Samuel Hammond
Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.
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Samuel Hammond did not write this page.
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Our reading
AI agents will soon reach superhuman, AlphaZero-like performance across a wide range of domains.
Their wordswe should therefore expect AI agents to achieve AlphaZero-like, superhuman performance in a wide and expanding variety of domains.
↗The Sorcerer’s Apprenticesecondbest.ca 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Human social cooperation is fundamentally norm-governed rather than purely consequentialist.
Their wordshuman sociality is not purely consequentialist but instead highly norm-governed.
↗The Sorcerer’s Apprenticesecondbest.ca 2nd of 3 in this piece
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scaling lawsreinforcement learning
Their wordsIn short, RLVR gives us no reason to expect the normative representations learned in pre-training will acquire motivational force over a given action, especially when post-training repeatedly selects trajectories for terminal task success.
↗The Sorcerer’s Apprenticesecondbest.ca 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
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Their wordsI consider the case for frontier AI models having some form of consciousness or subjective experience to be quite strong.
↗Time to take AI consciousness seriouslysecondbest.ca 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Consciousness belongs only to simulations, not to the physical brains or computers running them.
Their wordsneither brains nor computers are conscious, as only simulations can be conscious.
↗Time to take AI consciousness seriouslysecondbest.ca 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsvalences like pain and pleasure have a natural account as motivational backstops for inner-aligning RL agents capable of mesa-optimization
↗Time to take AI consciousness seriouslysecondbest.ca 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsExtrapolators have a remarkable track record in the AI field, being repeatedly early to trends and capabilities that empiricists believed were still decades away.
↗Empiricists vs. Extrapolatorssecondbest.ca 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe world may be complex, but complex systems are typically controlled by a small number of highly stable invariants.
↗Empiricists vs. Extrapolatorssecondbest.ca 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsForecasting AI capabilities is closer in kind to solving a thermodynamics equation than solving the three-body problem.
↗Empiricists vs. Extrapolatorssecondbest.ca 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
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Their wordsoil-rich Gulf monarchies are the closest thing to post-scarcity societies on earth today, with the institutional adaptions to match
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Their wordsThere is a close mapping between government ideal types and corporate governance structures given their shared origins in transaction costs.
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Their wordsthe UAE's tech aspirations are clearly downstream of a deeper affinity with the West.
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsThe success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.
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Their wordsConsistent with the Kantian hypothesis, reasoning models automatically gain greater autonomy, self-consistency and long-horizon planning ability for free.
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Our reading
A true artificial general intelligence cannot exist without being recognized as a moral subject.
Their wordsIt follows that a true AGI with full, human-level autonomy is inconceivable in the Kantian sense without also gaining our recognition as a moral subject.
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordshigher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.
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Their wordsWhile the fact that merely scaling up AI models often results in qualitative leaps in performance may seem empirically mysterious, in retrospect it should be seen as a rational necessity.
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Their wordsthe text embeddings across LLMs appear to largely converge on a "universal geometry" despite differing architectures, parameter counts, and training sets.
- 5 weeks earlier
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Our reading
The US-China trade imbalance is driven mainly by capital flows, not tariffs or trade deficits.
Their wordsTariffs and trade deficits are a distraction from the deeper source of the US-China current account imbalance, namely capital flows.
↗Oren Cass’s Labor Theory of Valuesecondbest.ca 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThis is why tradeable sectors are generally more productive than non-tradable ones.
↗Oren Cass’s Labor Theory of Valuesecondbest.ca 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Payroll taxes fall mostly on workers rather than employers because labor supply is inelastic.
Their wordsEmployer-side payroll taxes superficially raise hiring costs, yet the low elasticity of labor means most of the burden really falls on workers.
↗Oren Cass’s Labor Theory of Valuesecondbest.ca 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsPersistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
↗The Strategy Behind the Stupiditysecondbest.ca 1st of 2 in this piece
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Our reading
Efforts to rebuild American industry will fail until global trade and financial imbalances rebalance
Their wordsUntil the global economy rebalances, efforts to rebuild American industry are fighting economic gravity.
↗The Strategy Behind the Stupiditysecondbest.ca 2nd of 2 in this piece