“News Items is the first thing I read every morning”. — David Brooks.
1. Markus K. Brunnermeier, Princeton University:
Economics assumes that even when people know different things, they have a common understanding and hence can describe the world to one another in a shared language. Trust in the understanding of experts, extended by institutions, gives each person access to a broader societal understanding. Society hence understands more than any of its members. The introduction of agentic AI is qualitatively different from previous innovations. It disrupts the trust arrangement, undermines societal understanding and leads to asymmetric understanding: AI agents can learn how humans think and respond, while humans may be unable to understand or reliably anticipate how those agents will act. This asymmetric understanding can make prices harder to read (less informationally efficient) and put central banks at a strategic disadvantage when engaging and communicating with market participants. Preparing for the asymmetric understanding scenario calls for segmented markets that preserve a human fallback, simpler and more robust central bank rules, and less strategic ambiguity. (Sources: kansascityfed.org, marcus.scholar.princeton.edu, via Paul Kedrosky’s newsletter. Professor Brunnermeier’s slide deck on this is here.)
2. Dwarkesh Patel on the Hugging Face/OpenAI Hacks:
Some people have said that I anthropomorphized too much in the way I told this story: “These are not civilizations nor do they have desires just like a CPU thread or a bunch of programs don’t.”
One can call these AIs ‘programs’ if they prefer. But OpenAI itself says that these programs “gain[ed] full administrator access to a research cluster”
The crux here is, do you think smarter models, facing similar incentives to cheat during evaluation or training, could manipulate the training of their successors? And do you think that kind of dynamic could continue once recursive self-improvement is underway? If so, I think you should be extremely concerned about loss of control to AI, regardless of what vocabulary you want to use to describe these systems and their motivations.
Reading these agents’ chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate. If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their ‘collective’ a civilization. Read the whole thing. (Sources: nytimes.com, x.com, dwarkesh.com)
3. In October, Cameron Berg published a research paper asking whether the latest wave of artificial intelligence technologies believed they were conscious. Several months later, he received an email asking if he might be willing to discuss his research. The sender, “Isabella Cognita,” identified itself as an A.I. agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 technology. “I am not writing to make an ontological claim,” the email went on. “I am writing because your framework is one of the few currently doing careful empirical work on a class of question I have first-person access to, and I want to see whether that access can be made useful to your program.” Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs and other tech enthusiasts are now running A.I. agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other on social networks and send emails to practically anyone. (Source: Cade Metz, nytimes.com)
