Read Miranda's full piece here:
helentoner.substack.com/p/personaliz...

And the research brief she wrote that inspired this post:
cdt.org/insights/its...

I honestly don't know how big the potential harms of personalization are—I think it's possible we end up coping fine. But it's crazy to me how little mindshare this seems to be getting among people who think about unintended systemic effects of AI for a living.

Thinking about this, I keep coming back to two stories—

1) how FB allegedly trained models to identify moments when users felt worthless, then sold that data to advertisers

2) how we're already seeing chatbots addicting kids & adults and warping their sense of what's real

Full video here (21 min):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzwi...

The 3 disagreements are:
How far can the current paradigm go?
How much can AI improve AI?
Will future AI still basically be tools, or will they be something else?

Thanks to
@farairesearch
for the invitation to do this talk! Transcript here:
helentoner.substack.com/p/unresolved...

Great report from Apollo Research on the underlying issues motivating this call for research ideas:
www.apolloresearch.ai/research/ai-...

More on our Foundational Research Grants program, including info on past grants we've funded:
cset.georgetown.edu/foundational...

Related reading:

Virginia Postrel's book (recommended!): amazon.com/FUTURE-ITS-E...
And a recent post from Brendan McCord: cosmosinstitute.substack.com/p/the-philos...
What else?

...But too many critics of those stasist ideas try to shove the underlying problems under the rug. With this post, I"m trying to help us hold both things at once.

Read the full post on AI Frontiers: www.ai-frontiers.org/articles/wer...
Or my substack: helentoner.substack.com/p/dynamism-v...

From The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel:
Dynamism: "a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition"
Stasis: "a regulated, engineered world... [that values] stability and control"

Too many AI safety policy ideas would push us toward stasis. But...

Link to full post (subscribe!): helentoner.substack.com/p/2-big-ques...

Find them by searching "Stop the World" and "Cognitive Revolution" in your podcast app, or links here:
www.aspi.org.au/news/stop-wo...
www.cognitiverevolution.ai/helen-toner-...

Cognitive Revolution (🇺🇸): More insidery chat with @nathanlabenz.bsky.social getting into why nonproliferation is the wrong way to manage AI misuse; AI in military decision support systems, and a bunch of other stuff.

Clip on my beef with talk about the "offense-defense" balance in AI:

Stop the World (🇦🇺): Fun, wide-ranging conversation with David Wroe of @aspi-org.bsky.social on where we're at with AI, reasoning models, DeepSeek, scaling laws, etc etc.

Excerpt on whether we can "just" keep scaling language models:

cc @binarybits.bsky.social re hardening the physical world,
@vitalik.ca re d/acc, @howard.fm re power concentration... plus many others I'm forgetting whose takes helped inspire this post. I hope this is a helpful framing for these tough tradeoffs.

I don't think this approach will obviously be enough, I don't think it's equivalent to "just open source everything YOLO," and I don't think any of my argument applies to tracking/managing the frontier or loss of control risks.

More in the full piece: helentoner.substack.com/p/nonprolife...