332 - The Invitation

The first time that you’re invited for an (expenses paid) transcontinental trip to come speak on your research is a very rewarding moment. Appreciation for research papers is often VERY sparse, so it came as a surprise when such an invitation came to me recently, attached to noteworthy appreciation for a paper I wrote back in 2022, later published in the Polish Academy of Sciences:

The Human Governance Problem: Complex Systems and the Limits of Human Cognition

Today I took a moment to read back over what I had to say 3 years ago. Given what the end of 2022 brought with the “ChatGPT moment” ironically just a couple of days after Meta showcased a nearly identical model with the opposite public reaction, you might expect a paper from mid-2022 to not age so well. This proved to be far from the case.

While terminology has shifted, everything still lined up, nothing had actually been outdated. Rather, the same problems have continued in the expected directions, riding on the vehicle of LLMs and their various derivatives. As I’ve said numerous times, LLMs haven’t surprised me since the term came into common usage, so even while terms have changed, the fundamentals of the technology haven’t.

Likewise, the bad actors driving much of that technology haven’t meaningfully changed either. Scam Altman is still the same Ponzi Scheming Crypto Bro, and his old accomplices in crime, the Amodeis, had 71% of their funding (circa 2022) as money laundered from Sam Bankman-Fried, also exposed at the end of 2022.

I couldn’t have asked for a paper to age any better than this one has, but the past 3 years closely following my expectations for continuation of the status quo isn’t a good thing for humanity by any means.

In mid-2022 I didn’t account for Altman’s move to drive the world’s most gullible investors into dumping all of their funds into scams like his, and had that been avoided the technology solution that I discuss in the paper could have already been deployed by the start of this year. Instead, it remains at least another year away, as humanity must not only come to terms with being scammed at a global scale, it must invest in the technology that it should have invested in back then for there to be any hope of recovery.

I look forward to attending, sitting with world leaders, their advisors, and CEOs, to find those among them who want to avoid advancing the Artificial SuperIncompetence of “GenAI”, and who are ready to shape a future worth having.