Has every made-up anecdote already happened?

September 13, 2024

A weird thing about anecdotes: there are so many humans, and each human has so many things happen to them, that for a great many simple stories, you might make up (as long as it is within the bounds of physics/current technology/human capacity, and isn't too specific), something similar has happened to somebody. For instance, I just made up these stories that I've never heard of ever happening: • a young child stealing their mother's car • a dog discovering buried treasure And i...

Nine ways that text-generating AIs will probably change the world in the next ten years

December 3, 2022

Image generated by the A.I. DALL·E 2 using the prompt "A robot hand drawing itself by MC Escher"

Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4). Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years: #1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and...

Many global challenges arise due to collective action problems or incentive misalignment

November 16, 2020

Many of the biggest challenges that we face in society are due to one or both of these types of problems: (A) Collective Action Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though they'd be better off in the long-term if everyone agreed not to take action X. Some of the big challenges with Collective Actions Problems are (i) getting people or groups to agree to stop the behavior in the first place, and then (ii) creating a v...

Ten things we each personally can do to help democracy:

November 3, 2020

1. Vote 2. Double check claims before repeating them 3. Don't share articles unless we've read them (i.e., not just because we like a headline) 4. Take a breather before responding when we feel angry (in person and on social media) 5. Remember that groups are purposely trying to feed us appealing disinformation (that exploits our preconceptions and biases), intending to create chaos 6. Read multiple news sources with differing perspectives 7. Go to the unedited video/text (whe...