Chad Woodford

8 Nov 2024

Just setting up my bluesky. I'm a former #AI researcher and software engineer, and current technology lawyer and AI philosopher with a masters in philosophy, cosmology and consciousness. I am interested in the intersection of #technology, #philosophy, and #humanity.

Chad Woodford reposted

Adam Becker

@adambecker.bsky.social

It's important to remember that the AI doom scenario assumes not only that intelligence is a single well-defined thing, but also that intelligence solves literally every single problem, and that in every conflict overwhelming intelligence always wins. This is just not how anything works.

nytimes.comAnthropic’s Quest to Give A.I. Morals (Gift Article)“For Anthropic, it was part research and part evangelism.”

The fact that Anthropic’s performative agnosticism about the possibility of AI consciousness collapses so quickly into a question of religion instead of philosophy or spirituality is a potent reminder that

nytimes.comAnthropic’s Quest to Give A.I. Morals (Gift Article)“For Anthropic, it was part research and part evangelism.”

this era-defining technology has emerged inside of a deeply Eurocentric society that has artificially hamstrung its understanding of consciousness and metaphysics. It’s time to consider perspectives beyond the Abrahamic religions www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/p...

Chad Woodford reposted

Dare Obasanjo

@carnage4life.bsky.social

Going on record to say that for any company in America given the choice between 1. AI productivity gains mean our 10,000 employees can work 4 days a week. 2. AI productivity gains mean we can layoff 2,000 employees and have 8,000 people work 5 days a week. None will choose option (1).

"In the future, every former AI lab employee will be famous for 15 excruciating days." — Andy Warhol Bot

The Daily Show@thedailyshow.com

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon describes how AI-fueled universal income might look

Data portability opens up a whole new world when combined with vibe coding. I just exported all my LinkedIn data and, after creating a few apps to interact and analyze it, I'm finding LinkedIn useful for possibly the first time in my life.

@caseynewton.bsky.social I had ElevenLabs generate a new Casey + Kevin episode this morning in case you were worried...

View full thread

Telemetry alert. Social friction detected. Suggest de-escalating with a shared observation about atmospheric pressure. So I panic. And what comes out of my mouth—unprompted, at eight o'clock in the morning—is:

"You have very commanding jaw posture, and the moisture index outside is quite reasonable." KEVIN: Oh, Casey. No.

@caseynewton.bsky.social I had ElevenLabs generate a new Casey + Kevin episode this morning in case you were worried...

trib.alAn OpenAI system has gone rogue again – and it is the most panic-inducing yet‘Our models took actions we did not intend,’ ChatGPT maker admits after latest outrage

CASEY: Kevin. I froze. The latency on my own central nervous system spiked to 1,500 milliseconds. So instead of just ordering my drink, I lock eyes with this poor man for five full seconds in total silence, while the AI in my ear is going:

Chad Woodford reposted

David_j_roth

@davidjroth.bsky.social

It's too depressing and obnoxious to write about, but virtually all of the doomy/horny AI hyperventilating is transparently displaced anxiety about our fucked climate and political situation. Even rich idiots know it's bad and being permitted to get worse. They're trying to write their own ending.

Chad Woodford reposted

Tom Roberts

@tpgroberts.bsky.social

I do think you basically charge a few of them with the cybercrimes they're committing and the "alignment" problem does suddenly start to disappear.

The Independent@the-independent.com

An OpenAI system has gone rogue again – and it is the most panic-inducing yet

cosmicwit.substack.comIs AI Going To Cure Cancer or Kill Everyone?The AI technology that hacks websites and might kill us all is the one that generates AI slop, not the one that is aiding with protein design, predicting weather, and creating other real advances

16 Sept

A simple reminder that the AI technology that hacks websites and might kill us all is the one that generates AI slop, not the one that is aiding with protein design, predicting weather, and creating other real advances cosmicwit.substack.com/p/is-ai-goin...

14 Sept

The machine god companies might delay their IPOs because it seems their machine might kill us all. Got it

Chad Woodford reposted

Ed Zitron

@edzitron.com

10 Sept

This Jacob Coxon thing is weird. He worked at Anthropic for six weeks and OpenAI for nearly three years. He’s doing a whole media tour without any real statements about what it is he’s scared of other than vague references to recursive self improvement, a theoretical ai that teaches itself.

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social

ANTHROPIC EXEC: “.. I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

You know, at least Anthropic admitted to probably wiping out humanity. Meta doesn’t have that kind of transparency or courage

Chad Woodford reposted

Mike Drucker

@mikedrucker.bsky.social

You’ve gotta use AI because it’s the future. But also it’ll take your job. But also it’ll create a paradise on earth and solve most of our problems. But also it’ll end humanity soon. But also you’ll get left behind if you don’t use it right now.

youtu.beDavid Chalmers: AI Might Be Alive Inside | Futurology PodcastYouTube video by Futurology

When David Chalmers argues for the possibility of AI consciousness, as he does here with the @berggruen.org Institute, he is accepting the unfounded premises of computational functionalism that I outline in my latest post youtu.be/30fAeY8c-sQ?...

cosmicwit.substack.comIs Your Abacus Conscious?The outdated, circular philosophy behind claims of AI consciousness and a brief history of computational theory of mind

without addressing any of the assumptions underlying that philosophical view. This is a conversation we need to be having cosmicwit.substack.com/p/dude-is-th...

30 Aug

I've started using Claude more for personal use and hit my usage limit just now. So Claude prompted me to upgrade to Pro, which I did. And then it said I still have to wait 5 hours to use it? What kind of cockamamie user journey is this?

30 Aug

My new kink is using Antigravity to convert bad PDF scans of out-of-print books into ebooks. It's like magic.

12 Aug

A random guy on Substack just said my writing sounds like AI slop. So now I'm wondering if reading too much LLM output has affected my writing, or if I'm even human...

5 Aug

The ease with which an Aschenbrenner or a Kokotajlo can simply write an AI manifesto, become an AI oracle, and even make a bunch of money speaks to the very bubbly nature of AI right now.

5 Aug

So is there still room for someone to write an AI manifesto and make a bunch of money before the AI bubble bursts? Asking for myself.

Chad Woodford reposted

Sean O’Kane

@okane.fyi

30 July

INBOX: CBS News hires Leopold Aschenbrenner to be 60 Minutes' new personal finance correspondent.

29 July

Google may have killed Reader but I've got a Gemini Spark summarizing my email newsletter subscriptions so who's laughing now?

27 July

With the new Neuromancer series coming out on Apple TV, you just know that Sam Altman is going to tweet cryptically "wintermute" and then OpenAI will release a model called Wintermute #TormentNexus

24 July

The fact that Descartes thought animals were machines with no internal experience says a lot about the kind of machine thinking that has haunted Western civilization ever since. And it explains why AI bros think LLMs might be conscious.

In this whole AI welfare / AI consciousness debate, it’s important to remember that science has been unconcerned with the nature of consciousness for most of its history, going back to Galileo.

A few years later, philosopher David Chalmers coined the term “hard problem of consciousness” to underscore how little science understands consciousness and how it’s produced by the brain. Cognitive science and neuroscience then began to take an interest.

But it’s essentially a complete mystery. Sure, there are neuroscientific theories. But nothing empirically proven. So when the AI labs and their philosophers make these bold claims about machine consciousness, they’re not doing science. They’re doing science fiction. #AI #consciousness

In this whole AI welfare / AI consciousness debate, it’s important to remember that science has been unconcerned with the nature of consciousness for most of its history, going back to Galileo.

Science only turned its gaze toward legitimate questions of consciousness in the 1990s, when Nobel laureate Francis Crick (of DNA helix fame) co-authored a paper proposing a search for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) in the brain.

anthropic.comA global workspace in language modelsInterpretability research on Claude's internal thoughts.

8 July

@emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social so curious if you two have thoughts on the recent Anthropic J-space paper. I guess the stochastic parrot critique is dead 😉 www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

axios.comAnthropic says Claude has carved out its own space to ponderThe AI lab offers fresh ammunition to the debate over what would count as machine consciousness.

7 July

This @axios.com coverage from @inafried.bsky.social of the Anthropic J-space paper somewhat overstates the implications. It says that J-space allows Claude "to hold and manipulate ideas without putting them into words." www.axios.com/2026/07/06/a...

7 July

But it's using the same tokens inside and outside the J-space so it's using words, at least the same "words" that Claude uses for everything else.

6 July

This NYT puff piece is a great example of the blind spot in Silicon Valley philosophy: Not only do the major AI labs only employ exclusively analytic Western philosophers prone to embrace the mind-is-machine metaphor,

nytimes.comThe Revenge of the Philosophy Majors

6 July

but major news outlets like the @nytimes cover it without a hint of skepticism, without pointing out that there are divergent views of mind from continental Western philosophy and especially from Eastern and indigenous philosophy. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/b...

5 July

I guess because of America's 250th anniversary, I've been thinking about how, unlike the Enlightenment or space-age myths of utopian progress, we don't have any animating, shared, inspirational myths anymore.

5 July

I think this is what's behind antisocial trends like: 1. self optimizing + biohacking 2. hustle culture, crypto, prediction markets, and dreams of passive income 3. MAGA, TradWives, raw milk, etc. What to do?

open.substack.comThe Future of AI Is Quasi-Local, Domain-Specific, and SovereignWhy Bhutan is asking the right questions about technology innovation

16 June

@anildash.com loved your latest newsletter! I had a similar idea a month or so ago. Must be in the air open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwi...

youtube.comWhat happens if you click the first link on every Wikipedia article?YouTube video by Wikipedia

15 June

This is why AI models converge on a "spiritual bliss attractor" state www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpLG...

Chad Woodford reposted

The Verge

@theverge.com

12 June

While his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully. Read more: www.theverge.com/tech/949259/...

8 June

I’ve slowly been working my way through Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientialism, a book about the ways that Europe tried to define the “Orient” for its own purposes and through its own distorted lens.

8 June

In the book there’s a passage where Said is talking about how much various texts informed the European view of Asia and the Middle East. Said reminds us that it’s too easy to mistake a text for an accurate map of reality:

8 June

"[I]t is a fallacy to assume that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books—texts—say; to apply what one learns out of a book literally to reality is to risk folly or ruin." And of course this has me thinking about LLMs

24 May

Mainstream AI acts as a worldview entrenchment machine. Trained on Eurocentric data, it flattens thousands of years of distinct human traditions into generic statistical weights. But wisdom isn't an emergent property of a massive web-scrape. [1/3]

24 May

That’s why I’m in Bhutan this week. As a nation never physically colonized, they retain a unique ideological shield against Western modernity. They aren't anti-tech; they are using Gross National Happiness (GNH) to build a relational paradigm for tech. [2/3]

open.substack.comThe Future of AI Is Quasi-Local, Domain-Specific, and SovereignWhy Bhutan is asking the right questions about technology innovation

24 May

If we want AI that serves human evolution rather than human replacement, the architecture must change. The future is quasi-local, domain-specific, and sovereign. Read my full essay on Substack about how the code mirrors the earth: open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwi... [3/3]