-the-wrong
1. AI has a big leaf from 2022 to now
2. AI improves faster than human belief
3. Advanced AI like Anthropic Mythos makes human expert cost cheaper quickly
4. AI advancement just make decision time like compressed
5. Institute runs too slow comparing to AI advancement
6. Universities still do not update curiculum, then how about graduating students?
7. The author assumes that AI will continue to accelerate fast
8. The thesis starts from Anthropic annoucement about Mythos, without any proof or debating
9. We should update our belief frequently. I prefer reading (real) research papers.
10. The author claims an arbitrary 2 years that advanced AI model will be everywhere -> only 2 year to prepare
What I find most telling (if too obvious) is that no one seriously entertains the option of just not continuing to develop the technology, or slowing things down to a crawl.. That would be the "neat" solution - but it's impossible. Everyone knows we're at the mercy of the people trying to speed it up the fastest, and no one has a choice in the matter.
You wrote: "The instinct to look backward is not a character flaw. It is a survival strategy. We use the past as a compression algorithm: this situation resembles that situation, so the same responses should work."
I was raised to value historical thinking as indispensable to understanding events of today. To resist presentism, which fails to see that everything continues to be shaped by its past and we are always situated within these histories. In that larger humanistic sense, using the past is much more than just a heuristic or compression algorithm. But what you describe here raises the unnerving possibility that even historical thinking cannot make sense of the current moment. I would like to think that's not entirely the case.
If nothing else, one lesson from the pandemic is "You Can’t Finesse the Steep Part of an Exponential." https://www.theinsight.org/p/lessons-from-a-pandemic-anniversary
thank you so much for your contribution Carlo! We are finalizing a proposal for a community anchored Holistic Wellness DAO and this piece will be linked in the case for action.
You are truly scaring me. Mainly because I have no power or influence to stop or even slow down all of this. Can you help us find some solutions
Before it is really too late? Or is it already there?
I have shared your recent posts with my friend Susan MacMillan, who runs the TAKING STOCK newsletter. She has found them very interesting and included references to them in their latest posting: https://takingstocknewsletter.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email