Some favorite lesser-known books
Which aren't Parfit or Borges or Orwell
TechPhilosophy
Andy Masley.
Andy Masley on AI systems, data centers, and the philosophical stakes of technology.
Recent essays
30 of 543 thoughts on effective altruist comms
A poke for more people to try communicating about the high-level ideas
Thinking about the future of AI shouldn’t feel like choosing from a buffet
The world doesn’t react to the vibes we want to give off
The direction I’d like for effective altruism
Planting a flag for the version of EA I want to promote and grow
Why I believe current AI models can really think and understand - Part 2 of 3
Why computers can in principle produce thinking and understanding
Why I believe current AI models can really think and understand - Part 1 of 3
How the human mind is different from our conception of it
What I get out of effective altruism
Part 1: The EA story of the world
Don’t treat surface-level metaphors about AI as if they describe fundamental reality
Debates about whether AI is a “tool” or whether it’s wrong to “anthropomorphize” it often seem confused about what reality is made of
AI safety and the data center backlash
Planting a flag for AI safety as a place where we won’t abjectly bullshit you
I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers
It’s probably not your ideological thing, or mine. It’s about object-level claims about how data centers impact the communities where they’re built, many of which are wrong.
Thinking about other industries like we think about data centers shows how impoverished the debate is
Clumsy, arbitrary environmental ideas ignore the incredible complexity of the systems modern society depends on
I'm very skeptical that China has played a meaningful role in the US data center backlash
The evidence we have is pretty weak
Toward liberal environmentalism
The underlying normative claim of my environmental writing
A conversation with my city planner friend Curtis on a recent data center moratorium in Holyoke MA
I recorded a conversation with my friend Curtis who until a few years ago was a city planner in Holyoke MA and had a lot of thoughts on a recent data center moratorium there.
AI art as curation
Asking whether AI art involves real creativity mostly misses what's interesting about it
What does it mean for AI to be democratic?
Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications
A plug for a tool I made to show how little most current AI chatbots add to your emissions and water use, with citations
Take this and share it, you don't need to mention me
A simple trick to fix the data center debate
Remove the status quo bias by asking "would we spend this much in tax revenue to avoid the externalities of the data center?"
Why I think panic about local impacts of data centers is just a panic
A request for counter examples
I think I figured out exactly how the “AI uses a bottle of water per prompt” miscalculation happened
Looks like it's roughly 50-250x too high
A history of the data center panic - part 1
Pre-ChatGPT and the creation of common wisdom
A crash course on US air pollution
Data centers and air pollution - part 1
Let's not compare data center heat exhaust to nuclear bombs
Why dropping hundreds of nuclear bombs on Washington DC every day is pretty normal
Data center land use issues are fake
We have plenty of land, data centers provide more revenue per unit area than any other building, and we should have way less farmland
To be clear, I do understand how sound works
Replying to a criticism of my last post
Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake
One of the most popular videos made about data centers ever is a complete moment-by-moment disaster
Training AI models doesn't emit that much
If we just make reasonable comparisons instead of crazy ones
What's blocking Waymo in DC and how can we fix it?
The very late DDOT report is only part of the story
Data centers' heat exhaust is not raising the land temperature around where they're built
A terrible paper and even worse interpretation is threatening to become common wisdom
A call for more specific and numerate climate communication
There's too much low-hanging fruit going unpicked, and it's relatively easy to pick