Richard Baker

People called “James Bond” keep being born, growing up to serve in the Royal Navy and then join MI6. The government is currently tracking seventeen further cases in the 007 pipeline. We don’t know why it happens.

Life would be better for everyone if we collectively abolished the policing of gender norms.

War is failure. Humanity won’t truly grow up until every person fully internalises this.

The government of the United States of America should not be an apparatus dedicated solely to propping up its President’s fragile self-esteem.

Science is the ongoing discovery of ideas that are false.

Almost the entire discourse about AI risk, AI safety and AI alignment is, for all it might be interesting, utterly irrelevant to systems we can build now or are likely to be able to build over the next many decades.

Let’s start with the billionaires and work down.

The main teaching of the Buddha is that numbered lists are really cool.

The path from ignorance to knowledge winds though the endless valley of uncertainty and confusion. Being comfortable with doubt is amongst the greatest of virtues.

I quite want to write a short essay on knowledge, problems, knowledge generation, problem solving, tractability, knowledge models and AI. But would anyone read it?

The rate of improvement in the exploitation of old ideas says nothing about the rate of generation of new ideas.

The Soviet Union provided the vaccine that eliminated smallpox in eastern Europe, India and China. Smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century. So the USSR did some good in the world. What has post-Soviet Russia done that isn’t a net negative?

If we make a better world then fewer bad things will happen. It sounds utterly obvious when stated like that but a surprising number of people don’t seem to grasp it. You can’t suppress bad things by making the world worse.

Counterpart.

We need a deep and profound secularism, in which governments don’t attempt to impose any ideological commitments on citizens, except for the most minimal commitments to liberalism and pluralism that we need to be able to all live together regardless of our individual values.

We’ve made machines that pretend to be people pretending to be machines pretending to be people.

It’s especially true that the “AIs” like Claude or ChatGPT are fictional characters. Indeed, much of the corpus whose statistical properties they reproduce are human-written conversations between fictional people and fictional AIs.

They’re interactive fiction generators. Sometimes the fiction is “mainstream”, sometimes alternative-history, sometimes hard-sf, sometimes fantasy. There’s literally no way of knowing which without reference to something external.

There are no utopias, just worlds with an endless series of problems, and dystopias dominated by one big problem.

The only futures that won’t descend into dystopian nightmares are ones built on a solid foundation of liberalism, pluralism and secularism.

The single most important way to inoculate people against outbursts of murderous violence is the cultivation of complex identities, woven from many threads of the tapestry of civilisation. Simple narratives are the enemy.

There were more than sixty murders in America yesterday (based on the average homicide rate). The only acceptable number is zero. All of those people, whether saintly, monstrous or anywhere between had a right to life.

My theory: Weyland-Yutani has an actual science ship out there doing the survey and the Maginot is just a support ship returning samples to Earth. Surely this crew weren’t the people collecting the specimens.

The region now called “Britain” has been colonised by humans at least eight times as the ice advanced and receded over the last 700,000 years. Only the most recent attempt (11,500 years ago) has modern descendants. For long stretches of that time there have been no inhabitants.

We know very well our own virtues and flaws, and have a tendency to judge someone virtuous or flawed based on their accidental resemblances to us in ways that have no moral valence rather than by any more objective standards. We must fight this tendency.

In case there is any doubt, I’m entirely in favour of immigration, and I believe that in a just world everyone should be able to live, learn and work in whatever region of the world they like. The way to tackle “illegal immigration” is to have better, easier legal paths.

If you’re using the symbols of your country to intimidate and exclude rather than to celebrate and include, that’s nationalism not patriotism. In so doing, you often show yourself opposed to your country’s highest ideals.

We may, of course, reasonably hope for very many other things on a range of shorter timescales, and perhaps we care not for deep futurity.

Civilisation is a conversation, and on the longest timescale the most for which any of us can hope is to have been a participant.

Ironically, the heyday of online connection and discussion was before “social media” was invented as a product category and connection subsequently monetised into oblivion.