Autumn ambiance (Bergen, Norway). 🍂🍁🍂

New podcast interview of me on Empathy Unbound, mostly about whether AI could soon be conscious and what the consequences would be: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

BREAKING: new kind of injustice identified in philosophy. Conservatives hardest hit.

What is the best book about the imagination?

When the Oxford children's dictionary discarded dozens of nature-words—"dandelion," "fern," "starling"—as irrelevant to children's imagination and replaced them with words like "broadband" and "cut-and-paste," this inspired act of resistance was born: themarginalian.org/2019/06/1…

In Matmata, Tunisia, people have lived in underground homes for hundreds of years, with rooms carved into deep pits and connected by tunnels.

A 3500-year-old amber bear amulet, found in a peat bog near Slupsk, Poland.

Struggling to meet hot singles in your area? Have you considered singles in other possible worlds? Continuing the theme of brilliantly playful philosophy papers, here's @neilsinhababu's superb 2008 paper on getting a girlfriend through the power of modal realism.

Philosopher David Chalmers asks: When we talk to AI, what are we talking to? piped.video/uUjJOMcNU9w?is=YdzF… @davidchalmers42 #philosophy #AI

Architecture in Vienna. -- "Ernst Fuchs Villa", originally designed by Otto Wagner, and added to by Ernst Fuchs. #Vienna #Austria #photography #architecture #art

"Actually, in America, the reading of books is up." newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

The more you are enjoying an in-person talk by a public speaker, the more tempting it is to take out your phone and try to capture the moment, but here are a few reasons not to. carissaveliz.substack.com/p/…

In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. piped.video/watch?v=XD_Cww5Q… #Middelmarch #Spinoza #Hegel #literature #philosophy

New Issue of Journal of the American Philosophical Association now available 📚 cup.org/4s4Ky7u #Philosophy @apaphilosophy

New Issue of Philosophy now available 📚 cup.org/4Bfa0Lx

New Issue of Kantian Review now available 📚 cup.org/4yVgxcG #Philosophy #Kant

If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” - or take this moment to call for different conditions?

I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.

Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.

A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.