Imagining a Future Without Computers — The previous hundred years might be framed as the century of the computer. What began as a special-purpose military device has become a ubiquitous part of the lives of nearly everyone. This has enabled an incomprehensible increase in the productivity and interconnectivity of all the people on the planet. It…

Psychedelic therapy is emerging as a promising new treatment for depression, anxiety, addiction, and other mental health issues [1]. Many proponents are even envisioning a world in which psychedelic therapy, which is administered once or twice over the course of a month would replace the current status-quo of taking an…

Preface: The following is an exercise in imagining a positive vision for artificial intelligence systems over the next years to decades. As a practicing Buddhist, this vision is unsurprisingly one heavily inspired by that tradition. It is also greatly indebted to the wonderful paper “Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as…

A primer on the REBUS/CANAL theory — In recent years there has been a renaissance of research into the use of psychedelics for the treatment of a wide array of psychopathologies. Mental health concerns as various as mood disorders, anxiety disorders, body-image disorders, addiction, and others have all been shown to be amenable to psychedelic therapy [1]…

Three mechanisms of action for antidepressant drugs — Millions of people in the world suffer from depression and anxiety of various causes and manifestations [1]. Since the mid-20th century, biological interventions, typically in the form of pharmaceutical drugs, have been introduced to help treat these issues and improve people’s lives. A key target of these drugs is the…

Using this term attributes properties to the LLMs they don’t have while also ignoring the real dynamics behind the production of their made-up information — You hear it everywhere. Whenever someone discusses the tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to make up facts or present fictional information, they say the LLM is hallucinating. …

Introduction When psychologists discuss mental content, they typically divide it into two broad categories: thoughts (cognition) and emotions (affect). The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has focused extensively on understanding and simulating cognition in machines. Especially in the past decade this approach has seen great success, with more and more human-like…

Blueprint For A Bottom-up “One-World Government” — Introduction This essay is a thought experiment in political theory. From reading Plato’s Republic in high school to closely following both local US politics and world politics for the past decade, I have maintained an interest in political philosophy. How best to govern? Free from all actual historical restrictions, what would…

Happy New Year! For the past few years I have compiled lists of the books that I read in the previous year. This post consists of a list of the books that I read in 2022, along with some thoughts I have on each. I’ve divided the list into fiction…