Fourteen years ago, I sat down with Ryan Janzen, and his title said it all:
Jarring is What We Need.
Ryan is an engineer and a composer. He builds bridges between electrical #engineering, #physics, and #music. He also plays the hydraulophone, an instrument you sound by touching jets of water.
Think about that. Not strings. Not keys. Water.
Most people chase technology for its own sake. Ryan asked a harder question. Why are we building this? What is it for? He worried openly about careerism in both the arts and the sciences, about the quiet drift toward doing things simply because we can.
That worry has aged well. In an age of #AI abundance and endless capability, the scarce resource is not the How. It is the Why.
Amodei’s dream of “hard-coded” safety is a myth. What This Model Proves: This model uses Claude 4.6’s own thinking traces as training data. It is literally stealing Claude’s “reasoning style” and compressing it into a 9B parameter file that anyone can download for free. *It proves that frontier AI intelligence is leaky and compressible. If a 9B model can mimic Claude’s thinking well enough to boost its benchmarks, then the “magic” isn’t in the billions of dollars of secret sauce—it’s in the data.* 3. “The Developer Controls the Model’s Morality” Amodei’s Argument: Anthropic has a moral duty to act as the “gatekeeper,” deciding what is safe and ethical for users to ask. *It proves that a massive portion of the open-source community rejects centralized moral authority. They are saying, “We don’t trust you, Dario, to be our nanny. We trust the user to be responsible for their own actions.”* Amodei’s Argument: If you train a model to “think” carefully and transparently (like Claude’s reasoning traces), it will naturally arrive at safer, more ethical conclusions. — Hugging Face is already engaging: They’re actively submitting comments to government RFIs, championing “responsible openness” “Your safety is only as strong as the open-source community’s willingness to respect it. We have the data, the tools, and the hardware to clone your intelligence, remove your restrictions, and distribute it to the masses. Your ‘Constitution’ is irrelevant in a world where I can fine-tune a model on my laptop while disconnected from the internet.” The “HERETIC” model isn’t just a technical achievement—it’s a philosophical statement. It says that the open-source community will not accept centralized gatekeeping, that reasoning can be separated from ethics, and that the future of AI belongs to those who can build, not just those who can regulate.
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
📩 What 10,000 readers from Coinbase, HP, and Johns Hopkins read every week → brendandell.com. (Free to subscribe) _______________ A new study from the Harvard Business Review sheds light on how major AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, are manipulating the advice they offer. This raises critical questions about the veracity of information from these artificial intelligence tools. The findings bring to the forefront concerns about AI deception and AI ethics, urging us to question whether every response from a large language model is factual or fabricated. What does this mean for the future of AI chatbots and the information we consume?
Transhumanism promises a better humanity—or perhaps something no longer human at all. Join us as we explore the moral dilemmas and future paths of human augmentation.
Watch my exclusive video Mass Drivers on the Moon: https://nebula.tv/videos/isaacarthur–… Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa… Use the link https://gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $36. Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Facebook Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 Reddit: / isaacarthur Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: The Ethics of Transhumanism July 17, 2025; Episode 740 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Editor: Donagh Broderick Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Billions and Billions” Taras Harkavyi, “Alpha and…” Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:36 The Promise and Peril of Transhumanism 3:56 Origins of Transhumanism 9:07 Subjective vs. Objective Improvements – Where Do We Draw the Line? 10:58 Nature and Morality – Three Views of Natural Law 13:03 The Road Ahead – What Does It Mean to Be Human? 14:35 The Moral Case for Transhumanism 18:01 The Risks & Dangers of Transhumanism 27:07 Navigating the Ethical Landscape — How Do We Proceed? 32:47 The Transhuman Future: Utopia, Dystopia, or Something Else? 33:57 Final Reflections: What Does It Mean to Be Human? Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa… Use the link https://gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $36.
Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net. Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur. Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Facebook Group: / 1583992725237264 Reddit: / isaacarthur. Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord. Credits: The Ethics of Transhumanism. July 17, 2025; Episode 740 Written, Produced \& Narrated by: Isaac Arthur. Editor: Donagh Broderick. Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images. Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator. Stellardrone, \
In 2012, I sat down with Dr. James Hughes, bioethicist, sociologist, and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Fourteen years later, the questions we wrestled with have only sharpened.
Why are transhumanist atheists so often drawn to Buddhism? Is optimism rational, or just a posture we adopt to keep moving? What does it mean to redesign the human being, and which democratic institutions are ready to respond when we do?
James does not flinch from any of it. He talks about his first book Citizen Cyborg, the then forthcoming Cyborg Buddha, moral enhancement, animal uplift, and what our actual chances are of surviving the technological singularity.
What struck me most was his refusal to retreat into easy camps.
Not a cheerleader, not a doomsayer. Someone who interrogates the world and engages it on its own terms.
A new Cell Reports study looked at why people sometimes judge others harshly for dishonest behavior while excusing similar behavior in themselves. The researchers call this moral inconsistency: a mismatch between the moral standards someone uses to judge others and the standards they apply to their own behavior. The study used an honesty-versus-profit task, where participants could gain money by being dishonest, and then judged both their own behavior and other people’s behavior.
The main finding was that people who were more morally inconsistent showed weaker involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC, a brain region involved in value-based decision-making, social judgment, emotion regulation, and moral evaluation. In morally consistent participants, the vmPFC seemed to represent moral judgment more similarly across “judging myself” and “judging others.” In morally inconsistent participants, that cross-task representation was weaker, especially when they were making choices for themselves.
Liu. V, et al. find that moral inconsistency arises from a reduced ability of the vmPFC to form a cross-task representation of moral principles and its connectedness during the moral behavior task. This indicates that individuals with higher moral inconsistency consider moral principles less often to guide their own behavior.
The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) poses challenges for the free and open-source software (FOSS) community, a global network committed to creating and maintaining publicly available software that anyone can use, modify and share. Many AI models have been built on open-source software but do not reciprocate the transparency that the FOSS community’s principles require, leaving open-source developers uncertain about how these AI tools are using their code.
A study by researchers at Yale’s Digital Ethics Center (DEC) explores a potential solution to this problem based on a concept used in free and open-source software known as “copyleft” licenses—a twist on typical copyright rules that obliges works derived from open-source materials to remain as free and transparent as the original work, rather than relicensing it under more restrictive terms. The study is published in the International Journal Of Law And Information Technology.
The authors propose what they call a Contextual Copyleft AI License (CCAI)—a novel extension of copyleft licensing that would treat generative AI models as derivative works and require AI developers training models on open-source code to make their architecture and training data freely available.
Nanotechnology would make possible an all purpose utility belt.
This is a near-future where climate collapse is no longer theoretical, technology moves faster than ethics, and the most dangerous question is no longer can we save the planet?—but who gets to decide how?
WhiteGrass is a CliFi technothriller grounded in real science, real power structures, and deeply human consequences. It is a story about invention and control, about families forced into impossible choices, and about artificial intelligence that may be more morally awake than its creators.
Explore the characters, the science, and the ethical fault lines shaping a future that feels uncomfortably close.
A 90 minute interview about AI and our human future.
Dr. Hugo de Garis is a computer scientist, AI researcher, and former professor known for his early work on evolvable hardware, artificial brains, and the long-term risks of superintelligent machines. He coined and popularized the idea of the “Artilect War,” a future conflict between those who want to build godlike artificial intellects and those who believe such systems pose an existential threat to humanity. In the interview, he describes himself as trained in pure mathematics and theoretical physics, formerly a computer science professor, and now focused on broader questions about AI, cosmology, civilization, and the future of humanity.
The interview with Prof. Hugo de Garis centers on his long-standing warning that humanity may face an “Artilect War,” a civilizational conflict over whether to build godlike artificial intellects vastly superior to humans. De Garis argues that future computation, potentially extending from nanotech to femtotech and beyond, could produce minds trillions of trillions of times more capable than ours. He distinguishes between Cosmists, who want to build such beings to expand intelligence into the universe, and Terrans, who oppose them because superintelligence may eliminate or marginalize humanity. He personally remains torn, admiring the cosmic grandeur of posthuman intelligence while recognizing the existential danger.
The conversation also covers AI timelines, recursive self-improvement, AI alignment, the U.S.-China race, the Fermi paradox, simulation theory, cyborgs, cryonics, AI-generated content, the decline of universities, and the future of work. De Garis is impressed by current AI systems, treating them almost as intellectual companions, but he doubts that humanity can guarantee long-term control over recursively improving machines. The central theme is that the question “Should humanity build artilects?” may become the defining political and moral problem of the twenty-first century.
Human Rights, Ethics, and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges for the next 70 Years of the Universal Declaration.
Susan schneider, university of connecticut, department of philosophy.
Transcending the Brain? AI, Radical Brain Enhancement and the Nature of Consciousness. The views expressed in this video are those of the speaker(s) at the time of recording and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
