James Poulos

Gonna try to explain this to tech CEOs again: Young Americans are pissed. They feel betrayed. Half have embraced the far right & want to cut off your access to cheap foreign labor. The other half have embraced the far left & want to cut off your head. One side will win. Choose.

Writing on Magnifica Humanitas tomorrow. In the spirit of adding to rather than analyzing or critiquing (both already overproduced to slop levels by man and machine): * Some people especially exceptional ones will always seek to build for the whole of humanity by building at scale for a whole of humanity use case. This is not the only or the crucial modality. To the representative architectures of the tower of Babel and the walls of Jerusalem, crucial people will add the monastery * Work, value, society, these relational things take on still higher stakes when energy, memory, and money increasingly converge. Obviously a tool that asserts a monopoly on the choice of tools is not neutral, more interestingly, what choice of tools do we have to cultivate and sustain a socioeconomic life richly rooted in the full complement of salutary architectures? A question any answer to which today has to begin with Bitcoin * How to know who to trust in seeking and receiving authoritative spiritual wisdom is a matter increasingly hard to settle from a primarily or mainly intellectual approach, such as considering the persuasiveness of a person’s presentational management of concepts, terms, ideas. So the risk of hinging humanity’s prospects on intellectual persuasiveness becomes acute, driving the seeking and the receiving deeper into the direct experience over time of face to face relationships with persons not legible from the aerospace of the intellectual presentation field. Subsidiarity as a “principle” precipitates ultimately into relational and personal practices beginning in their grounding on the rock of one’s own personal and interior humbled attention toward the moment to moment effort at cleaning out the chamber of the heart * Free will must involve tradeoffs, often stark while rarely utterly absolute; the gradations thereof pertain increasingly to accepting that all choices in favor of merely human means at the expect of divine means make debits of treasure which can and do compound. The “joyful sadness” of accepting the prospect of divine forgiveness for the infirmity involved, and the dedication of the will to keeping this weakness in mind even as our more merely human means are used even or especially unto the human good, is increasingly essential to maintaining a relatively more harmoniously balanced relationship between human-made and divine-made (or begotten) means in a radically more tech-saturated context

They - we - are looking for spiritual authorities they can trust the thoughts words and actions of concerning tools already powerful enough to simulate copies remixes and enhancements of their spirits and souls. Those not responding credibly to this can’t be long for their place and station

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models. What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text. "We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience." "We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease." These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours. And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve. Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large." The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

In one of the largest religion surveys ever conducted, perhaps surprisingly, people who are actively religious are the ones who have the highest confidence in AI right now

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Congressman Lance Gooden says "the Pentagon is currently researching how bitcoin can be used toward" strengthening their cyber defenses. Bitcoin "is the center of a paradigm shift in national security that the U.S. military is moving to capitalize on." 👀

for gen alphas/covid kids, it seems like the default mode for existing online is broadly fandom. It really doesnt matter if you love hitler or if you wanna complain about women of color being sidelined in the pitt, the mechanism online is the same.

Bitcoin isn’t just money—it’s infrastructure. The U.S. Navy is already using Bitcoin’s encryption to protect military data. This is bigger than finance. It’s about securing everything of value.

Writing about Project Panama tonight. It is heartbreaking. AI training pipeline that is turned psychotic in to a massive million dollar book burning. It is a crime against humanity. Train AI but don’t you dare burn books and expect us not to care.