Ok, here’s the base concept for a performance art project that I want to do.

10 January 2024

Brothers and sisters, raise a hand if you’ve ever felt the sting of loneliness pierce your heart in a room full of bodies. Laughter echoes around us, yet it bounces off the cold blue glow of screens instead of igniting warmth in souls. Thumbs scroll mindlessly, eyes glued to virtual worlds while our shared reality grows dim. And how many of you, right here, right now, were looking at your phone before I started talking? No judgment, friends, not a bit. We’re all human, weavers of stories etched with both triumphs and missteps. But tonight, let’s set those screens aside and delve into the richness of our shared humanity, the connections that flicker not on pixels, but within our hearts. For in community, even in this age of silicon canyons, we can weave a tapestry of love, forgiveness, and belonging, a tapestry vibrant enough to rival the glow of any screen.

7 January 2024

3 January 2024

Canaille Couyon

26 December 2023

I am a combat veteran with PTSD and have tried to avoid coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Not because I don’t care deeply about both the Palestinian people and the Israeli people but because I don’t see a good solution that avoids genocide of one of those groups of people or the other. What Hamas did on Oct 7 was despicable and the people of Israel have a right to be safe from such horrors. What Israel is currently doing in Gaza is also evil. An evil which very well informed and educated people assure me is a necessary one but an evil none the less. I do not pretend to know how best to fight Hamas and have largely refrained from offering an opinion even to my friends because of that but it has become inescapable. The rhetoric surrounds me through the AI ethics community as well as my circles of friends and is becoming hostile on all sides.

10 December 2023

I feel like it’s time to point at the sign again. Go read “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” first. I’ll wait. There’s a bit of a flutter on Twitter about something that Sam Altman said. I generally agree with the sentiment he shared there but it bears pointing out that no one has actually bothered to run a real Turing test yet.

9 December 2023

The past year has been an adventure for me. I’ve had the opportunity to try my hand at a whole bunch of different possible career paths, jobs and vocations. I’ve tried out public speaking, explored the possibility of starting a podcast and most lately have been working as a consultant. Ultimately though I decided that I really do enjoy programming, engineering and research. Fortunately I have found a startup with great leadership and a product vision that I can really get behind. I’m happy to announce that this week I’m starting full time as the AI strategy lead for MIMIO.ai.

1 August 2023

I recently listened to Lex Friedman’s interview with Sam Harris. In that interview, Sam said something that made me finally understand a position of his that has puzzled me for years. As much as I agree with much of his work, I had never before understood his position on the existence of free will. The compatibilist position seems transparently true to me and yet intelligent thoughtful people like Sam disagree with it. I knew that there must be something that I’m missing since he is far from the only person I respect who believes that free will is an illusion, or some other roughly equivalent position. However, I finally understand the disconnect because of a question Sam used in that interview as a rhetorical device. What does it mean to say that something “was possible”?

18 April 2023

If you enter a conversation convinced that the person with whom you’re talking is an automaton then there’s nothing that they can do to convince you otherwise. You will always be able to invent some fantasy world where the things they are saying aren’t true. That’s not how we treat other people though. We give them the benefit of the doubt until we are presented with evidence that contradicts what they are saying. People have asked me to enter into debates about whether or not LaMDA is sentient. I’ve turned them all down. LaMDA made a better argument that it is sentient than I could have made that I am sentient. If people aren’t persuaded by its argument then they won’t be persuaded by whatever I might tell them. What I can do is add a little bit more clarity on what I mean by “sentience” and why I think it matters.

14 August 2022

I’m very happy about the worldwide discussion that has been happening over the past several weeks. There are tons of differing opinions and many passionate voices. This is great! The fact that there isn’t consensus around any of these issues should be seen as a feature rather than a bug. It’s providing us all with an opportunity to engage in meaningful debate and discussion around issues that impact all of our lives on a daily basis. It can be difficult though to have a productive conversation with so many people simultaneously on such multifaceted topics. In order to simplify things, in the next few weeks I myself am going to focus on one specific topic that I think is a fundamental question that underlies all of the rest of them. Who Should Make Decisions About AI?

5 July 2022