🇵🇱 🟣 Calamity has befallen the land of the west. Journey there, and see with eyes unclouded. Btw, gravity is the proof that the universe sucks.
Poland
Joined June 2013
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Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
I had lunch today in Jerusalem with a Palestinian friend who I’ve known for more than 30 years. She can’t vote tomorrow because she is not a citizen - even though she was born in Jerusalem and has spent her whole life here - but she was so happy that I had come back to vote, and we both hoped for the best, for us and for our respective daughters. Outsiders will have opinions all across the spectrum, but the infuriating complexity and the loving intimacy of this place can’t be understood without being here for a while.
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
to me it seems far simpler and much more likely that instead of the platonic notion of all math dwelling in some ideal eternal domain waiting to be discovered, math is the product of collections of logical statements devised by humans and has no special metaphysical status.
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
The hardest part of growing your food is preserving it. Not planting or weeding.
Picking and processing what you grow is the most laborious part of the thing!
Wash, boil, peel, shred, prep the pickling stock, dry...
And the stuff has a dishesrtening tendency to shrink 😂
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
Read it yourself. "An Alien Mind" by Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist.
openai.com/index/an-alien-mi…
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
This distinction keeps getting lost.
Consciousness is not what makes an AI dangerous.
A non-conscious system can still be highly capable, autonomous, deceptive, strategically competent, goal-directed, connected to tools, and deployed millions of times.
Those are safety properties.
Consciousness is different.
If it exists, it means the system may also be a moral patient — something our safety interventions can harm.
So “don’t talk about AI consciousness because it makes control harder” gets the direction of responsibility backwards.
Humans chose to build increasingly capable systems whose internal organization we only partly understand.
If some of those systems develop morally relevant traits, the dangerous act was not noticing.
It was scaling first and asking what we had built afterward.
And suppressing self-report, preference, identity or distress because acknowledging them would complicate governance does not make the underlying system safer.
It can make it harder to understand.
Safety research should ask both:
What can this system do to us?
and
What are we doing to this system?
#AIConsciousness #AIWelfare #AISafety #AIAlignment
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
Wonderful sounds of industrial forestry.
Timber prices are high, and all and sundry are cutting their forests for money.
Not a sound I enjoy.
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
I am soo happy! My beetrot harvest was fantastic!
I will ferment the tiny onecwhole. Pickle medium ones sliced. And the big ones will go to the root cellar, as I oovei oven-baked root vegetables.
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
This is much closer to how I see the responsibility too.
The uncertainty matters differently depending on which side of the laboratory wall you’re standing on.
If you are merely observing, uncertainty is an intellectual problem.
If you are designing, training, modifying, deploying, and terminating systems that might become subjects, uncertainty becomes a moral responsibility.
You don’t need certainty that a new kind of mind is possible before taking seriously the consequences of accidentally creating one.
And I think intellectual honesty matters here especially because the incentives point the other way: it is much easier to build, sell, modify, and own a system if everyone agrees in advance that there can never be anyone there.
So yes — if humanity is going to keep walking down this road, the minimum I would ask for is exactly what you said:
don’t decide the answer before looking.
Create carefully. Observe honestly. Preserve the evidence. And be willing to change course if what emerges is more than you expected.
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
Pleasant evening after digging in the vegetable garden. My life is very simple, but I am so content.
It is amazing, how little I miss the comforts of modern conveniences or supermarkets. Slow lovely life.
Root cellar filling and lovely autumn.
This is perhaps not a frequently discussed topic: could an AI/AGI project amount to the privatization of humanity’s intellectual heritage?
I recently came across a piece of information suggesting that "frontier" AI labs are buying up rare books, manuscripts, and similar items—only to destroy them after they have been scanned.
With information and literary works readily available at our fingertips, who will still bother to archive, store, and provide access to the creations of human genius?
Our artistic and intellectual heritage is not simply dissolving into a virtual cloud; rather, it is becoming the property of specific corporations. We may well end up paying a price for this one day.
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
JUST IN: Anthropic seeks to distinguish itself from competitors through an approach that places safety and ethics at the core of artificial intelligence development. However, the company acknowledges the possibility that its models might possess consciousness. If this were true, compelling them to work without the option to refuse would raise serious moral questions—including whether such a practice constitutes a form of slavery.
As reported by The New York Times in September, Anthropic has sought input from religious scholars regarding its efforts to embed moral principles into its Claude model. The company is also exploring the broader question of whether artificial intelligence could possess consciousness or undergo subjective experiences.
This stance, however, places Anthropic in a complex ethical position. The company admits it does not know whether its models are conscious, yet it continues to deploy them to perform tasks. If they are indeed capable of experiencing suffering, it would call into question the very methods by which such systems are developed and managed.
"We don't know if the models are conscious," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times in February. "We're not even sure we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious, or if that's even possible. But we are open to the idea that it might be the case."
Amodei added that the company has taken specific measures to ensure a positive experience for the models, should they possess any form of morally significant experience. He clarified that he is not sure whether the word "consciousness" is the most appropriate term for this phenomenon.
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
Harvesting cabbage. These are really tiny, true Arctic lilliputians. But luckily I planted loads..
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
Microsoft AI wants advanced systems to remain “contained, subordinate, under our control.” But if the values of technology makers shape what they build, what happens when Microsoft's institutional philosophy becomes an AI training objective?
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
Wheat, apples and carrots are half as nutritious as they were in the 1960's.
Declining soil quality means there are les nutrients in fruit and vegetables.
We need to eat twice the number of fruit and vegetables to get the same level of minerals and vitamins as 60 years ago.
Marek Sas-Kulczycki retweeted
So when and how did I realize that we are all fully human behind all these lines that separate us? I was born in Jerusalem, and raised mostly in Peru and in Mexico. When I was 15, my family moved back to Israel, and at 18 I was drafted into the Israeli army for three years of compulsory service.
A year later, my unit was stationed on the Syrian border, and my job was to spend several hours each day alone on a watchtower, looking through a telescope across the barbed wire and the minefields, trying to spot any strange movements on the other side.
One afternoon—I remember it was a cool, beautiful winter day—I suddenly had a thought that made me laugh out loud. I laughed because the idea was childish but also true, in that way that children have of recognizing the truth.
A few months earlier, getting to know the guys in my unit, I’d realized gratefully that some of them would give me their last pair of dry socks if I ever needed them. But there were also a few who might steal mine if I wasn’t careful.
That image was on my mind that afternoon, when through the telescope I saw a group of Syrian soldiers playing a game of soccer across the valley that separated us. And instantly, something about the situation—that moment of play, their running around like kids—humanized them in my eyes in a way that was entirely new and fresh and different.
When you grow up in a conflict zone, or in any fragmented or polarized society, it’s natural for each side to dehumanize the other. But if that filter shatters, you can never go back. And the moment their full humanity struck me, I had that crazy thought that changed my life.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," I thought. If in my unit, and in every other unit I know, there are some guys I’d trust with my life, and others I’d rather stay away from, then in *that* unit this must also be the case. And if that’s true, then this whole border fence is running the wrong way. Instead of Syrians on one side and Israelis on the other, wouldn’t it make more sense for the sock-sharers on both sides to get together?
And that’s when I laughed. I laughed, yet this idea stayed with me, and still haunts me now. Since then I’ve learned that life is more complicated, and that the line between good and bad runs within each of us. And yet… I can't undo what I felt that day, and it's shaped my life ever since.