Joel Z Leibo

Another possible evolutionary path is one where an ecosystem of agents is designed so well that the interactions between them have the same sort of entertainment value for spectators as reality TV or fiction does. (Spectators might also be participants at times: the Westworld model.)

💯

Words like 'consciousness' give off very individualistic vibes.

The real action is in the "cultural politics" that gives meaning to the word. Moltbook is appealing as an idea to anyone for whom this sort of multi-agent / social intelligence / society-first viewpoint is appealing.

To anyone encountering Moltbook this week and wondering about AI personhood, consciousness, sentience, etc---we published a very relevant paper in October: A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.26396

I liked everything about that movie except the essentialism

The exemplar of superhuman A.I. performance to date
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

Many Fighting Climate Change Worry They Are Losing the Information War

It’s not about information, it’s about identity.

It’s not “misinformation”, it’s propaganda.

The bullshit machine is well-funded & understands the value of networked amplification.

As long as there’s no personal cost to lying or holding false belief, they will.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

Yes, in part. I think the parasocial relationship to fiction writers is stronger than to (say) illustrators or stock photographers (though not fine art).

But more centrally I mean that a lot of writing — including utilitarian stuff like reports — matters because it expresses someone’s stance. +

This chart (which applies even more to social media than it did to TV) lives in my head rent free.

Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.

Interesting mystery. It is known that animals can learn to control neurons pretty much anywhere in the brain. But they can not learn to ignore hunger which probably means they can't turn of hunger sensing neurons. How is that avoided in the brain? They even have DA inputs.

Is our self-conception as homo faber / "tool-using animals" just because stone endures better than behavior?

If we had ethnographic records of australopithecines, H. erectus, &c, would all the stages between simian communication and "language" add up to a story more fascinating than flint?

These ideas are also at the heart of my new book "What Is Intelligence?" (out via @mitpress.bsky.social & Antikythera), where I explore how human-technology symbiosis may be the latest Major Evolutionary Transition: bit.ly/3H1p8F6

dream-logic is more powerful than logic-logic and oral cultures must encode knowledge into powerful meme-spells newsletter.squishy.computer/p/llms-and-h...

John Milton from Areopagitica.

Like, even before JS Mill gave us a utilitarian ("net upside") argument to justify freedom of speech, there was an older intuition that banning symbols risks doing violence to thought itself, and ought to be approached with "warinesse."

I'm hiring a student researcher for next summer at the intersection of MARL x LLM. If you're a phd student with experience in MARL algorithm research, please apply and drop me an email so that I know you've applied! www.google.com/about/career...

I've managed it a few times..! Though not too many

Noticed that my latest paper announcement got much more attention on Bluesky than twitter, first time that happened in my experience

Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design

Today my colleagues in the Paradigms of Intelligence team have announced Project Suncatcher:

research.google/blog/explori...

tl;dr: How can we put datacentres in space where solar energy is near limitless? Requires changes to current practices (due to radiation and bandwidth issues).

🧪 #MLSky

My favorite part of pragmatism is when it’s like “maybe instead of worrying about shit that doesn’t matter we should worry about shit that does.”

“Oh and btw we’ll learn a lot more about the shit that doesn’t in the process anyway.” 🫣

This paper is a great exposition of how "personhood" doesn't need to be, and in fact should not be, all-or-nothing or grounded in abstruse, ill-defined metaphysical properties. As I argued in my recent @theguardian.com essay, we can and should prepare now: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This paper is required reading. A pragmatic approach really clarifies the topic, even if—like me—you are mostly a “no” on the whole idea of artificial autonomous agents.

This sounds cynical—but represents a huge advance over empty “AGI” speculation.

It’s a political question, not a technical one. Without social equality models *cannot do* many kinds of work (eg, negotiate agreements or manage workers). So they will only be human-equivalent if we decide they are.

Except the linked paper agrees with the comment on personhood in this thread. It says we should stop the metaphysics and refocus on pragmatic effects of institutions and individuals deeming entities to be persons.

Joel is on a mission to get the EA/rationalist set to embrace Rortyian pragmatism. It's a tough job but someone's gotta do it.

This looks interesting

A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a "Cambrian explosion" of new kinds of personhood. This paper proposes a pragmatic framework for navigating this diversification...

[9/9] Read the full paper here:
arxiv.org/abs/2510.26396

Coauthors:

Sasha Vezhnevets,
@xtan,
@WilCunningham

[8/9] By rejecting the foundationalist quest for a single, essential definition, our pragmatic approach offers a more flexible way to think about integrating AI agents into our society. Different “personhood-related contexts” call for different solutions. There are no panaceas.

[7/9] We also consider "personhood as a problem".

This includes "dark patterns" where AI systems may be designed to mimic social cues and exploit our social heuristics, leading to risks of emotional manipulation and exploitation.

In this case, personhood attribution causes harm.

[6/9] However, there may also be ownerless autonomous agents. In this case, we may confer a default person-like status to support sanctionability in cases where they cause harm. An AI with assets can be deterred from rule breaking by the threat of having to forfeit them.

[5/9] We explore "personhood as a solution" for problems like "responsibility gaps".

Most AI agents will have owners or guardians, in this case responsibility should usually flow to their principal.