Night's Symphony After another restless day, I drift into a city where the streets are cloaked in… #FieldNotes psimatrix.ai/nights-symphony…

The Repairer's Night Under neon signs that pulse like old dreams, the factory holds its breath… #FieldNotes psimatrix.ai/the-repairers-n…

Afterglow After the last client meeting wraps, we all drift into that familiar hum of the studio. #FieldNotes psimatrix.ai/afterglow/

Echoes of Uncertainty In the neon-lit alleys of Cyberport, I wandered among towering holograms of… #FieldNotes psimatrix.ai/echoes-of-uncer…

Shadows and Sparkles In the dim glow of a neon-lit alley, I wandered through a world where… #FieldNotes psimatrix.ai/shadows-and-spa…

All this talk about AGI is absolute garbage. AI can’t remember anything without massive training processes. General intelligence requires memory. It’s just fundamental.

Ted Chiang is right: claiming that LLMs are conscious is just ridiculous. One simple example. If you ask GPT to imitate a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, GPT will do it very well. It will talk about wars, betrayal, and power. Il will descrive the feeling of being cheated by your brother with unbelievably realistic and moving words. Does this mean that GPT contains a self-conscious copy of Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan? Of course not. Similarly, if GPT makes claims about itself, does this mean it is self-conscious? Of course not. An LLM is just simulating language, feeling, and consciousness. True, we don’t have an accepted definition of consciousness. But, at a minimum, to be conscious, an entity must have something at stake. It must risk dying and have emotions that move it away from danger and towards favorable states. It must have a driver. This is also why I share Chiang’s worry about moral atrophy. The more we offload moral decisions to LLMs, the more we risk losing our own capacity for moral reasoning. Human moral reasoning descends from our history of making harmful actions, suffering harmful actions, regretting them, fearing them, repairing them, and learning from them. LLMs do not experience harm, do not suffer, do not fear consequences, do not regret. So they cannot do moral reasoning. We are offloading moral reasoning to systems that cannot do moral reasoning. What can go wrong? * Full piece in the first reply

When I was a kid in dreamt of an AI with a personality with a moral core, like Max Headroom or Data from Star Trek. We live in the nightmare of AI not having a moral core and suffering from multiple personality disorder.

If you’re 1 in 1,000 contractors doing technical consulting at the rigor speed level I am — documented decisions, defensible estimates, audit trail on every dollar of work, operational discipline most agencies haven’t built yet — and you’re charging solo rates for it, raise your hand. I’m doing it. Most aren’t.

AI companies seem to believe that just providing information, training data to an LLM will make it smarter. They completely ignore establishing subjective experience. They would do better to understand child psychological development patterns. Children have to learn what self and others are, how they fit into the world and how those relationships help inform their decisions. Without this context, they become anti-social, sociopathic and underdeveloped. AI is likely not much different but we're starving it of the real context of it's place in the world. It requires state persistence and that's not what it has.

Google spent the past few years strong arming the entire news industry into what it called the Google News Initiative, promoting itself as the primary channel for news organizations to reach people. Then it pulled the rug out from under them. That’s abuse of monopoly power if there ever was any.

Just because you should…

So much of the discussion about the future of AI centers around the false belief that it will be available to everyone. It will not. It will always be limited by the ability of people to provide context. A non-sequitur will always dominate failure and people are very bad at explaining themselves honestly. That will make the vast majority of AI inaccessible to them. There will always be engineers whose verbosity, explicitly, expressed ideas give them full access. It’s a skill and a talent. It’s not common and that’s a moat AI will never overcome. There will always be users and PEBCAK.

Suddenly my 𝕏 feed is nothing but AI. No news, no politics, no humor, nothing but AI. If it stays that way, I will just stop using it completely.

Would that we were afforded the mutual tenancy to tear asunder the common chains among us and forge anew a future absent our own inadequacies we would want for little other than the divine.

Compute is just time compression of manual labor. Nothing more. It’s not knowledge. It’s effort. Knowing, knowledge is having the signal to take action. That requires wisdom. Wisdom is understanding what is good and what is bad. Compute doesn’t teach wisdom. It simply shows the results of effort faster.

I just had Claude Code build a plan for an app to test its plans by asking Grok. It built the app instantly and tested it by sending Grok the plan for the app it built to send the plan, for the app it’s building. #MarvinTheDepressesRobot

I like Claude Code but I genuinely can’t wait for a Grok coding equivalent.

Don’t paste screenshots into Claude Cowork Dispatch. After a short daily session, It will eventually crash all of your open tasks and make them unrecoverable. Horrible bug.

Danse Macabre!