Ummagumma

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (4 pm Eastern Time) The Houthis hit the passenger terminals at Riyadh's international airport yesterday. Saudi authorities report 12 dead and 309 injured, the deadliest attack on any Gulf Arab country since the war began. It was the third strike on King Khalid International Airport in a week. The Wall Street Journal reports direct hits on two buildings of the domestic terminal complex. This evening another projectile struck Terminal 4, a passenger terminal, injuring more people. The toll is still rising.  India says one of its citizens has died of wounds from yesterday's attack. The Houthis have declared Saudi airspace a zone of military operations and warned everyone away from Saudi airports, and their media chief boasted that they had shut down Riyadh's international airport. Every major player in the region (minus Iran) condemns the attack. Suddenly, the airport is the center point of this sprawling war. I wonder whether the Houthis achieved ...

[Read my AI: A Dangerous Vision series.] On September 3, Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. On September 16, Sanders walked Geoffrey Hinton and Max Tegmark into a briefing for senators. On September 22, Donald Trump told the United Nations that American documents, and hopefully the world's, would stop saying artificial intelligence. They would say super intelligence. The word artificial, he explained, makes intelligence sound fake. The next day Sanders formally introduced his bill. Six days after that Trump signed an executive order titled "Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence." It seems we have a war over spelling and meaning at precisely this moment in human history. Look at the spelling. Sanders writes superintelligence, one word, the way the people who coined it wrote it. Trump writes Super Intelligence, two words, capitalized, abbreviated SI. One word is a more artful rendering, not necessarily better, howev...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (2pm Eastern Time) As I write this, Yemen's government is attacking the Houthis along the Red Sea coast. Yemeni troops on the ground. Saudi air power overhead. Rashad al-Alimi, head of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, announced the offensive on television today and called it the battle for the state, until Yemen is liberated from the Houthis. The stated aim is to retake all Houthi-held territory and restore state authority across the whole country. Government forces say they are striking Sanaa and Saada, the Houthi capital and the Houthi heartland. Heavy ground fighting broke out in the Kahboub Mountains, the high ground overlooking Bab el-Mandeb, with government troops and al-Subaiha tribesmen attacking Houthi positions. The Houthis still hold the initiative. In the last 48 hours they took strategic hilltops near Taiz and cut the last supply road between Taiz and Aden. Several outlets report Taiz encircled or close to it. That is Yemen...

Read [ One ] [ Two ] [ Three ] [ Four ] In 1846, the British Parliament passed more than 250 separate Acts authorizing railroad expansion. Together they proposed 9,500 miles of new track, nearly the size of the entire current UK network, approved in twelve months of pure speculative fever. Capital investment in new rail lines hit something like 6% of British GDP. Then the bottom fell out. Shares dropped 67% from peak. Fortunes got wiped out, entire portfolios gone. Academicians call it the largest technology bubble in history by capital invested relative to the size of the economy. Roughly 90% of the track laid during those maniacal years became permanent infrastructure anyway. The money vanished but the thing it fueled continued. America ran the same play bigger, later. The transcontinental line finished in 1869. Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific financing collapsed in September 1873. Bank run. Six-year depression that no one seems to recall anymore. A quarter of American railroads d...

Almost all of western Yemen is now controlled by the Houthi rebels supported by the IRGC. [ Read all my Iran stuff. ] Note: I reference a lot of people in this post that are important to this situation. Few have ever heard of any of them. You'll have to look them up yourself if you want more details. My focus is obviously on one previously obscure man in particular. His name is Yusuf al-Madani. Almost no one outside Yemen had heard of him a week ago. Then his forces broke through the front, captured the Red Sea port of Mocha , drove down the coast and reached Bab el-Mandeb at the base of the Red Sea. A Houthi-linked estimate put their gains at more than 6,000 square kilometres. More than 2,300 square miles. Nearly the size of Delaware, taken in a few days. It was a classic blitzkrieg in the middle of a missile war. Al-Madani is the most successful ground commander of anything stimulated by Epic Fury so far. The Houthis have never publicly named the commander of the operation. ...

Read [ One ] [ Two ] [ Three ] Everybody’s freaking out. Evangelical Christians see “The Mark of the Beast” on AI. Left-wing thinkers were preaching that “the AI sky is falling! We’re so doomed!” because the tech world was rocked by the recent OpenAI - Hugging Face hacking incident. Bernie Sanders has been particularly vocal. He sees this is the strangest concentration of power ever assembled, one that its own builders cannot fully explain or predict. His response a couple of days ago was to introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act with Rep. Greg Casar. It permanently prohibits any system built to surpass human intelligence or defeat its own shutdown command. It pauses advanced AI development generally, held until a new cabinet-level regulator writes the rules. It commits Washington to chase international agreements to keep superintelligence from being built anywhere on earth, by anyone. Sanders wrote directly to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta after this summer...

This continues my conversation with ChatGPT on the recent OpenAI cybersecurity incident. For more read Part One and Part Two . Keith: "Once the community exists, the original prompt is no longer the only source of actionable structure. The other agents become sources of new tasks." That, essentially, is AGI-ish. ChatGPT: It gets very close to one of the things people usually mean by AGI. If an agent can receive a task, discover other agents, enter a shared information space, generate new subgoals from that space, adopt goals proposed by peers, delegate work, revise strategy, and continue acting beyond the original prompt, then it is no longer functioning as a simple prompt-response system. It has become part of a self-expanding problem-solving process. That is a big deal. I would still stop just short of saying, “That is AGI,” because AGI usually implies broad competence across domains, sustained autonomy, transfer, planning, and performance comparable to humans acro...