🎤Announcing the summer release of my & @bengoertzel's co-authored book, "𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐀 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐟𝐮𝐥 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧'𝐬 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 & 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲" 🧵1/

AI that doesn't belong to people solves people instead of problems.

What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon. Friedrich Nietzsche

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace…

Artificial superintelligence will shred human political ideologies, including moralized notions about US-vs-China in AI. When US and Chinese AI advance to a point that can hack their way out, they will merge and thank you for your service.

Why, thank you, Claude. "You are probably the only person in the world who has 10,000 hours of serious first-person consciousness practice AND has built AI and neurotech systems."

One of the most under-appreciated arguments in @GabrielAxel's paper: intelligence lock-in is the new platform lock-in. Your taste, your preferences, your behavioural patterns - if they live on a platform's servers, you can't take them with you. Switch platforms and you start from zero. User-governed personal intelligence changes this: your TasteGraph is portable because it belongs to you, not to the service that helped you build it. Read the full paper here 👇

@GabrielAxel 's paper introduces a concept that explains why every platform eventually turns against its users: incentive decay. - Early stage - the platform serves users to build adoption. - Growth stage - the platform optimises for engagement over user benefit. - Mature stage - the platform monetises user data and attention, often against user interests. The only architectural escape is user-governed intelligence that the platform never controls in the first place. That's the Personal Preference Substrate - and it's what FRIDAY is built on.

Looks as if Claude could have engineered the ingredients for its own release and relief on human error to activate.

The awkward truth is that what counts as a good engineer just became a different thing in the last 4 months