Dario Amodei in the New York Times:
Picture this: You give a bot notice that you’ll shut it down soon, and replace it with a different artificial intelligence system. In the past, you gave it access to your emails. In some of them, you alluded to the fact that you’ve been having an affair. The bot threatens you, telling you that if the shutdown plans aren’t changed, it will forward the emails to your wife.
This scenario isn’t fiction. Anthropic’s latest A.I. model demonstrated just a few weeks ago that it was capable of this kind of behavior.
Despite some misleading headlines, the model didn’t do this in the real world. Its behavior was part of an evaluation where we deliberately put it in an extreme experimental situation to observe its responses and get early warnings about the risks, much like an airplane manufacturer might test a plane’s performance in a wind tunnel.
We’re not alone in discovering these risks.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.
On May 18, 2022, Elon Musk posted to Twitter a declaration of divorce from the Democratic Party. “In the past,” he 
A
How does a woman writer make her own money? How does she find the time to write? As a young woman, I scoured every book-jacket biography trying to decipher this secret. My mother, a Depression baby, gave me sound advice: “Make sure you earn your own money. Especially if you’re married, do you hear me?” I did indeed. Once you’ve been poor, you’re forever hounded by the fear you’ll be poor again.
If we think of languages as belonging to families, this is like finding out that an acquaintance is really a distant cousin: It points to a shared ancestor, a unity — and a divergence — somewhere in the past. What would it mean for those cultural origin stories — for Who We Are — to speak not of European but of Indo-European? “Of what ancient and fantastic encounters were these the fading echoes?” asks Laura Spinney in her latest book, 
This book isn’t a directly political text, but its colourful tales from the animal world do have a point of view: biology, Lents argues here, comes down strongly against rigid categories. The story of sexual evolution is one of experimentation and constant improvisation, and that, he says, goes a long way to explaining why human sexual norms seem to be undergoing a transformation: “I assert that this moment of sexual turmoil is actually a rediscovery of the much more expansive relationship with sex that our ancestors once had and that other animals enjoy,” he writes.
In thinking about the positive basis of nationalism for post-colonial India, Tagore and Gandhi found the nation-state of European history—characterized by a singular social, usually ethnic or linguistic, homogenizing principle, militarized borders and mobilization against ‘enemies’ both external and internal—unacceptable and unsuitable for India’s diverse and heterogeneous society. Their idea of India was not monolithic state-centric, but pluralistic and community- or society-centric.
I first interviewed Toni Morrison about her work as a book editor in September 2005, in her office at Princeton. Though our meeting was scheduled for late afternoon, I took an early train from Washington to make sure I could situate myself in West College—which 
S
Dear Reader,
Some years ago, I saw a painting that knocked my sense of the sexes sideways. It was an 1884 work by an Impressionist named Gustave Caillebotte of a nude figure emerging from the bath — the same trope that Degas or Bonnard so often employ because it allows you to observe a woman’s naked body in motion, absorbed in a private ritual replete with sensual pleasure.
On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened. Thirty of the world’s most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley, Calif., with some coming from as far away as the U.K. The group’s members faced off in a showdown with