Book review: Future-Generation Government: How to Legislate for the Long Term, by Nicholas Chesterley.
This book has some good theory about how governments could behave more far-sightedly. It is a bit too academic to be a very practical guide to action.
Continue ReadingI’ve been shifting my investments to more AI-focused bets.
Here’s an overview of my larger positions, in descending order of how eager I am to recommend further purchases now:
Short positions:
[This is not at all a complete list, as I have smaller positions in something like 150 other companies.]
AI stocks are likely to form a bubble someday, but I’m guessing the peak of that bubble is more than a year away.
I still have some concerns about tariff-related damage causing some declines sometime this year. I’m optimistic that the courts will strike down the per-country tariffs this fall. It shouldn’t take long for the country to recover from the tariff damage once the tariffs have been removed.
Beware that even in a strong bull market, there will be periodic scares, such as January’s DeepSeek-trigger panic, that cause sharp drops in leading stocks. AI-related stocks had a big rally in June, and are likely to consolidate for a while before the next such rally.
Mainland China seems committed to reasserting control over Taiwan within a few years, regardless of how much force is needed. Here’s my attempt at planning a non-disastrous scenario.
I have less expertise here than in my average blog post, so I encourage readers to question my guesses.
In April of 2028, China launches a blockade of Taiwan. It surrounds the island with their navy, threatening to seize or sink any ship leaving Taiwan that doesn’t submit to Chinese inspections.
Continue ReadingMy recent post Are Intelligent Agents More Ethical? criticized some brief remarks by Scott Sumner.
Sumner made a more sophisticated version of those claims in the second half of this Doom Debate.
His position sounds a lot like the moral realism that has caused many people to be complacent about AI taking over the world. But he’s actually using an analysis that follows Richard Rorty’s rejection of standard moral realism. Which seems to mean there’s a weak sense in which morality can be true, but in a socially and historically contingent fashion. If I understand that correctly, I approve.
Continue ReadingIn key centers of power, there’s an important shift happening now of the Overton Window for AI dangers.
The first sign is a surprising reaction to the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
Continue ReadingBook review: Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity, by Eric Topol.
I was somewhat disappointed, partly because the title misled me.
The book is broad and shallow, as if he’s trying to show off how many topics he’s familiar with. Too much of the book consists of long lists of research that Topol finds interesting, but for which I see little connection with aging. He usually doesn’t say enough about the research for me to figure out why I should consider it promising.
He mostly seems to be saying that the number of new research ideas ought to impress us. I care more about the quality of the most promising research than about the quantity of research.
The book is mostly correct and up-to-date, but I’m unclear what kind of reader would get much out of it.
Continue ReadingThis post is a response to a claim by Scott Sumner in his conversation at LessOnline with Nate Soares, about how ethical we should expect AI’s to be.
Sumner sees a pattern of increasing intelligence causing agents to be increasingly ethical, and sounds cautiously optimistic that such a trend will continue when AIs become smarter than humans. I’m guessing that he’s mainly extrapolating from human trends, but extrapolating from trends in the animal kingdom should produce similar results (e.g. the cooperation between single-celled organisms that gave the world multicellular organisms).
I doubt that my response is very novel, but I haven’t seen clear enough articulation of the ideas in this post.
Continue ReadingOn May 16, news sources reported that Republicans planned to eliminate subsidies for nuclear power, leading a number of pundits to complain that Republicans were destroying nuclear power in the US (e.g. this otherwise good Noahpinion post).
The stock market told a very different story. I will illustrate with the stock prices of the two companies that seem most focused on building new nuclear power plants.
NuScale (NYSE:SMR) was up more than 52% between April 30 and May 22.
It was up a further 19.6% on May 23 in reaction to an executive order that is aimed at speeding up approvals of nuclear plants.
Oklo (NYSE:OKLO) was up more than 67% between April 30 and May 22. It was up a further 23% on May 23.
Both stocks were up slightly on May 16 and the subsequent trading day, indicating little interest in the news about subsidies.
The market seems to be pretty clear: the benefit of reducing regulations is so much larger than the benefit from subsidies that the subsidies are hard to distinguish from a rounding error.
It’s also fairly likely that some of the market rise up through May 22 was influenced by the executive order that was published on May 23. In other words, it seems pretty likely that somebody profited from advance knowledge of the executive order. I’m pretty sure that’s covered by the SEC’s rules as illegal insider trading.
I can’t prove insider trading here. It’s possible that there was public information that contributed to the pre May 23 rise. The NYT reported relevant rumors on May 9, but both that article and the stock market reaction to it suggest that the administration didn’t decide until sometime later on what kind of executive order to make.
I don’t care enough about insider trading to be too outraged about this particular example of likely corruption. But I’m a bit sad that the most corrupt administration in US history manages to look better than its critics on nuclear issues.
Note: I own stock in NuScale, and some uranium processing companies.
Book review: The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime, by Dale E. Bredesen.
As expected, The Ageless Brain repeats a good deal of information from Bredesen’s prior groundbreaking books about Alzheimer’s. Maybe 10% of the book seemed like ideas that I hadn’t seen elsewhere.
This time, he’s focused a bit more on cognitive decline in people who are young enough to not be at much risk yet for full-fledged Alzheimer’s. But that doesn’t create much of a difference in his advice for brain health.
Continue ReadingAI 2027 portrays two well thought out scenarios for how AI is likely to impact the world toward the end of this decade.
I expect those scenarios will prove to be moderately wrong, but close enough to be scary. I also expect that few people will manage to make forecasts that are significantly more accurate.
Here are some scattered thoughts that came to mind while I read AI 2027.
The authors are fairly pessimistic. I see four key areas where their assumptions seem to lead them to see more danger than do more mainstream experts. They see:
I expect that the authors are being appropriately concerned on about two of these assumptions, and a bit too pessimistic on the others. I’m hesitant to bet on which assumptions belong in which category.
They don’t focus much on justifying those assumptions. That’s likely wise, since prior debates on those topics have not been very productive. Instead, they’ve focused more on when various changes will happen.
This post will focus on aspects of the first two assumptions for which I expect further analysis to be relatively valuable.
Continue Reading