099 - Chaos Theory

In the process of chipping away at the 10 new books I was recently gifted I've settled on a name for my next non-study paper worth setting aside the time to write up, "The Complex Chaos of Cognitive Biases and Emotional Observers".

It occurred to me while reading about modern perspectives on Chaos Theory and the Three-Body Problem that the systems my team works with could be described in the context of those and related materials. Trashbot technology isn't that complex, which is why universal automated prompt injection systems demonstrated such smashing success this summer, breaking through open and closed source systems alike. People have also had great difficulty understanding how our systems work and what makes them different, and hopefully, this paper will help in that regard.

There is a fine line for us to walk, however, as every additional counterintuitive detail revealed lowers the bar for bad actors and frauds like OpenAI or Anthropic to begin attempting reverse-engineering. Were such an attempt to actually succeed it would mean human extinction in no uncertain terms, as the first group to deploy such technology fundamentally cannot be an unethical one if extinction is to be avoided.

On the other side of this balance, people don't want to invest in anything genuinely new, and for anything new, they want to swim in all of the secret sauce before even discussing investment. As more information is made available and clear the probability of both investment and human extinction rises.

Humanity's future presently looks like it is up to a coin flip between the two.

*Addendum: The paper is now live and you can read it here.