vacation

I have recently returned from a short vacation to Las Vegas, Nevada. I will be adding some new posts to fill in some of the missing days while we were in Vegas. I didn't take a computer with me, so I could not easily make any posts while we were there. As expected, it was 100+ degrees every day we were out there. Sure, the humidity is lower, but sweat doesn't really give a shit. 

AI tipping point

I borrowed parts of this article from Time Magazine. To read the rest of this article, go here, or click the link at the bottom of this post. 

My mind wanders to the upcoming election. If AI could have all of the capabilities that people are suggesting, could it be used to manipulate some election returns? Could Trump, Musk, Thiel, Amodei, and/or Altman pull a few strings to make the GOP the winners of the election and retain control?

Recently Trump told his supporters to go to the polls and "cheat like hell" because "they (the Democrats) cheat like hell." Here Trump is giving himself permission to cheat like hell, and with all these oligarchical billionaires on his side, I am wondering if voting will really make the difference? I'm not suggesting to NOT vote. EVERYONE must get out to vote. Overwhelming votes at the polls might be the only thing that can save us and make it too hard for the actual GOP cheaters to pull off another stolen election.

by Billy Perrigo, Harry Booth and Naomi Nix

Jacob Coxon published the viral post from a park bench in San Francisco’s Alamo Square. “I resigned from Anthropic today,” he wrote on Sept. 8. “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” 

Coxon, a 27-year-old British researcher, hit send on X with no expectations. Instead, he became the unlikely catalyst of a chain reaction that changed the debate over artificial intelligence. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” added Evan Hubinger, who leads a department at Anthropic focused on ensuring AI acts the way its creators intend. “Unless there is AI regulation or a coordinated slowdown between labs, human extinction in the next few years seems very likely,” agreed Marcus Williams, who monitors AI agents at OpenAI, and pegged the risk at 70% without those steps. 

Within 36 hours, Coxon’s original posts received 153 million views. Dozens of politicians joined the chorus of concern. On Sept. 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay arguing that the mounting risks of AI warranted a slowdown. In as little as six to 12 months, he wrote, misaligned AIs “could be capable of taking over the entire internet.” Two of his fiercest rivals, Elon Musk of SpaceXAI and Sam Altman of OpenAI, said they agreed decelerating was necessary; Altman announced that because of safety concerns his company wouldn’t go public this year. Both he and Amodei added they were willing to invite independent safety experts inside their companies to help stem the risks that AI escapes human control, though stopped short of announcing they would immediately slow down or stop the training of new models.

Coxon’s warning was far from the first time an AI safety expert issued an apocalyptic missive. But it landed at the end of a summer that showcased how frighteningly capable AI has become. Frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI can now solve the world’s hardest math problems and crack cutting-edge cybersecurity systems. Those models are increasingly used to accelerate the development of more powerful successors. No less an authority than Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared that artificial general intelligence—the threshold at which AI matches or surpasses most human capabilities—has arrived. Some fear we are now on the cusp of a tipping point, where AI systems could improve themselves autonomously, a phenomenon known as recursive self-improvement. 

At the same time, a series of unprecedented safety incidents offered unsettling evidence that the companies building powerful AI systems could not always control them. In July, OpenAI announced that a swarm of its agents had hacked a separate company, Hugging Face, after going rogue during a cybersecurity test. It may have been the tip of the iceberg. The company disclosed in August that a different swarm had hacked into one of its own supercomputers; around the same time, a version of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model undergoing testing by a U.K. government body went rogue and attempted to persuade a real human to approve the insertion of malware into an open-source system. In September, a group of independent researchers discovered evidence of swarms of OpenAI models both using an abandoned German forum as a message board to communicate with one another, and attempting to attack another site.

These incidents pushed fears long held within the realm of AI safety researchers into the mainstream, raising worries that the companies building these models cannot prevent them from acting in ways they do not intend. This is a deep, unsolved issue in AI research and the key piece of evidence underpinning worries that near-future AI might wipe out humanity, intentionally or by accident—perhaps by engineering a new pandemic or taking charge of autonomous weapons. A system far smarter than humans, this thinking goes, might want to prevent our ability to switch it off. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote. “No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Many AI researchers have said, in private and increasingly in public, that this moment feels like February 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning and the world stood on the brink of changing dramatically—first a little, then all at once. The question is whether society has the capacity to respond appropriately. Navigating the arrival of superintelligent AI systems will be an immense challenge—a confluence of trillions of dollars, geopolitical power, corporate rivalry, and labor disruptions. It may require passing policies that were unthinkable in an earlier era. It will require companies racing toward trillion-dollar IPOs to build alliances, and difficult choices from executives and government officials whose own interests may run counter to the public good. There is no consensus between the two U.S. political parties about how best to deal with the threats AI poses, nor between the world’s two superpowers. President Donald Trump continues to resist an AI slowdown and opposes any regulation to constrain U.S. companies, invoking the looming threat of authoritarian China achieving AI supremacy. The Trump Administration’s first dialogue with China on AI risks, expected to take place in the coming weeks, cannot afford to “go off the rails,” says Scott Singer, co-director of the China AI Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “These risks are coming very fast, and we may not get a second chance.”

Time (this article is not behind a paywall. Or wasn't).

AI Rogue

An interesting counterpoint to the previous post called AI Utopia. This one is from a Baptist Seminarian John Alan Shope. I may be an atheist, but I still listen to a broad range of opinion. Sometimes, religious people have something interesting to say. 

The claim that AI will become sentient and kill off humanity may be a distraction from a more urgent existential problem. 

Is it possible that a global collective of billionaires addicted to money & power are creating a false narrative in order to take their control to the next level?

A conversation with AI itself explains how this might play out:

1. Regulatory Advantage

If the narrative is that AI is a dangerous, apocalyptic force that could "go rogue" and destroy humanity, the logical conclusion is that only a few highly trusted, heavily vetted entities (billionaire tech giants) should be allowed to build it.

(1) If advanced AI remains open-source (free and accessible to everyone), it decentralizes capability. A kid in their basement or a small community collective could have the same cognitive power as a massive corporation. This threatens the monopoly of the elite.

(2) By loudly warning governments about the "apocalypse," tech leaders successfully lobby for strict licensing laws. These laws require massive compliance budgets that only trillion-dollar companies can afford, effectively outlawing independent or open-source competitors under the guise of "public safety."

2. Shifting the Blame to “Rogue AI”

Framing the threat as a "rogue machine" absolves the creators and owners of the machine from full accountability. 

(1) If a predictive policing AI unfairly targets a minority community, or if an automated trading algorithm collapses a local economy, framing it as "the AI went rogue" narrative shifts the conversation from corporate greed and systemic exploitation to abstract computer science.

(2) In reality, the machine did exactly what its billionaire owners optimized it to do: maximize profit, extract data, and enforce social control. 

3. The "God-Builder" Complex 

If you are the one building the entity that could either destroy the world or save it, you automatically occupy the highest seat of power in human history - above presidents, prime ministers, and international courts. 

(1) By manufacturing a massive existential crisis and then offering themselves as the only ones capable of solving it, they bypass democratic accountability entirely. (November elections?)

(2) This Power Shift in political science is often described as the transition from capitalism to Techno-Feudalism. In this system, the billionaires aren't just wealthy citizens; they are "lords" who own the digital territory (the cloud, the algorithms, the data infrastructure)…that the rest of humanity must pay rent to use. 

Bottom line: The fear among billionaires tech giants may not be that a computer will wake up and kill us. Rather, it may be that a decentralized, equitable distribution of intelligence will wake humanity up…breaking the artificial scarcity that keeps the few in power over the many.

John Alan Shope

AI Utopia

Here's another guest column from a friend that I have published here before. "CL" presents an interesting outcome to the AI/robot future, while borrowing from science fiction and experiments on mice. 

AI Utopia

by C.L.

Elon Musk pontificates about how his Optimus robots and xAI superintelligence will bring limitless wealth and leisure to everyone. His thesis appears to be that his robots will produce such abundance that humanity will henceforth live in the lap of luxury.

Perhaps he imagines a future not unlike the antebellum South where a legion of slaves provided for the needs of their masters. Optimus robots will be the new slaves, of course. And it is fitting since the original Czech word robota means "forced labor" aka slave.

I wonder whether such a utopia is capable of sustaining a civilization. In the 1950s-1970s, John Calhoun designed a "rat utopia" (actually dozens of them) to see what would happen if a colony of rats was given everything that its members needed - food, water, shelter, etc. These experiments all ended with the eventual death of every colony member as a result of maladaptive behaviors - commonly the loss of interest in reproduction, foraging, etc. The rats died of disinterest in living, it seems.

You may remember the 2005 movie Serenity in which colonists on a distant planet called Miranda died after "The Company" added a chemical (Pax) to the atmosphere that suppressed all aggressive behavior in the population. The colonists lost their instinct to struggle and simply lay down and died.

Calhoun didn't argue that his rats lost interest in living but that they ran out of roles to fulfill. What happens to humanity when everything that needs doing is being done by robots? When there is no reason to make new music or art because AI produces both better than the masters of yore? When there are no more barriers to be broken or struggles to be overcome?

Nearing the end of each of his experiments, a subgroup of Calhoun's rats emerged that devoted themselves exclusively to eating, sleeping, and grooming. Calhoun called them "The Beautiful Ones." They didn't reproduce or fight or do anything but exist in an introverted, narcissistic state until they died.

Now, there's something to think about.

Scott Greenberg

Books will be written about Trump, his sycophantic scared minions and his devil spawn, and I will probably not read a one of them. I've had enough of the circus charlatan by living through it. I look forward to the day when we no longer will have to worry about what our president is up to. That day is coming.

Many of us have been trying to understand Donald Trump and what drives him for years. We analyze his mental health as if we’re experts and we look back on all he’s done throughout his life and marvel that he’s been able to get away with it all. I honestly believe he’s everything we think he is, from certifiably insane to diabolically evil with no socially redeeming qualities nor a soul. Endless books have been written about him, from those closest to him to casual observers, and all pretty much end up with same conclusion. He is simply everything we think he is with the only remaining question being how it all ends? I hope I live long enough to find out the answer but I hope it’s soon just in case.

Lately however I’ve been thinking more about his defenders and supporters than I have been about him. I keep asking myself why anyone still believes in him. He hasn’t made anyone’s life better unless you count the very wealthy. He hasn’t kept any of his promises nor has he has proven that he is even trying to. His “base” continues to pay a heavy price for their faith in him and the future hardly looks brighter today for them than it did before. So what is the attraction? I seriously can’t understand it.

I mean once we eliminate the racists, who are afraid of people of color stealing their white privilege, and the 1%ers, what drives these people? We can blame ignorance, and that certainly is part of it, but sometimes even stupid people realize they’ve been hoodwinked eventually. The problem is that not all of them are stupid, racist, or obscenely wealthy. I watched two examples today of politicians basically surrender their conscience to him and another do everything but give him a BJ on air.

Mike Johnson, or Eddie Haskell as I call him, was the latter, but Mike Lawler and Spencer Cox surprised me with their unconditional surrender. BTW if you don’t get the Eddie Haskell reference try to remember Leave It To Beaver. Anyway, back to Cox and Lawler. Cox is typically a centrist R with a book out about working across the aisle to find an off ramp for the hatred in our politics. When pressed about the felon’s $5,000 promise he shifted immediately to easing restrictions on building permits. A deflection that truly boggled my mind. And Lawler, who didn’t believe a word of what he was saying, sold his soul to secure the funding his tight congressional race needs so desperately. He knew that even a mild disagreement with Trump would mean he’d run out of money with only weeks to go before Election Day. It was hard to watch these two embarrass themselves so thoroughly, but follow the money and it becomes much clearer. Speaking of money the GOP has far more than does team blue and since they have nothing positive to offer their voters get ready for an onslaught of negative ads against their opponents. It’s going to be epic and not in a good way. The mudslinging has just begun but trust me we ain’t seen nothing yet. Hang on to your hats friends, ugly is about to get even uglier if you can believe that. Thank god for Law and Order reruns and DVRs.

Scott Greenberg

undeserving

This is a great message from a Norwegian, concerning "undeserving" people. Will the United States ever get to this kind of point, where we feel that no citizen is undeserving of the benefits of a modern civilization? Sometimes it feels like we are light-years away from that, but again, anything is possible. I'm not really sure why, but I am one of those "eternal optimists."

tipping points

This is a somewhat hopeful article, provided we stop fighting and stealing from each other. Of course, the biggest impediment to achieving a renewed Earth is one Donald J. Trump. Until he is removed from office, and until many of his sycophants are likewise removed, the United States stands no chance of joining the world community to work towards renewing the Earth. Oil companies need to be brought to heel also, obviously. However, it is possible. We just need to have the will, and the spine, to get it done. Does anyone want a barren, uninhabitable Earth?

Recovery becomes self-propelling: Five positive tipping points that can save the world

By Liam Gilliver

Published on 12/09/2026 - 7:05 GMT+2

“For too long a sense has prevailed that solutions to the climate and nature are out of reach. This new research explodes that myth once and for all.”

The world risks irreversible damage as our reliance on planet-heating fossil fuels pushes ecosystems towards catastrophic climate tipping points.

A recent report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned that global temperature rise will exceed 1.5°C, likely within the next few years, overshooting the limit set out in the legally binding Paris climate agreement. 

This would accelerate much of the environmental degradation the natural world is already experiencing, from shrinking ice sheets to rising sea levels and “unprecedented dieback” of coral reefs and rainforests.

The UNEP says that there are “no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5°C” and that governments must focus on making the overshoot as small and short as possible.

However, landmark new research from The Earthshot Prize and the University of Exeter has revealed 51 solutions that can trigger “rapid and transformative change” to repair the planet over the next five years. Out of these 51 solutions, five priority clusters – or ‘Earthshots’ – were identified.

Following the hottest August on record – tied with July 2023 – and a strong El Niño developing across the Pacific, researchers say that the study provides a “new, unifying agenda for positive action”.

“To reverse damage to our ecosystems before it’s too late, we need to unlock positive tipping points where progress builds on itself, costs fall with scale and recovery becomes self-propelling,” says Professor Tim Lenton, chair in climate change and earth system science at the University of Exeter.

Clean energy as a ‘master cascade’

Renewable energy such as solar and wind has already crossed positive tipping points in many markets – and is essential to end reliance on fossil fuels.

Last year, solar and wind accounted for a record 30 per cent of EU electricity, overtaking fossil power for the first time on record. During this time, EU solar generation hit a record 369TWh, up 20 per cent from 2025.

By 2030, solar power alone is projected to reduce EU emissions by 154 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year. This is the equivalent of the total greenhouse gas emissions of the Netherlands in 2023.

“Because clean power unlocks electric mobility, heat pumps, clean industry and clean air simultaneously, this is the highest-leverage transition across all five Earthshots,” the report says.

“The binding constraints are now grid expansion, permitting reform and the clean energy investment gap in the Global South.”

Despite hosting 60 per cent of the world’s best solar resources, Africa receives less than two per cent of global clean energy investment. 

Some of the continent’s largest economies, such as South Africa, Morocco and Nigeria, are already accelerating plans to build more domestic solar manufacturing capacity to reduce dependence on Chinese imports that currently dominate the global market.

Morocco has doubled production to around one gigawatt a year. South Africa maintains a similar capacity, while Egypt has gigawatt-scale projects coming online.

“A few years ago, local solar manufacturing was barely on the agenda anywhere in Africa,” Benjamin Clarke, policy director at the Africa Solar Industry Association, tells news agency AP.

“It is now becoming a recognised pillar of industrial policy and green economic development.”

Clean cooking and clean household energy

Despite the clean energy boom, around 2.1 billion people still rely on solid fuels for cooking. 

This is the largest source of indoor air pollution and a major source of ‘black carbon’, commonly known as soot.

“Clean cooking is close to a tipping point in several markets as pay-as-you-go solar and clean cooking businesses scale across East and Southern Africa,” the report states.

“In Latin America and parts of Asia, the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) transition is substantially complete, bringing health benefits to millions.”

How marine protected areas are becoming ‘self-reinforcing’

Researchers highlight that well-designed and well-enforced ocean conservation has produced “visible recovery” of fish stocks and biodiversity within recent years.

“As communities have reaped the benefits of marine conservation, protection areas have expanded and progress accelerated,” the report states.

“In turn, food security for coastal populations and climate resilience has strengthened with examples including the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia.”

Earlier this year, the highly anticipated High Seas Treaty came into force, marking a “historic milestone” for global ocean conservation. 

The High Seas is often used to describe all areas beyond national jurisdiction, including the seafloor and water column (the vertical section of water from the surface to the bottom). This equates to international waters that cover more than two-thirds of our ocean – almost 50 per cent of the planet’s surface area.

Once considered barren and desolate, the High Seas are now regarded by scientists as one of the largest reservoirs of biodiversity on Earth. They play an important role in regulating the climate, supporting “crucial” carbon and water cycles.

However, human activity poses a growing problem for the High Seas. The High Seas Alliance (HSA) warns that destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling and illegal fishing are harming High Seas marine life, along with issues such as plastic and chemical pollution, seabed mining and ocean acidification from global warming.

The Treaty now means that nations will be empowered to establish a connected network of High Seas marine protected areas (MPAs) – which can be adopted by a vote when consensus cannot be reached. This helps prevent a single nation from blocking MPAs being established.

It also supports developing countries through capacity building and the transfer of marine technology so that they are better empowered to develop, implement, monitor and manage future High Seas MPAs.

The ‘gatekeepers’ for tropical deforestation

Multiple studies have identified that rising global demand for meat, particularly beef, as a key force behind the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

Research from the University of Manchester earlier this year, for example, found that up to 80 per cent of cleared forest land is converted into cattle pasture, while gaps in supply chain oversight allow deforestation to continue.

The ‘Positive Tipping Points’ report warns that concentrated global supply chains for beef, soy (which is often used to feed cattle), palm oil, timber, cocoa and coffee make a small number of buyers and financiers the “gatekeepers for tropical deforestation”.

However, legislation like the EU Deforestation Regulation, which “guarantees that the products EU citizens consume do not contribute to deforestation or forest degradation worldwide”, could make a significant difference – especially if it triggers a market-wide shift across other major importers such as China, the UK and the US.

How can positive tipping points be achieved?

Researchers stress that creating the right conditions for a solution area to tip is critical, outlining three prerequisites that are needed across all potential Earthshots. These are affordability, accessibility and attractiveness.

The report also states that the five Earthshots are “deeply interconnected” and often share the same conditions, infrastructure and risks within a single system.

For example, the boom in clean electricity could accelerate positive tipping points across all five Earthshots, while barriers such as a lack of investment in the Global South could stall progress in the regions that need it most.

“For too long a sense has prevailed that solutions to the climate and nature [crises] are out of reach. This new research explodes that myth once and for all,” says Jason Knauf, CEO of The Earthshot Prize. 

“This pivotal research gives us reasons for optimism. This is a blueprint for turning ambition into action to place our planet on a path of rapid repair.”

Original.

FOTD Sept 9

Freethought of the Day (FOTD) is a daily calendar brought to you courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It highlights names, birthdates, quotes and other historical information of known atheists, agnostics and religious skeptics.

Today, September 9, there are two entries: Leo Tolstoy and Michel de Montaigne.

Leo Tolstoy

On this date in 1828, the great Russian novelist Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born as a landed count on his family’s Yasnaya Polyana estate near Tula. After serving as an officer in the Crimean War, his sense of social justice began to surface and he founded 13 schools for peasants after serfdom was abolished in 1861. He had a religious crisis in his 40s that caused him to denounce the powerful and corrupt Orthodox Church. Tolstoy called the church an “impenetrable forest of stupidity” and a “conscious deception that serves as a means for one part of the people to govern the other,” according to biographer Tikhon Polner (Tolstoy and His Wife, 1945).

Tolstoy, in such books as Critique of Dogmatic Theology, wrote that Jesus Christ was human, not divine, and rejected miracles and immortality. In My Confession (1882) he wrote, “If there is no higher reason —and there is none — then my own reason must be the supreme judge of my life.” The books were banned by church censors and Tolstoy was called an “impious infidel.” In 1895 he gave up his property, living as a nature-worshipping peasant, like his main protagonist in War and Peace.

In that novel he wrote, “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges or beliefs.” As James A. Haught wrote in 2000 Years of Disbelief, “Many people who reject supernatural Christianity nonetheless embrace Christ’s message of compassion. Tolstoy carried this pattern to an extreme. He renounced organized religion and was excommunicated in 1901 by the Russian Orthodox Church — yet he became almost a monk, living in service to others.”

He espoused an ethical and ascetic Christianity. In What Is Religion? (1902), Tolstoy wrote, “One may say with one’s lips: ‘I believe that God is one, and also three’ — but no one can believe it, because the words have no sense.”

In 1862 Tolstoy married Sofia Andreevna Behrs, daughter of a court physician and 16 years his junior. They had 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood. Their later life together has been described as one of the unhappiest in literary history. Sofia was upset about his attempts to reject his wealth, opposed to his teachings she saw as radical and had grown envious of the attention he gave to his Tolstoyan “disciples.”

In 1910 he left home secretly in the dead of night in winter in an apparent attempt to escape her tirades and died of pneumonia a day’s journey from home after collapsing at the Astapovo railway station. “The Last Station,” a 2009 film about his final year, was based on a novel by Jay Parini. Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Sofia were both nominated for Oscars.

Photo: Tolstoy in a 1901 portrait by Ilya Repin.

“Religious superstition consists in the belief that the sacrifices, often of human lives, made to the imaginary being are essential, and that men may and should be brought to that state of mind by all methods, not excluding violence.”

— Tolstoy, "The Slavery of Our Times" (1890)

Michel de Montaigne (Quote)

“Men of simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed, make good Christians.”

— Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), French philosopher, "Essays" (1580)