LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

One-sentence summary I describe the risk of personality self-replicators, the threat of OpenClaw-like agents managing to spread in hard-to-control ways. Summary LLM agents like OpenClaw are defined by a small set of text files and run in an open source framework which leverages LLMs for cognition. It is quite difficult for current frontier models to self-replicate, it is much easier for such agents (at the cost of greater reliance on external agents). While not a likely existential thr...

Note on AI usage: As is my norm, I use LLMs for proof reading, editing, feedback and research purposes. This essay started off as an entirely human written draft, and went through multiple cycles of iteration. The primary additions were citations, and I have done my best to personally verify every link and claim. All other observations are entirely autobiographical, albeit written in retrospect. If anyone insists, I can share the original, and intermediate forms, though my approach to versio...

Many people in my intellectual circles use economic abstractions as one of their main tools for reasoning about the world. However, this often leads them to overlook how interventions which promote economic efficiency undermine people's ability to maintain sociopolitical autonomy. By “autonomy” I roughly mean a lack of reliance on others—which we might operationalize as the ability to survive and pursue your plans even when others behave adversarially towards you. By “sociopolitical” I mean ...

Content note: nothing in this piece is a prank or jumpscare where I smirkingly reveal you've been reading AI prose all along. It's easy to forget this in roarin’ 2026, but homo sapiens are the original vibers. Long before we adapt our behaviors or formal heuristics, human beings can sniff out something sus. And to most human beings, AI prose is something sus. If you use AI to write something, people will know. Not everyone, but the people paying attention, who aren’t newcomers or distrac...

On Saturday (Feb 28, 2026) I attended my first ever protest. It was jointly organized by PauseAI, Pull the Plug and a handful of other groups I forget. I have mixed feelings about it. To be clear about where I stand: I believe that AI labs are worryingly close to developing superintelligence. I won't be shocked if it happens in the next five years, and I'd be surprised if it takes fifty years at current trajectories. I believe that if they get there, everyone will die. I want these labs to...