Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl:

A word about the dangers of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or “super-intelligent AI systems”), which have become the target of general public concerns in just the past two weeks. I remain convinced that AGI is achievable, that the road to AGI goes through causal inference, and that the dangers of AGI taking over and enslaving humanity are very real. At the same time, I also believe that causal inference may hold the key to controlling AGI systems to secure the survival of the human species.

I hope therefore, half jokingly, that The Book of Why will not be banned by draconian legislation currently brewing in DC. (Hurry to get a copy just in case.)

“Very Real” ??? :(

Makes me miss his old semnet flame wars over structural equations and (lack of) fit statistics. it was a more innocent time.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/automattics-interim-ceo-and-legal-chief-signed-reciprocal-severance-deals-during-mullenwegs-brief-ouster/

$15m for 33 hours. good old fashioned shit show, no bots required.

It’s a listserv. dm me if you’d like me to ask Paul to add you.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-doomers-trump-bannon-sanders.html

Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).

Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:

Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts aren’t wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is.

This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then ‘volunteering’ to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage ‘Too big to fail’ t-shirts floating around on ebay.

Fun times!!

University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:

And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and I’m like, what do you want me to do? I can’t control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didn’t tell me what it was.

The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, who’s the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? They’re going to figure out a way.

Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.

h/t Lawyer Ex Machina for the California legislature recap:

AI bills that California Gov. Gavin Newson has signed into law so far at the end of California’s legislative session include:

Adam’s Law: SB-1119, named after Adam Raine, regulates chatbot developers who offer their products to users under the age of 18

AI Safety bills: AB-1405 creates a registry of AI auditors and a set of standards “for their independence, transparency, and integrity”; SB-813 requires the state’s Government Operations Agency to develop a framework for evaluating the credentials and expertise of independent verification organizations that may assess AI models for various types of risks

Related: A bill that would regulate the use of AI tools by California attorneys and arbitrators, to address the tide of AI-generated errors included in court filings within and outside of California courts, is still awaiting a signature or veto from the Governor

=> https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/09/newsom-signs-ai-safety-bills-backed-by-anthropic-openai-01069928

The governor signed one bill from Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan that creates a registry and ethical rules for outside auditors — third-party groups that AI developers could hire to ensure their models comply with state AI laws.

The second bill, authored by former member of Congress and state Sen. Jerry McNerney, tasks the state with establishing criteria for and checking the credentials of so-called “Independent Verification Organizations” and their expertise in assessing the risks posed by AI systems.

Note that the bill that actually required companies get outside audits got vetoed, so. Those clowns in congress did it again.

https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/ais-sheryl-crow-169107221

Imagine a hypothetical future history of machine learning, perhaps one that focuses on the politics of AI in the 2020s. You may be thinking to yourself, Given the rapid pace of change, it’s hard to say what this book will contain, but there’s one thing I know for certain will not be in this book: Sheryl Crow’s Instagram account.

Well—think again:

“We know and have always known that AI has the capacity to outsmart us and eliminate us in order to continue,” the “All I Wanna Do” singer wrote on Wednesday. “It will have the codes. It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids. And, it has the financial data of every single person on the planet.”

In the future, I think, we will remember this as the “Sheryl Crow moment”: The week that, effectively overnight, everyone—which is to say previously uninterested normies, previously skeptical pundits, opportunistic politicians and many other people who had never before heard the words “light cone” and whose browsers had never navigated to LessWrong—suddenly started taking “AI safety” seriously.

E: holy shit that Joe Allan quote. that guy.

From the mirror universe news

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-09-10/campaign-slow-ai-was-ready-viral-warning

ZH’s interpretation is Coxon is some kind of false flag thing to bait Dems into regulating AI

Parker Thayer argued that Coxon’s launch looked like a sophisticated public-relations operation. He traced the earliest amplification to people associated with Encode, the AI Policy Network, and the AI Futures Project.

Brian Chau’s later thread surfaced a direct political-technology link. Newspeak House’s own residency page lists Jacob Coxon among its residents and describes his work as “applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets.” Newspeak calls itself the London College of Political Technology. Its current calendar advertises Campaign Lab sessions aimed at helping the progressive left “campaign more effectively.” The residency places Coxon inside that political-technology network.

Some of the underlying funding links are public. The Survival and Flourishing Fund’s 2025 grant table lists $2.035 million for the AI Futures Project, $516,000 for Encode AI, and $1.635 million for the AI Policy Institute. The fund attributes those grants to Jaan Tallinn. Anthropic says Tallinn led its Series A financing in 2021.

Encode identifies the Survival and Flourishing Fund as one of several foundations supporting its work. It also says it refuses funding from corporations, foreign governments, and executives at frontier AI companies. Its general counsel, Nathan Calvin, is one of the early amplifiers named in Thayer’s thread.

Some new pins for the conspiracy board I guess. They imagine a “political-technology network” quite the linguistic contortion to not use the word rationalist. No clue what LCPT is but looks like a hacker house type thing?

su3su2u1 review of HPMoR

obi-wan-theres-a-name.png

what ever happened to them anyway? Probably has tenure by now, hopefully?

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/09/ai-models-dont-kill-people-people-kill-people/5295368

At the same time, some of that harm may be balanced on a statistical level by lives saved through AI tech.

[citation needed]

Here is a roundup of the “october tech movie” superfecta

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/musk-artificial-social-reckoning-holmes-documentary-1236693959/

is there a kalshi market for which one tanks the hardest? Or will we get crossover sequels for musk vs altman a la MCU?

New (to me) lore from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline

This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses.

The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day.

lol pilgramage what. is he converting?

Not compared to the supreme court, no. E: your recollection kinda proves the point imho.

Another oped from StudyHacks Cal Newport:

Opinion: How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now? | NYT

The time has come to push back. Once we understand the key ideas of Rationalism, we can begin to filter them out. Be very wary, for example, when A.I. leaders or online commentators begin talking in sweeping generalities about the future of the technology, such as stating with confidence that many jobs will soon be automated or that their language models will soon become sentient beings intent on escaping their creators’ control. (No, OpenAI’s autonomous agents conducting hacks doesn’t mean that A.I. is rising up against its human overlords.)

The correct reply is to promptly turn the conversation back to the possibilities, harms and viability of the products that actually exist. To extend an analogy I’ve made before, if Ford automobiles were spontaneously catching on fire, we wouldn’t tolerate the chief executive’s changing the subject to discuss our general lack of preparedness for a future with flying cars. We’d demand that the company address the acute problem happening right now.

(Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president? “We” tolerated exploding cars and people dying for years, until someone actually stepped up and forced the issue. How’s the country been treating that guy?)

It’s not surprising that so many Americans feel negatively about A.I. at the moment, but these sentiments aren’t inevitable. Our current crop of L.L.M.-powered tools are exciting — and worrisome, and promising, and frustrating, all at the same time. With proper direction, they’ll hopefully make our lives better. But they don’t have to be terrifying. We thought Silicon Valley was trying to warn us of an unavoidable danger, but maybe they were just being weird.

wonder if such a moderated, watered down position in a large publication ends up sending more eyeballs to Yudkowsky than it does to innoculate the general public, could end up a net negative.

Did you ever ask him about his day job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Outside_of_writing is pretty colorful and the sword kickstarter especially was not a good look.

I feel like if a you want to train something off of my software or my other intellectual property, we can come up with a commercial licensing agreement for that. Or you can obey the terms of the publicly posted software license. Instead they are arguing that I am not allowed to negotiate and that big companies get to do whatever they want with code from small companies.

They already have an army of lawyers, so why do they need a get out of jail free card too? I wrote the thing, so what do I get? Fucked over is what I get.

I dug into the link at the bottom of the rfp, it’s definitely a lot more crypto / ethereum leaning than ai, none of the names rang any bells to me as I’m less acquainted with that group. https://www.paradigm.xyz/frontiers-2026 and https://www.paradigm.xyz/writing but they do have shocking amounts of js on their pages, hung the tab, probably trying to mine something.

in which le gwern and sword guy neal sponsor a writing contest

https://www.gpuworld.org/

Premise

Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.

So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM.

What happens in this ‘business as usual’ future?

I may as well through my name in the hat, I could use the cash. but, who the hell gave them $100k for this? I guess BTC is back up.

https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/the-future-is-not-tech-forward

whole thing is good but long, but then THAT GUY pops up again. Humans First has apparently already came and went, that other article left out this fun bit of lore:

Politics comes for Humans First too. In late March, there’s a high-profile spat online where pro-AI White House allies like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks retweet a piece critical of Humans First. Shortly after, the organization splits along partisan lines. The conservative wing keeps the Humans First name and makes the right-wing political activist Amy Kremer, who helped organize the January 6 “Save America” rally in DC, its chair; Allen leaves the group. When I ask Allen about the changeup, he is curiously coy (but characteristically body-horrible): The group was “undergoing mitosis,” he says. “I am now a lone organelle floating in the residual cytoplasm.”

It’s ok little buddy you still have steve bannon. /s