Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled 'We Must Pace The Frontier,' arguing that AI's transformative benefits—from disease cures to economic growth—come paired with serious risks that warrant a measured development speed. His essay arrives alongside more extreme warnings from AI safety advocates like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has called for sweeping government control over AI-related speech and publication as an emergency measure.
prestonbyrne.com
· 2026-09-14
The piece revisits a 2009 essay musing on why intellectual acknowledgment that a theory is wrong doesn't translate into the same urgency as a real anomaly demanding explanation. It draws on a Zen dialogue about conviction and quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky's fictional 'beisutsukai' story about physicists who failed to overturn quantum mechanics despite knowing something was off. The author admits the essay never fully came together but explores the gap between knowing something is wrong and having the drive to fix it.
gwern.net
· 2026-09-09
A software developer published a personal essay cataloguing mixed emotions about AI: awe at how neural networks produce reasoning without explicit algorithms, fear over unresolved existential-risk arguments, disgust at crawlers overwhelming open web communities, sadness for artists undercut by AI-generated content, and anger at political systems failing to check corporate AI power and resource consumption. The author concludes AI feels promising as technology but troubling for society.
beza1e1.tuxen.de
· 2026-09-06
GoKawiil