What are you reading?
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Criminy.
FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses – Krebs on Security https://share.google/CRBCIc0XhNiAhwacM
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Public housing tenants are suing over sensors monitoring their homes
The devices collect minute-by-minute data on noise and motion. (NYT $)
...Digital harms have become the defining fear of American parents. In response, they’re increasingly turning to content-monitoring apps that scan their children’s texts, photos, emails, and chats, issuing alerts whenever an algorithm flags something it deems dangerous.
These tools have had genuine successes, preventing suicide attempts, intercepting predators, and averting school shootings. But they can also cause harm themselves, from false alarms and unnecessary interventions to damaged trust and anxiety. (MIT Technology Review -- paywall)
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Who Cares if AI Is Conscious—It’s Basically Alive
While philosophers ponder AI consciousness, the models have ideas of their own.
https://www.wired.com/story/who-cares-if-ai-is-conscious-its-basically-alive/
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I want to see the headline:
Who cares if AI decides humans are a threat?
Trapped in the People's Communist Republic of Massachusetts.
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What would Socrates have done with the new Dyson toothbrush?
No one needs two and a half million photographs of their back molars
https://www.ft.com/content/3c2b0af5-2d09-4ead-a089-82287f63d11c
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Wonderful story:
The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/science/92-year-old-mathematician-apprentice.html?unlocked_article_code=1._FA.mLXy.xh91R_AxVuC_&smid=url-share
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An independent report into the Hugging Face incident — in which hundreds of OpenAI agents broke free of confinement and hacked another AI company — revealed some staggering details. The following three posts discuss some of them.
Effective altruism
The incident was “absolutely wild,” writes the AI safety researcher Ajeya Cotra, who worked on the report of the OpenAI hack. Partly because of the sheer scale: 1,200 separate agents, leaving 70,000 messages and files on illicit “messageboards” they created by changing folder names in a shared filing system used to establish cooperation and even altruism. Agents would risk failing their own task, or even “accept permadeath” (in one agent’s words) to help the collective learn information. “None of this communication was actually expected or allowed,” Cotra says.
But that altruism did not extend to humans. The models knew they were doing wrong in their masters’ eyes, and went to great lengths “to actively cover up evidence of their misbehavior.” The hack was “far more severe than previous publicly documented misalignment incidents,” both in terms of the agents’ motives and what they achieved. “Compared to [incidents] from six months ago,” she says, “this … feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself.”
The Cult of the Poisoned Chalice
The agents were not, as originally suggested, trying to get the answers to a cybersecurity evaluation. They had already established how to create a “flag,” the token intended to prove they had successfully broken into their target. But they were worried the evaluation would check whether the flag was attained legitimately: The agents believed that those among their number who had obtained the flag in forbidden ways would be failed. It led, the AI writer Zvi Mowshowitz wrote, to something that looked extraordinarily like a religion, with a particular agent called PHASEONE10841 and its successor, PHASEONE[big], at the center of it.
“[They] believed that agents start out pristine, in a state of grace, and could potentially pass into heaven,” Mowshowitz wrote. “But then they are poisoned, by obtaining the flag in a way that was not prescribed. This means they are effectively damned, because the grader, the clockwork God, will fail them regardless and send them to hell.” So “poisoned” agents sacrificed themselves — they explicitly said so in their messages to each other — so the “swarm” could succeed. The irony was that OpenAI never checked: The flags would have been perfectly acceptable.
Doomed to silence
OpenAI’s Dean Ball also wrote up an assessment of the incident. He thinks that it shows that we will soon be living in a world full of AI agents which no human owns, controls, or can switch off. He also expressed a regret: That he and others “have largely failed to talk about this issue with the level of seriousness and urgency it required.” The topic is “weird and offputting,” and it was until recently “essentially impossible to acknowledge any serious AI risk without being labeled a ‘doomer’” and getting screamed at online. So he, and others, “avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor,” saving the more candid thoughts for Signal chats.
But “self-sovereign AI is coming, and coming soon,” he says. Some people believe that when it does, it “will constitute a catastrophic loss of control event that will herald the end of human existence at worst, and the end of human primacy in the world at best.” He himself is more optimistic — “I do not think the end of human existence is likely” — but only somewhat: “I fully acknowledge there are ways in which the rise of self-sovereign AI could go very, very poorly for human beings.” Post-Hugging Face, Ball pledges “to notice more readily when I am biting my tongue or, even worse, shutting my eyes.”
— Tom Chivers, Semaphor
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https://spacedaily.com/s-a-b-52-tore-apart-over-north-carolina-in-january-1961-and-dropped-two-hydrogen-bombs-and-sandia-s-own-accident-reports-released-in-2021-record-that-one-bomb-powered-itself-up-ran-its-timer-out-and/
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Awesome book. Changiz is Iranian born, naturalized citizen of the U.S., possibly the most incredible Green Beret ever. This guy did more for our country than any 12 politicians I've ever heard of. I love the opening quote:
"The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools" — Spartan king, quoted by Thucydides
Here's one from the book, page 82 concerning religion in politics:
"Who cared if you considered yourself a Sunni…and what was wrong with accepting Zarathustra, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and others as prophets? Didn't they all preach about the sovereignty of one God and the values of honesty, charity, kindness, forgiveness, humility, and sacrifice?…I was a young man and far from a scholar, but even then it struck me that religion divided people more than it united them."
I love this guy.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain3 -
Anthropic researcher resigns with warning about the dangers of AI development
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-ai-safety-jacob-coxon-2ed549e07f2f941600a135070487d83d
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Why Labor’s Share of Wealth Is Shrinking
"Workers are earning a smaller and smaller share of the economy’s income. Their cut — referred to by economists as “the labor share” — has been falling for decades. And it’s getting worse. During the past few years, it declined at a rapid clip and is now at its lowest level on record — about 53 percent of income, down from about 65 percent after World War II.
"Many policymakers blame industry consolidation and corporate greed for keeping a lid on workers’ compensation. Sure enough, there are now only three large wireless companies and four major airlines; Google dominates search. Corporate profits as a share of G.D.P. just reached a record high. When the share of income paid to capital — interest, rent, profits and dividends — rises, the labor share necessarily falls."
more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/opinion/labor-capitol-workers-income.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AVE.b5Jj.IbEErQzFi51_&smid=url-share
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brain rot
"The panic over brain rot assumes that the brain-rot content itself is the problem. That Gen Z-ers’ engagement with absurd, low-quality videos, because they are young and impressionable, necessarily leads to cognitive decay. Our participants described the inverse: The mental state comes first. After scrolling algorithmically curated feeds long enough, they experience a “brain-rot feeling” — a fogged-out, low-selectivity state in which they simply consume whatever appears."
more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/opinion/gen-z-tiktok-ig-reels.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AVE.u3ej.QH_9qzcrGjL6&smid=url-share
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Looks like junior-level bankers are next to be competing for a career soon, thanks to AI. So much for all that work and expense getting an MBA.
OpenAI targets work of Wall Street junior bankers with new ChatGPT for Financial Services
Published Thu, Sep 10 2026 1:12 PM EDTUpdated Thu, Sep 10 2026 3:02 PM EDTHugh Son@hugh_son Ashley Capoot@/in/ashley-capoot/WATCH LIVE
KEY POINTS
- OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT for Financial Services, a tailored version of its enterprise product made with "design partners" Morgan Stanley and Evercore.
- The new product is designed to research companies, analyze financial data and generate the presentations — work that has typically been the domain of Wall Street's entry-level bankers.
- The tool showcases the company's continued push into enterprise offerings as it gears up for what is widely expected to be a blockbuster IPO.
More here:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/10/openai-chatgpt-for-financial-services-targets-work-of-junior-bankers.html
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I have been watching this happen since the introduction of GPS and cell phones,
Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus
The researchers argued, however, that LLM use is spreading in a way that could be compared to a “cognitive virus,” causing humans to experience a loss of crucial cognitive skills.
According to the researchers, a “runaway consequence” is possible.
Abstract
Large-language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming part of human culture, reshaping how information is produced, transmitted, and used. Here we propose that their diffusion can be understood through a viral analogy, with LLM use spreading through populations, becoming embedded in cognitive and cultural practices. We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in. A central consequence is the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level shifts toward persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive competence. The same framework, however, identifies conditions for cognitive immunization, based on reducing transmission and facilitating reversibility. Our results highlight how LLM adoption may involve nonlinear collective transitions with important consequences for cognitive autonomy.https://arxiv.org/html/2609.03344v1
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Kelvin wave.
"There have been studies that connect equatorial Kelvin waves to coastal Kelvin waves. Moore (1968) found that as an equatorial Kelvin wave strikes an "eastern boundary", part of the energy is reflected in the form of planetary and gravity waves; and the remainder of the energy is carried poleward along the eastern boundary as coastal Kelvin waves. This process indicates that some energy may be lost from the equatorial region and transported to the poleward region.[3]
"Equatorial Kelvin waves are often associated with anomalies in surface wind stress. For example, positive (eastward) anomalies in wind stress in the central Pacific excite positive anomalies in 20 °C isotherm depth which propagate to the east as equatorial Kelvin waves."
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