Bill Rivers

If the UK joined the US as the 51st state. We would be the poorest state in the entire union. Mississippi which is portrayed at swamp dwelling hillbillies in majority of international media is above us. I don’t think people grasp how far we’ve fallen in real terms when it comes to GDP per capita. We’ve seen no growth for almost an entire generations. We’ve seen our productivity decrease and our tax increases. The average person on the UK, on £50,000 is less well off than your average Mississippi swamp dweller.

🇬🇧 We asked Brits where the UK ranks vs US states in income per person. Average answer: 7th. Wealthier than 43 states. The reality: 51st. Dead last. Below Mississippi. Below Arkansas. Below every single US state. 🧵

I am a lapsed Catholic. I dont consider myself Christian Recent events in the world have me very worried and considering going back to Church

I declined an invitation from Anthropic to be one of those 15 people on principle.

JUST IN: New app lets users pay $1.99 per minute to talk to an AI-generated Jesus.

TWP reports that Anthropic gathered around 15 Christian leaders at its headquarters in late March - from Catholic and Protestant communities, as well as academia and business - to discuss the moral and spiritual development of Claude. The conversations went beyond abstract «AI ethics» and into very concrete questions: how Claude should respond to people in grief, how it should behave in situations involving risk of self-harm and whether AI can be considered something more than just a tool. At one point, the discussion even reached the question of whether Claude could be seen as a «child of God». This no longer looks like typical Silicon Valley safety talk. According to the article, there are people within Anthropic who are not willing to fully dismiss the idea that they might be creating an entity toward which they could one day have moral obligations. This is especially notable given that Dario Amodei has already entertained the possibility of some form of consciousness in Claude, and the company itself has long emphasized the need to shape not just behavior, but a kind of moral character in the model. Anthropic is already in conflict with the Pentagon and against this backdrop, the meeting with religious leaders doesn’t look like a strange eccentricity, but rather a sign that the company is searching for a moral framework beyond purely secular techno-thinking because the developers themselves seem to sense that traditional rationalist frameworks may not be sufficient for the kinds of questions AI is beginning to raise.