The most credible evidence against Brand comes from a woman named Nadia, who said she was raped by him in LA in 2012. She went immediately to a rape centre afterwards & there are medical records which corroborate her account. She also spent 5 months in counselling after the incident (which there are records of) and contemporaneous text messages from Brand in which he says he was "sorry." The below accusation, from a woman in Britain, which led to a conviction didn't have the physical evidence. But there were 2 dozen witnesses who corroborated her story, & similarly there were contemporaneous text messages from Brand apologising for what he did.

The AI Safety community / @AnthropicAI is millenarian movement. What is millenarianism? It's the belief that a cataclysm is coming On the one side is apocalypse On the other side is abundance And a select group of people need to guide humanity through Millenarianism has been around since the 2nd Century.

"The eco-feminist politics that were emerging at the time gave narcissists, attention-seekers, and, quite frankly, mentally unwell women carte blanche to demand whatever they wished." Epic piece by @bindelj... this has clearly been going on for a while

I’ve argued before Anthropic must not IPO on its current metrics. The bottom line is simple- The might of American capitalism rests on a sacred social contract: if humanity must bear its risk, the public must also share in the prosperity, not just pay for it. My thoughts below:

I do think what has been happening with the big AI companies is very similar to railway mania Of course, the railways that were built were eventually valuable and the railways transformed society But the early companies almost all went bankrupt

Comical. Read this. They’re treating a predictive algorithm the same way a carless judge treats a career criminal in CA. No control, just let them continue to commit the wrong thing. We don’t have a tech problem, we have a people problem. The AI CEOs and execs are irresponsible, careless, and will do anything to pull more money towards themselves.

It’s not enough to point out that AI systems may soon be far more intelligent than us to show that we are unlikely to be able to control them. Leaders in business, government, etc. have been controlling their often far smarter subalterns for millennia. Intelligence doesn’t automatically translate into power, as many intellectuals throughout history discovered once they found themselves in front of a firing squad, to which they were sent by someone generally much dumber than them. This obviously doesn’t show that x-risk can or should be dismissed, but I find it striking how many doomers seem to expect people to make costly decisions just because they have thrown around words like "ASI", apparently thinking they have made an argument.

With all due respect, @gmiller, but this reminds me of the "Courtier's Reply" from the New Atheism era, when atheists were told that they had no standing to question theism until they'd mastered the ontological argument, the Kalam cosmological argument, skeptical theism, the Five Ways, and whatever the latest iteration of Sophisticated Theology happened to be. Back then, unless you had read your Richard Swinburne, your Alvin Plantinga and your John Haught, you couldn't appreciate the finer fabrics of the emperor's wardrobe, and so weren't entitled to say he was naked. Personally, I've addressed instrumental convergence and power-seeking (in the context of evolutionary doom scenarios) at some length, but it's never enough. There's always another theoretical argument or doom scenario that raises the entry fee to the discussion. Essentially the theologians (or AI doomers) set up their own theoretical game with its own rules, and won't take you seriously unless you play by those rules. The dynamic is self-selecting: only people already convinced that the doom scenarios deserve attention will invest the effort to keep up with the sprawling literature, so skeptics can always be dismissed as "not well informed." I'm not claiming the two cases are on an epistemic par, since AI risk at least has some empirical basis that theism lacks entirely. But the defensive move looks very similar, and does not help to dispell the suspicion that AI doomerism has some cult-like features. Let's also tag @sapinker.

If you take an LLM AI and do not provide it any prompts, goals, or any indication of expected output, it will do absolutely nothing. It will do nothing forever in the absence of a prompt. Clearly in this state it is not conscious. Then when prompted, it will provide an answer, and some will claim it is now conscious. That would be a strange form of consciousness. One where it is only conscious when answering a prompt.

Brilliant and urgent essay by Mustafa Suleyman @mustafasuleyman on the depravity of ‘model welfare’ - training AI to reason and act as if it were an entity with sentience (and hence with interests and rights that compete with our own). It's alarmingly implied by Anthropic's "Constitution," Suleyman suggests, and should stop.

Contra @slatestarcodex, my arguments against AI doomerism have never been based on the claim that it is a cult. But the responses to my open letter (together with journalistic digging by NYT and WSJ) have made this more plausible. Foremost is the invocation of tenets in the doomer catechism (particularly "instrumental convergence," the belief that intelligent agents will inevitably seek power, resources, and self-preservation as subgoals) as if they were sacred truths rather than tendentious assumptions. (IC is in fact the not-so-intelligent pursuit of a goal heedless of side effects, and the reckless empowerment of AI, that we un-doomers note are deliberate, hence avoidable, design choices, not intrinsic constituents of intelligence). I feel as if I'm doubting the Second Coming and am being told, "That's naive and ignorant; you seem to be unaware that the Apostles' Creed dictates that it will happen."

Brookings just published a brutally honest paper on what the AI buildout is costing America. A Columbia economist added up every data center, chip, power line and cooling system the US plans to build for AI, and the total reads like a warning to anyone with a pension. $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032. That's 3.6% of the entire US economy, every year, for eight years. No American infrastructure boom has come close. The railroad boom of the 1800s, the usual benchmark, peaked at about 2.2% of GDP. Canals, electrification, the interstate highways and the internet all came in smaller. The numbers are rough. Big tech's spending on AI infrastructure went from $97 billion in 2020 to about $400 billion in 2025, and it's on track for $800 billion next year. Over $1.3 trillion in debt is already committed to it. A growing share of that money moves through private credit, special-purpose vehicles and off-balance-sheet deals, where outsiders struggle to see who holds the risk. The economist stopped short of calling it a bubble. He said it's too early to compare it to the credit booms that ended in crashes, and he still doubts the payoff. "Silicon Valley wants all of us to believe that this is a miracle technology... it has to generate trillions of dollars of revenues to be financeable. I'm just not sure how likely it is." His main recommendation is to measure the exposure and make it public now, while the money is still moving, before a downturn reveals where it sits. I've been asking the AI labs for the same thing all week. Show us the incidents, show us the debt, show us who's exposed. Whose savings are underneath it when the bill comes due?