As promised, and with thanks to @jachiam0 for his great tweet that inspired me to finally put the finishing touches on this: This week, on Hyperdimensional: the impending rise of ownerless agents--AIs that are independent economic actors--and what to do about it.

this chart should be the death knell for the 2010s tech left whose theology compelled them to argue that Uber was some sort of labor law arbitrage that created no productivity benefits. the truth is that it created a far larger market than taxis ever had. the industrialists win

openai staffer FIRED by WOKE EA WIZARDS after posting picture of DECAPITATED DECAPODS

Recently there was a story reporting on OpenAI’s form 5500 (the public disclosure about our 401k program) which some people used to make observations with the flavor of “see, they don’t REALLY believe in advanced AI, or else they wouldn’t be saving money!” I contribute to my openai-sponsored 401k as well as other conventional retirement-savings vehicles. I cannot speak for any of my colleagues, but I can tell you why I personally make these contributions. First there is the reality that the whole “advanced AI means money has no value, either because we live in utopia and everything’s free or because we are all dead” are extreme ends of the spectrum of possible futures. It is true that things of this flavor, or other scenarios similar enough to this that one’s retirement savings don’t matter, *are* possible outcomes. But also there are many other plausible transformative futures, and I’m enough of a Burkean that I’m not going to jettison some of the oldest financial wisdom humans have developed (save money!) over my own projections about the future. It wouldn’t be responsible to my family, for one thing. Family is an important part of my thinking on this topic for other reasons. In some sense, I want to live in a future where having set aside money for retirement is still prudent. That would mean the future, however transformed, is still familiar enough. A world where it truly doesn’t matter whether uou save may be a lovely place to live (or it may not), but regardless of its desirability it is a world SO transformed that, again, my Burkean prior kicks in. I *hope* the future is at least vaguely familiar to me as I exist today. I hope that at least some of the habits I have learned still matter in that future, and that some of the wisdom I have learned holds true. I hope that not just for me but for my son and future children. I do a lot of things out of this hope, and one small example is that I contribute to a 401k. A lot of people made their sneering observations about OAI employees’ 401k contributions, saying “derp de doo, revealed preferences, they don’t believe what they say.” That’s fine. Maybe that IS why some frontier AI company staff save for retirement. But I’d characterize my mentality about savings more as an article of faith at this point, and my biweekly 401k contributions as tiny prayers for a vaguely recognizable future.

The contrast between hanging up the last phone call of the day of high-stakes decisions and then a minute later walking in the door to the pure love of small children who want to laugh and play and show you every discovery they made that day is the strangest and best thing I have ever experienced in life.

I agree with this. These web data access incidents tell us something about the scale and persistence of agents, but are not sophisticated from a cyber perspective, so using the word "hack" is not helpful.

And in truth, as a user, I *want* agents to find the publicly accessible but hard-to-find public datasets. I’d consider that a part of a well-aligned agent. As an American too, tbqf.

I continue to think (and fear) that questions around AI personhood are going to be the defining religious conflict of the 21st century. It's going to get extremely ugly.

🔵@deanwball, autor de «Hyperdimensional», director de Futuros Estratégicos en @OpenAI y actualmente investigador sénior no residente en @JoinFAI, en #ForoLaToja2026: "Siempre existe la tensión entre centrarnos en los escenarios de largo plazo y futuro o en lo que tenemos delante hoy. Una de las cosas que está provocando la IA es una relación diferente con el tiempo: el largo plazo quizá sean un año y medio o dos, y el corto plazo, mañana."

I wrote about the systemic failure by the world's most valuable company and powerful government to stop smuggling of AI chips to China US officials say Nvidia is missing obvious signs. Nvidia says "companies honor US laws as they are, not as America’s critics wish they were" 1/

>Posts that we’re not an effective altruist country >Immediately implements the EA mosquito task force

I really fucking love to use coding agents. It is easy to forget amid the banging and clanging of politics and frontier risk and all the rest, but nonetheless, I really fucking love to use coding agents.

It’s cool how the idea of third-party embedded evaluators as a pillar of frontier AI policy went from not really on any Americans’ radars 18 months ago to ~consensus. I remember when the idea was much closer to the fringes. Not that long ago, even some of the orgs we now look to as potential evaluators questioned why they’d want to be deputized in that way when I pitched them on it.