A few weeks ago, I joined Cosmos Institute. AI is the transformative technology of our era. By acting as a force-multiplier on intelligence, I believe it has the potential to do tremendous good for humanity. At the same time, I worry that we may pursue the path of least resistance and increasingly outsource our judgment and our ability to think. We risk ending up in the warm bath of learned helplessness. 

Often these conversations feel like they’re confined to communities that would rather we abandon the development of advanced AI systems. Many of my fellow optimists treat them as minor details we don’t need to worry about. But over the past few months I feel like I’ve found real community. Through meeting Brendan McCord, the Cosmos team, and the wider network at the first Cosmos symposium, I’ve encountered a rare combination of technical depth and moral seriousness.

At Cosmos, I’ll be continuing to fight the battle of ideas. To give you a flavour of what I’ll be working on, for my first piece, I’ve written about why even highly capable AI systems will make for poor economic planners.