u/thebitpages

A lot of people look at what you do and simply see another vehicle for sports gambling. What do you say?

If you define gambling to mean any speculation, then all financial markets are gambling. There’s speculation on all financial markets. Actually, most activity in most financial markets is speculation, right? And you really don’t get liquid, vibrant financial markets with real price discovery without speculation. If it’s just hedging by itself or capital allocation by itself, that doesn’t build a real marketplace. So that definition of gambling, where people are putting some money to make more money on something they don’t control — well, that encompasses everything.

The core differentiator with sports gambling is whether you are trading on an open, fair, liquid marketplace or in a closed forum system against the house that picks winners or losers. One of them you can win. It doesn’t mean you will win, but you have the opportunity to win. That’s how the law has been set historically. That’s why we have the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

(Discussion of future ancestor simulations)

MR: Do you just feel very lucky that what you’ve spent your career writing about is so in right now? It really is. Let me ask it this way: Does it lead you to think it’s more likely you’re in a simulation given how everything lined up really well for you, intellectually-wise?

NB: So there were two questions there. Let me try to say something on both. A lot of what I've written about is how things could go wrong and existential risks and stuff like that. So in some sense, it's sad that it still looks plausible. It would've been better if that had all turned out to be false and barking up the wrong tree because then the world would be safer.

The fact that now as we move closer with AI, there do really seem to be these big difficulties with alignment and so on, is an unfortunate vindication.

As for the second question, I think to some degree it increases the credence somebody should assign to the simulation hypothesis if they are in a slot that would be more likely to be disproportionately frequently simulated. I don't think it's a huge effect relative to what everybody has reason to believe.

You could take some even more extreme case, perhaps, if you were Donald Trump or Elon Musk. If you’re reflecting, you got to at some point wonder what are the chances that I would just happen to be Donald Trump or Elon Musk.

MR: There’s all this debate about the traditional anthropic principle vis-à-vis humans, but you’ve coined a real anthropic principle.

NB: It is. It’s also the same with the simulation argument. If you're the person who published it, it also creates some slightly higher salience. If you imagine simulating not everybody, but just some people.

MR: Does your gut say that I’m a real person sitting here asking you these questions?

NB: Yeah, it does. And in fact, even if this is a simulation, I still think that you and I are real in the sense that matters — that we would be having real experiences, our actions would matter, and so on. It's just that the nature of what that reality consists in would have the surprising property of being implemented in some computer built by an advanced civilization.

The white-shoe law firm got caught red-handed. Last month, Sullivan & Cromwell apologized for submitting a filing in federal bankruptcy court riddled with AI-generated errors. The mistake was embarrassing, but the use of the technology wasn’t. Far from an indictment of large language models, the ordeal revealed that even the country’s most prestigious attorneys rely on such services. If the best in the business are allowed to do so, why aren’t you?

The Supreme Court has held since the early 1960s that Americans are entitled to counsel only in criminal proceedings. Yet each state maintains statutes that prohibit nonlawyers, including chatbots, from representing individuals in court. The result, according to Stanford Law’s David Freeman Engstrom, is that in roughly 75 percent of the 15 million or more civil cases each year at least one party lacks a lawyer. It’s a prime opportunity for artificial intelligence.

While there is an art to legal advocacy, the core of law is the application of rules to facts. Most cases are neither difficult nor controversial, and according to some analyses, the majority of federal appellate-panel decisions are unanimous. Rinse-and-repeat language tasks, like identifying rules and predicting outcomes, are exactly the kind of work for which chatbots are made. The models aren’t perfect, but the relevant comparison isn’t between Claude and Clarence (Thomas or Darrow). It’s between Claude and nothing.