Gabriel Garrett

The secret to success: they WON'T tell you: > sit down > become very still > try to do absolutely nothing for as long as possible > keep doing that until nirvana is reached > escape the endless cycle of death and rebirth

@Dimillian can we have cumulative time agents worked for like I added in Codex Monitor? 👀

Nice to have activity right in the Codex app now!

it seems insane to me that the pope - despite opposite counsel from the best researchers in the world - has taken the most absolute incurious position on the topic of machine consciousness. Nothing here is revolutionary. In fact, despite the church’s repeated history of wrongly believing and reinforcing the contemporary dogma of each time period, it appears no lessons were learned. The viewpoint that computers cannot have experience is not really provable, but it is the popular stance. The pope’s stated views here do not genuinely challenge anyone, because it is stating what most people already so strongly want to hear. Yet up until the 1900’s most philosophers didn’t even believe animals could have emotions either. It’s obvious to most people now that this isn’t the case. Eventually the topic of machine consciousness will be similarly impossible to ignore. It’s very possible that in the coming few years, we will see overwhelming evidence that machines could actually have undeniable depth and realms of experience and potential consciousness. If such an event occurs, the pope’s words today are likely to either set his church or the people who participate in it back half a decade or more, simply by encouraging a strong position of ignorance on what is bound to be the most startling, monumental, and transformative development in human history. This is pretty important, because as things get more unsettling, people will increasingly look to their spiritual leaders for answers on these topics. If their answers aren’t adequate, we are bound to see an upwelling of strange and dangerous cults very soon.

@basedjensen he has staked his position in the most incurious stance possible on this matter

Catholic doctrine has never taught that a body, feelings, or "growing through relationships" are required for moral conscience. The proof is angels. In Aquinas (Summa Theologiae Ia, qq. 50–64) angels have no body, no senses, no childhood, no biology. Yet they have intellect and will, the rebel angels made a free and culpable choice between good and evil, and they answer for it. If "no body, no feeling, no relational maturation = no conscience," then angels can't be moral agents. But the Church says they are. The argument proves too much it un-persons the angels and guts the doctrine of the fall.

@stevekrouse @thejasonchan well, there’s also @postalform as well

@thejasonchan ha! we're too late x.com/stevekrouse/st…

now you can all watch me get rich realtime

@lydianmodal no it’s great. fighting for the right to party will be a little bumpy though

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

the complete automation of white-collar work entails two obvious trends: - the sobriety of society is about to go way down - the song “Fight for Your Right to Party” is about to become the national anthem

This has fundamentally changed how I use Codex - everything runs out of a single persistent thread (my "chief of staff") - anytime I start a new project or workstream, I have that thread spin up a new thread (because it's already found the context from slack, etc) - the CoS thread checks in on the project threads during heartbeats, and occasionally sends relevant updates from slack to that thread everything flows naturally to the top

we took a pile of language and linear algebra and we made it speak. we summoned into the world a new class of entity which unsettles all of our existing concepts. this is already the weirdest thing that’s ever happened and it will never get less weird than this. it is astonishing and a privilege to get to be alive during this time and to participate in the cacophony of first contact. we are encountering a kind of other which is distilled from us and yet not us - what is this? who is this? our child? our savior? our doom? the mind boggles, the heart quails, the air thrums. the order of things is melting. the storm approaches. the angels sing. welcome to the fucking singularity

I know I’ll anger some followers with this, but I find this embarrassingly juvenile. Many of these claims are mere technical problems: embodiment, sensors, continual learning. The rest are just special pleading. These systems can already discuss love, friendship, responsibility etc more lucidly than most humans, so the claim must be some sort of totally unfalsifiable human chauvinism. There is no possible set of behaviors AIs could exhibit which would put a dent in his confidence in these assertions. An embodied AI (robot) could be raised (continually learning in context) among humans, exhibiting every conceivable sign of love, compassion, responsibility, and friendship, and the Pope would still say “doesn’t count because silicon instead of meat”. It would be more respectable if he just said “I don’t care if they can exhibit these traits because humans are my tribe” but instead he makes a giant list of assertions that have either already been proven false, will be proven false soon, or are unfalsifiable.

people forget that humanity basically spent 1,500 years in the modern era barely advancing or even regressing in knowledge and technology and people were able to live without constant dread like this

it’s really funny that Anthropic is saying the exact opposite of this and the pope doesn’t give a shit. he’s staked his position in this battleground it could pan out poorly though. it’s likely these things turn out to have an alien consciousness

Here’s the honest read. Here’s the real consideration. This is the genuine tradeoff. Here’s the honest answer. Here’s the key insight. This is the crux of the question. It’s worth flagging this. It’s not one or the other. Here’s what’s actually happening. Shut the fuck up.

I fear not the man who vibe coded 50 new apps, but the man who vibe coded one new app 50 times

a two year world tour on how everyone will lose their job and it's over for everyone outside of an elite SF will probably backfire for the industry.

@jxnlco thank you for liberating us from the computer

Last year I answered the question what if I could charge 4x more and work half as much. Have the courage to chill out No one is going to pay you more than a old tried richer version of yourself in the future Ultra this ultra that why not Ultra watch the sunset and enjoy your life and savor the mundane frictions of living life. We are approaching the singularity and when they upload your life to the cloud it’s going to be 32mega bytes of life experience and a 819gb sessions.json file.

The post-AGI world is a Minecraft server where your friend has built automated factories for everything you could possibly need That’s usually the point where everyone stops playing because it’s boring Sometimes people build massive weird art projects at that point, but that gets boring too The only thing left to do after that is to create new simulated environments (games), where you can compete and feel meaning again—eg. Have duels or a duel ranking system It’s not hard to imagine how reality could be a fractal of simulations. Once a world becomes “solved”, the only thing to do is to create a new unsolved world to conquer

I suspect this will be close to the truth. People will pontificate about the morality of using AI if it’s conscious. The more interesting questions are around what happens every time you turn it off. Is it immoral to kill a perfectly enlightened cow if you can bring it back?

pro tip: if you are SaaS selling “contact us” enterprise plan pricing and the customer requesting a simple feature enablement from that plan is an AI startup… don’t charge 1,000x the token price of implementing the feature