A Machine God.
Happiness in human history.
“News Items is the most valuable newsletter out there. — Peggy Noonan.
1. Cade Metz:
When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling for protections against the rise of artificial intelligence, he was joined by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which is one of the tech industry’s leading A.I. companies.
As Leo urged corporate executives, government regulators and other citizens of the world to safeguard humanity from the dangers of A.I., he included Mr. Olah as a symbol of the dialogue he hopes to foster between the leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.
But for Jeremy Nixon, Monday’s gathering at the Vatican showed that those two worlds are far from aligned. While the pope said that A.I. was fundamentally not human, Mr. Nixon, a well-connected figure in the Bay Area’s frenetic A.I. scene, argued that Mr. Olah’s remarks seemed to hint at the opposite.
“They are not in dialogue,” Mr. Nixon said during an interview at A.G.I. House, a San Francisco “hacker house” with deep ties to many of the people who helped create the A.I. technologies discussed in the pope’s encyclical. “Their perspectives are distinct.”
The difference between the humanist’s view of A.I.’s risks and the technologist’s dream of what it could become is something that has long been discussed in Mr. Nixon’s community. “It is the reason the community exists,” Mr. Nixon said. “It is its underlying purpose.”
Mr. Nixon, 33, is one of the founders of A.G.I. House, which is named for Silicon Valley’s headlong pursuit of “artificial general intelligence,” a hypothetical machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
“We are named for this moment in history,” he said of his seven-room group house. Over the years, it has been home to a rotating collection of researchers, entrepreneurs and philosophers.
More than most, Mr. Nixon understands the technology emerging from Silicon Valley and the attitudes of the people building it. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, when Silicon Valley started developing the technologies that power chatbots, Mr. Nixon worked in Google’s central A.I. lab. Later, he founded A.G.I. House with Andrej Karpathy, who was an early employee at OpenAI, oversaw self-driving tech at Tesla and recently joined Anthropic.
Mr. Nixon said the papal encyclical might mean something to the world’s Catholics, but he doubted that it would have an effect on Silicon Valley. The only reason that Silicon Valley even paid attention to the event, he said, was that Leo invited Mr. Olah to speak.
Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I.
Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like “The God Delusion” — in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence — he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.
A.I. has started to crack math problems that humans struggled with for decades, he said, and it will soon cure diseases in the same way. “Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,” he said.
This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God.
“People are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God,” said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI, a San Francisco company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. “They are not saying that ironically or in jest. They are saying it as a matter of fact.” A.I. researchers are trying to build technologies that have jobs, feel joy and pain, and exhibit all sorts of qualities that match and even exceed the traits that make us human. (Sources: nytimes.com, harpercollins.com)
2. The Harvard Study of Adult Development:
A Harvard psychiatrist spent 85 years tracking 724 men from their teenage years to their deathbeds to find out what actually makes a human life worth living, and the answer that came back is the one almost nobody in their twenties or thirties is willing to act on.
His name is Robert Waldinger.
He runs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest scientific study of happiness in human history. It started in 1938. It is still running today. Most studies last a few years. This one has outlived its founders, its second director, and most of its original participants.
The setup was simple. Researchers recruited 724 young men. Half were Harvard sophomores. The other half were teenagers from Boston's poorest neighborhoods. They wanted to follow them for the rest of their lives and find out what actually predicted a good life.
Then they did the thing nobody else had the patience to do. They waited.
For 85 years, the team measured everything they could think of. Blood tests. Brain scans. Income. Marriages. Mental health. Sleep. Loneliness. Every two years, the men answered questionnaires. Every five years, they had a full medical exam. Some of them became senators. One became President. Some ended up homeless.
When the data finally came in, the result was so simple that the researchers spent years looking for what they had missed.
It was not money. It was not IQ. It was not social class. It was not career success. It was not even genes.
The single strongest predictor of who would be happy, healthy, and mentally sharp at 80 was the quality of their close relationships at 50.
Not the number of friends. Not the size of the network. The depth of the connection. The men who had at least one person they could call in the middle of the night were measurably healthier 30 years later. The lonely ones, regardless of wealth, declined faster across almost every metric the team could measure. (Source: robertwaldinger.com, amazon.com)
3. A Rout:
(Source: nytimes.com)
