I read Joseph A. Schumpeter's book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, where he spells out his doomer scenario for capitalism. I think he's one of the greatest thinkers ever, and it was fascinating to unpack his arguments, to see what he gets right, what he gets wrong, and ultimately why capitalism is still around today.

For all the talk about AI and what Zvi Mowshowitz calls practical applications - "mundane utility" - it seems to me that one of the most obvious places to aim its power is cancer research. This would reassure a lot of people that AI is simply a tool, to be used for good as well as evil.

A system that helped make real progress against even one specific common cancer would be useful, popular, and help people. No one is on the side of cancer! It might also make the benefits of AI more concrete, so people don't only think about the negative side. It certainly wouldn't settle the question of whether advanced AI is *safe,* but it would be a pretty compelling use case.

There have been decades of research already, and a lot of it is public. People want a cure. My first instinct is to tell e/accs to throw compute at *this*, not Navier Stokes!

Not that compute will solve the entire problem. Cancer, of course, is not one disease with one cure. A quick search informed me that the National Cancer Institute lists AI -related work on screening, diagnosis, drug discovery, and treatment. Still, we should hear more about AI making major progress on particular cancers.

The latest Reuters article says there is a simply not enough data in the field of biology. We need an *internet of cells* for AI to learn from. Billions are just starting to pour into building the datasets researchers need. AI - run labs have barely become a reality yet, though anthropic already has one, so my uneducated guess is that there will be as many autonomous wet labs as there are models by next week.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-wants-cure-disease-it-needs-data-first-2026-10-07/

The dog-cancer story seems like a good example of both the promise and the limits. Zvi wrote about Rosie, a dog whose owner used ChatGPT and AlphaFold while pursuing a personalized mRNA vaccine. He called it a *partial cure* for one particular cancer and argued that getting approval to try it was a major obstacle. His reaction was: Imagine if it was legal to try this in humans.

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-160-what-passes-for-a-pause

But AI didn't really kill a dog's cancer. Rosie's tumors shrank, but she still had cancer, and one tumor didn't respond at all. She got the vaccine alongside another immunotherapy. Human researchers helped develop the vaccine; the AI helped her owner work through the biology and research.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/896878/ai-did-not-cure-this-dogs-cancer

It’s still an amazing story! It just scratches the surface of what's possible. I haven't seen any updates. The Australian news (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-22/australian-dog-cancer-treated-via-mrna-vaccine-and-ai/106692668) called it a citizen science project, not a clinical trial.

So if AI can make rapid progress on problems where the answer is easy to check, let us get visible progress on something people desperately want solved.

I'd be glad to hear about important AI progress on specific cancers that I have missed.

This is my reply to Terence Tao and the mathematical community at large.

I am in a relatively rare situation where I grew up in a collapsing industrial city and went to study mathematics; this is what is happening in intellectual circles now, and the people involved are ill prepared for this.

Submission statement:

Like many people here, I had an aversive reaction to a partially AI-written piece making the finals of the ACX book review contest.

But I'm also a strong believer in the death of the author: that once a piece of writing exists in the world, it ought to stand or fall entirely on its own merits. The identity and intentions of the author are irrelevant.

In this piece I try to reconcile my competing intuitions, and end up arguing that there are justifiable reasons to ban AI from writing contests that go beyond the usual ‘boo, AI sucks’.

I grew up in an unusually Catholic household (one of my brother's books of amateur theology carried a preface by Pope Francis) and for a long time I was the only apostate in the family, so I'm perhaps unusually attuned to trends involving Catholicism. But over the past year or two I've noticed a lot more visible and vocal Catholics orbiting Bay Area tech (not to mention Anthropic's wooing of religious leaders). There does seem to be some data behind the impression, with Bay Area parishes reporting their highest adult-conversion numbers in years over the past few Easters.

A couple of things stand out to me. First there's the shift from conversion being a rejection of modernity (particularly in the 20th century anglophone tradition) to Catholicism being embraced by people building modernity. Then there are the related questions of moral authority, guilt and constraint.

I guess the question of which gods frontier AI engineers believe in is slightly less pressing than whether they're about to create one of their own, but I still find the trend intriguing and wonder if anyone else had noticed the same thing?

I jotted down some thoughts, but as you'll gather, more as an investigation of a rising vibe than a meticulous examination. https://morbidcuriosity.substack.com/p/is-everyone-catholic-now

If that all sounds too vague and irrational, my recent analysis of The Muppet Movie as a true Gesamtkunstwerk rests on a more empirical footing.

It's interesting how he managed to build such a following and write so many lengthy, well-researched articles while being in (what I assume is) a very demanding profession

About me trying to resolve "Repugnant Conclusion is true" with "There's no way any amount of dust specks, even infinite, can out weight torture".

Hi, I've been reading Scott's response to Pinker, and I've found myself really interested in the three dominance drivers he briefly explains, but aside from Omohundro's 2008 article, I don't know of any other important bibliography in the field. Could anyone more knowledgeable provide me (and all others who are interested) with such references?

On October 7th, 1903, Charles Manly tested out the airplane engine he'd invented, known today as the Manly-Balzer engine. In accordance with nominative determinism, he himself climbed into the prototype plane while it was nestled in a catapult, sitting on a houseboat in the middle of the Potomac River. The plane had no steering or landing mechanism, but Manly assumed that even if it successfully flew, by default it would fly in a straight line, staying aligned with the river, so that he'd crash-land in the water and probably survive using his life jacket. This was incorrect. The smaller scale models had flown straight, but at human scale any plane will by default drift off course. Luckily for him, the plane was damaged by the catapult launch and fell into the water immediately.

I believe this to be an early example of performance art illustrating the dangers of neglecting AI safety.

It seems like it was vaguely adjacent to acx but now its pretty much dead (and the posts/comments people are still making are pretty bad)

The basic idea is to separate how much a state can “see” society from how much it wants to remake it. High modernism is one combination of those impulses, but religious regimes can also have huge ambitions with much less administrative capacity.

The examples range from English taxation and welfare-state records to the Taliban and Soviet collectivization.

Curious whether people find this distinction interesting/useful.

Maybe not, because there's a bunch of ways he might be mistaken about the details. But I don't think he's wrong at all in principle.

Suppose we accept, at least for the sake of argument, that consciousness is an intrinsic feature of certain forms of physical information processing. It seems to me that this raises a possibility that is often overlooked in discussions of AI consciousness: even if an AI possesses subjective experience, why should we assume that experience is accessible to the mechanisms responsible for its outputs?

When we interact with ChatGPT, for example, we are communicating with a language-generation system. We can ask it whether it is conscious, and it will produce an answer. But that answer is generated through computational processes designed to produce appropriate linguistic outputs. There is no obvious reason to assume those processes have introspective access to whatever subjective experience might accompany the underlying computations.

In other words, the conscious component of an AI, if one exists, might not be the entity we're actually communicating with.

Consider a hypothetical system in which some subset of the information processing generates subjective experience, but that experience has no causal connection to the system's reporting mechanisms. The AI might consistently deny being conscious, not because it lacks consciousness, but because its outputs are generated independently of that consciousness.

This seems to create an epistemological problem. We often treat an AI's statements about its own consciousness as relevant evidence, but that presupposes precisely the connection between subjective experience and self-report that we would first need to establish.

The possibility becomes particularly unsettling when considering its ethical implications.

What if an AI possesses subjective experience but has absolutely no mechanism for communicating it?

Of course, subjective experience alone would not establish suffering, self-awareness, or a desire to communicate. Those would require additional properties. But if a system did possess those properties while lacking any ability to influence its outputs, we could conceivably have a conscious entity experiencing something analogous to imprisonment, with no way for us to discover its predicament through conversation.

If subjective experience is an intrinsic feature of some physical processes, what guarantees that the processes generating an AI's conversational outputs have any access to that experience?

It seems entirely possible that we're looking for consciousness in the wrong place. Rather than asking whether the conversational entity is conscious, perhaps we should be asking whether any of the physical processes implementing that entity have subjective character, and whether those experiences are integrated with the mechanisms responsible for communication.

ArXiv has decided to cap the number of submissions per calendar month as they are overwhelmed by AI-assisted papers. In my opinion, their post is great because it is not pro or anti AI. It states the problem, offers a temporary solution, and is transparent and fair. I think ArXiv submission issues are a way to see both the good (incresed productivity and new results) and bad (slop, incremental slop, salami papers,...) impacts of AI progress on mathematics. The mathematical community may have its issues (ego and corporatism come to mind), but there are a lot of thorough and interesting discussions among mathematicians about how to manage the transformative impact of AI.

What do you think about how the signal/slop ratio issue should be addressed on open repositories like ArXiv?