Announcements & opportunities

• UK Great Stagnation summit in July, apply to attend (via @s8mb)
• Help Bryan Bishop create an enzyme that makes DNA based on digital instructions
• The Cybersecurity Grant Program, $1M for AI-based cybersecurity (from @OpenAI)
• Foundations & Frontiers, a magazine about future technologies (via @annasofialesiv)

Links

• An dig through the Extropian archives (via @ATabarrok)
• Orwell against progress
• “Coasean democracy” is the solution to Britain’s sclerosis (by @s8mb)

Queries

• Is there a good summary of all the different proposals for how to regulate AI?
• Have any of you read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872)? I could use some exegesis
• A book about economic history that focuses on how technology was scaled?
• Is there a counterfactual world where we’re still pre-industrial?
• Are self-driving cars still using control theory, with AI used only for sensors?
• Has anybody made an actually good publicly editable database?

Tweets

• Most people have no idea how much retail has gotten better over the last ~150 years
• An urban planner responds to my post on regulation
• Many people think self-driving failed, but there are customers in driverless taxis now
• The meaning of mortality declines
• The oldest known depiction of a steam-using atmospheric engine? From 1654!
• Desalination was a big technological success story of the 2010s
• Rewarding AI for a correct thought process, not just the right answer
• Humans correctly guessed an LLM chat agent was an AI only 60% of the time
• LLMs will be units within larger orchestrated systems
• Environmental regulations are an all-purpose tool to indefinitely delay anything
• Should we build underground cities? (Maybe not, say @ConnorTabarrok and Casey Handmer). Related thread on underground apartments.)
• Is it virtuous to assign probabilities to all uncertainty?

Charts

• The UK continued to get rich after the end of empire (GDP growth actually increased)

• Iterative change is slow but over time it moves the world