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There’s no such thing as ‘fully autonomous’ agents
In September of last year, I spoke with Evan Ratliff , the journalist and host of Shell Game about what it might be like to live in a...
Charley Johnson
Apr 64 min read
Trapped by the Pursuit of Efficiency
The newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) aims to drastically cut the U.S. federal budget and workforce. Just this...
Charley Johnson
Feb 25 min read
We don’t know the difference between AI risk and uncertainty and it shows
I’ve expressed concern about our over-reliance on direct, authoritative responses from chatbots. There’s no space to go back and forth...
Charley Johnson
Sep 1, 20244 min read
How do we work our way towards utopia?
In the summer of 1956, a group of 47 AI pioneers were invited to Dartmouth College to discuss the future of AI. All were men. All were...
Charley Johnson
Aug 4, 20247 min read
If the medium is the message, what is the message of AI?
Marshall McLuhan famously argued that the medium matters more than the content it carries: the medium is the message. E.g. TV has made...
Charley Johnson
Jul 7, 20245 min read
An AI model will take your place when you die
…and it will misrepresent your personality to your friends and family. Enjoy! AI chatbots are being used by people to chat with synthetic...
Charley Johnson
Jun 2, 20247 min read
Is AI a religion?
Come, human. Ensconce yourself in the fine swaddling robes of rational perfectionism I’ve written a lot of words about how we...
Charley Johnson
May 5, 20245 min read
The ongoing tug of war between open and closed AI
Should AI be open or closed? This is one of the most confusing debates raging in AI discourse at the moment. Those pursuing ‘open’ models...
Charley Johnson
Feb 4, 20246 min read
🧠 ‘AI Alignment’ isn’t a problem — it’s a myth.
Come with me on a journey through ordered and unordered systems I ’ve written about the false promise of emergence , and why AI doomers...
Charley Johnson
Dec 3, 20235 min read
Building alternative AI futures
August 9th marked the nine-year anniversary of when police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black...
Charley Johnson
Oct 1, 20237 min read
The artificial gaze
Imagine if society — for all its messy, entangled, complexity — were one big algorithmic system: what would it be optimized for? What are...
Charley Johnson
Sep 3, 20236 min read
The Doom Loop of Synthetic Data
Apparently AI systems will continue to improve forever — but is that even possible? If you’ve only got a minute this Sunday, here’s the...
Charley Johnson
Aug 6, 20235 min read
Does generative AI have ‘emergent’ properties?
A few issues back, I explored what ‘information’ actually means , and argued that it’s a big ol’ problem when we treat metaphors not as...
Charley Johnson
Jul 2, 20235 min read
🤖 AI isn’t ‘hallucinating.’ We are.
Why 'hallucination' is a problematic term (hint - it's not just because it anthropomorphizes the technology!) and what to do about it. If...
Charley Johnson
Jun 4, 20236 min read
Beyond ‘minimizing harms’
Algorithmic bias is still a huge problem — but where do those problems start? Remember playing the game whac-a-mole as a kid? You hit the...
Charley Johnson
Jan 1, 20236 min read
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