Mike Solana

Mike Solana's spin on Fermi's paradox challenges Nick Bostrom's paperclip maximizer. A superintelligent AI told to make paperclips, and not told to keep humans alive, turns the world into paperclips and humans die out.

Solana asks where the aliens are. If life arises naturally, some civilization should be billions of years ahead, and its superintelligence should already be visible. He says the silence complicates the claim that artificial intelligence will inevitably wipe humanity out.

Data centers use only 3% of the water that golf courses in America use. Data centers serve hundreds of millions of people. Golf courses serve a few million, maybe, but they use 30x the amount.

On Pirate Wires, Mike Solana and Liv Boeree open on a week of superintelligence news. The show says Donald Trump answered Bernie Sanders by signing an executive order that renamed artificial intelligence to superintelligence across federal departments, at a White House meeting the episode calls a morally binding pact for AI labs to police themselves. It places Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg in the room. Solana describes Sanders's Stop Artificial Superintelligence Act as a pause on advanced AI, a permanent ban on superintelligence work, and prison for violators, plus only a soft maybe on withholding technology from countries trying to build it. He says Eliezer Yudk

Seeing Like a State is a way to envision why states behave like they do. What a state wants is maximum transparency. If it could, it would break down everything into little constituent parts. Surnames didn't used to be a thing, because it was easier for the state to understand itself if people had a surname.

America.gov is a new AI-powered website unveiled by the Trump administration to help us all simplify the headache of dealing with government bureaucracy. It is billed as a concierge to help Americans with government services all in one place, including changing your address with the post office or registering your new business.

A woman who was allegedly taken advantage of while intoxicated filed a new civil lawsuit claiming that after consuming ketamine and alcohol, seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University engaged in sexual encounters with her over several hours that she could not consent to because she was intoxicated.

Vanity Fair published a story called The Slow Motion Car Crash at Data After Dark. The author writes that she brought an anti-data center activist to the pro data center party, and later describes the event as catnip to MAGA aligned and Dreesen Horowitz backed edgelords.

A data center is not strictly what they are. Nowadays, what we're trying to build is supercomputers, so let's actually just call those that. They're not even data centers anymore.

The overreaction treats data centers as the physical manifestation of a digital world people feel is bad for them. They feel a machine is coming and extracting them, extracting their life forces, while companies harvest their time, their attention, and their data, and the data center is the nexus of that.

A single probability is refused because the topic is far too complex to collapse down to a single probability. If you only tell stories of doom, you're more likely to get those stories, so saying P-doom is 70% or 10% already affects what the future P-doom would be. We don't really have a precedent, so it's just pure vibes.

Looking at the document, the Bernie thing seems to say that the thing that should be paused right now is only frontier development. They're not saying pause all AI.