Looking forward to @thoughtchannel.bsky.social’s Conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience and AI in Rome this June, where I’ll be joining @battleday.bsky.social and others to explore the computational foundations of intelligence.
More details: www.neuromonster.org
I was also thrilled to hear Sundar highlight our research moonshot Project Suncatcher and the incredible work my team is doing to explore the frontiers of data centers in space. You can catch the full conversation here: youtu.be/bTA8sjgvA4c?...
I just finished listening to Sundar Pichai on a new Cheeky Pint episode with John Collison and Elad Gil—a fantastic discussion on the evolution and future of AI at Google.
Get your copy of "What Is Intelligence?" (@mitpress.bsky.social & Antikythera) in paperback, Kindle, or audiobook: bit.ly/3H1p8F6
Our conversation also touched on the intersection of AI and neuroscience, AI “gotchaism”, ideas from my book “What Is Intelligence?”, and even a few sci-fi recs.
Read the full conversation: bit.ly/4vkGhhn
AI has advanced rapidly, but we still have a great deal left to learn. I enjoyed the chance to reflect on our progress, from early LaMDA experiments to my Paradigms of Intelligence team’s latest research, and what comes next, with John Gabrieli Buchet at MIT’s Poggio Lab last month.
Read the full paper in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) or the arXiv (arxiv.org/abs/2603.20639).
Photo: cover illustration by Alex Schomburg of Ray Cummings’ “The Exile of Time”
The next intelligence explosion is already here. It looks less like a single mind ascending and more like a combinatorial society complexifying.
As I explored in “What Is Intelligence?” (bit.ly/4on8vUw), we are seeing the "cultural ratchet" move into silicon. The path forward isn't just more compute—it’s building "agent institutions" and institutional alignment.
In our new paper with James Evans and Benjamin Bratton, we look at the "society of thought" emergent inside frontier reasoning models. They don't just compute; they carry out internal debates to reach better answers.
The "AI singularity" is often pictured as a monolithic mind bootstrapping itself to godhood. But the data suggests something different: intelligence is plural, social, and deeply entangled with its history.
Space-based solar energy for orbital AI is, to me, a more compelling short-term scenario, but we will indeed need to “build our way out” of trouble here on Earth, a point also made by Dan Wang (“Breakneck”), @ezraklein.bsky.social & @dkthomp.bsky.social (“Abundance”), and a growing chorus of others.
His account of how space exploration and Earth’s ecology intersect is compelling too. Unlike Kim Stanley Robinson (whose work I love) Suarez argues, persuasively, that abundant energy, as opposed to degrowth, will be essential in addressing the climate crisis.
Suarez’s picture of how asteroid resource mining, in-orbit manufacturing, and the first tentative steps toward space habitation could occur are well-researched and, at least in outline, seem plausible.
These are not literary works; the writing, character development, and plot are strictly in service to the world-building. I was hooked nonetheless.
Since the topic is much on my mind these days, I went shopping for hard sci-fi about space exploration, and turned up Daniel Suarez’s Delta-v trilogy; the first novel, “Delta-v,” came out in 2019, the second, “Critical Mass,” in 2023, and the third… hopefully soon, sign me up.
5 & 6: “Delta-v” and “Critical Mass” by @daniel-suarez.com
But also, Doughty is to music writing what Anthony Bourdain was to food writing: omnivorous, verbally dextrous, restlessly curious, hilariously acerbic, foul-mouthed and vulnerable.
After Soul Coughing, he continued to record prolifically, first as a crowdfunded troubadour, then with a rotating cast of other oddballs. Sex, drugs, rock & roll? Yes, yes, and yes.
…maybe because Doughty was at once a self-conscious wunderkind (New School classmate of @anidifranco.bsky.social!) and, at least in the beginning, naïve in his craft—a brainy punk.
Mike Doughty is the bête noire poet-musician behind the Knitting Factory-era 90s band Soul Coughing. He describes their sound as “a mixture of Tom Waits and A Tribe Called Quest,” though I think they made something genuinely fresh and wonderful…
3 & 4: “The Book of Drugs” and “I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound” by @mikedoughty.bsky.social
Not only is the research here eye-opening; this also feels like essential reading at a time when we’re seeing a worldwide backlash against feminism couched in “naturalist” rhetoric.
A spate of new neuroscience, endocrinology, and animal behavior research has probed the ancient biology behind this phenomenon, and found that there is a lot more to it than mere cultural adaptation in modern society.
“Father Time” is a crucial update and revision to this story, pointing out the obvious yet nontrivial fact that human fathers raise babies too.
As my “animal linguist” friend @begus.bsky.social points out, at least among mammals, how long mothers remain with their children after birth is an excellent correlate of intelligence. (Orcas win top prize here—mothers stay with their children for life.)
...and caring for young, through nurture, education, and normative modeling requires sophisticated theory of mind.
This story is fundamental to human (and much other animal) intelligence in a few ways: the brain is an energetically expensive organ; lifelong learning requires extreme plasticity (hence helplessness) at birth;…
Hrdy’s previous book, “Mothers and Others,” was a landmark in the study in alloparenting: how humans, along with a few other species, have evolved a form of collective child-rearing due to the extreme investment needed to raise our young.
