Tom Butterweich

Karma: 91

Tom Butterweich 7 Aug 2026 14:12 UTC
1 point
0
on: There Will Come Soft Rains
Sharing things that touch me—in my case mostly true stories, special music, sometimes live performances—is something I really cherish about working as a teacher. It also happens to be a use of embodied knowledge that AI cannot replace: not because AI couldn’t understand human art, but because it could fake being moved by it. When I inevitably well up in those certain scenes of Britten’s War Requiem or Rameau’s Les Boreades, that is a hard-to-fake signal (at least for me, I’m a shitty actor), and it communicates something about human experience that a “crying” robot couldn’t.
This isn’t just a sentimental point. AI is eroding the economic value of education and marginalising its role for distinction (intelligence isn’t exclusive to humans any more). What remains is education as a pathway to embodied experience. Because of that, I think teaching will not become 100 % machine work.

Tom Butterweich 17 Jul 2026 9:54 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: kbear’s comment on: Learning concepts is dirty work
Glad you liked it. And yes, I would agree that this is in accordance with what I tried to point out.
Being asked a question two times incentivises children (and adults, I might add) to favour a different answer. This makes interpretations blurry and the categorisation notoriously unreliable. The child in the video you describe could well be regarded as in second or even third phase, yet not engaged in the intended task (but focussed on the “language game”) -- or simply unclassifiable. Criticism will often point out these weak data points but fail to check how that affects Piaget’s deduction of constructivism as a description of how concepts are acquired (not at all, as long as there is also some compelling evidence for phase 2).
Maybe some day we will have more objective measurements of people’s reasoning. Evolutionary biology started out with spotty data and took a long time to fill the gaps it couldn’t explain in detail, the human eye being the most prominent example,* but nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. For me, it’s the same with constructivism and learning theory. And it’s exciting, if scary, to see how we might learn more about our own minds in the near future.
*) I think it’s 300-odd evolutionary steps, and every single one brings a gradual fitness advantage.

Tom Butterweich 16 Jul 2026 19:58 UTC
5 points
0
on: Why I Left Google DeepMind
First of all, thank you for your effort. I really think it makes a difference, and I admire your integrity and stamina.
The elephant in the room: The US is currently textbook pre-fascist, even though it might not feel that bad. The massive spending on ICE is not just for legal deportations. The midterms will not be fair. Trump (or his successor, should he die) will not leave office voluntarily.
AI is a dual-use technology of national importance. The administration would not leave it to chance whether it had full access to frontier models. They made an offer in public and enforced it in private. Even in more peaceful, more democratic times, state agencies had ways to get around any restriction if it was really necessary.
There might have been some soft persuasion, too: sharing classified intelligence about what China is cooking, painting disheartening but convincing scenarios that all included Trump getting what he wants. In the end, it doesn’t matter—the people you talked to don’t have the agency you asked them for. Not defending them—we cannot allow civil society to cave in --, but I wouldn’t underestimate the levers that are at work here.
Epistemic status: I think it’s more plausible than a bunch of commendable people suddenly learning to love the ~~bomb~~ killer drones. Sorry if this comment is depressing. :(

Tom Butterweich 15 Jul 2026 9:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
The US economy is overdue for a recession. This is currently delayed by massive investments in AI infrastructure. If the current, exponential growth were to be halted or even just throttled, that would let a lot of bets on the future of the industry burst. Could broader adoption (-> inference → hardware purchases) balance that? Enough to keep the US economy afloat? I doubt it, but I’m sure the tipping-point-ness of the situation makes predictions hard.
Also, I imagine that from an economist’s perspective, the idea of slowing down an industry just to save humanity would sound very hypothetical—not even /s

Tom Butterweich 14 Jul 2026 12:57 UTC
17 points
3
on: The Whitney Biennial Should Admit That Emilie Gossiaux Wants to Fuck Their Dog
Wow, what an arc! From spotting this title among all the alignment/extinction stuff, to feeling bewildered and very sceptical at reading the core thesis, to … uh, agreement. Among other feelings. This was well aimed, thank you.
Zeitgeist is found in the most improbable of places, I guess. In this case, it’s not even the content (weird art) -- it’s how it’s (re)presented.

Tom Butterweich 22 Jun 2026 18:10 UTC
17 points
4
on: Tom Butterweich’s Shortform
What’s going through your mind, vacuum pump?
.
.
.
Air, and air, and air again.
But less, and less, and less.

Tom Butterweich 21 Jun 2026 9:42 UTC
4 points
3
on: Would anybody here be interested in a “mistake postmortem” discussion group?
In society, we hear somewhat conflicting advice about thinking about our mistakes. Sometimes you hear advice like “Don’t focus on your past mistakes, look forward to the future”. But you will also hear, “learn from your mistakes so you don’t repeat them”. Which should you follow?
I think these are two sides of the same coin. Learning from mistakes is definitely useful, and it’s not the reflection itself that paralyses, but the (internalised) social punishment that comes with one’s downfalls getting exposed. In a setting where everyone may contribute to making mistakes and discussing them (safely),* nobody gets too attached to a clean record, and the fear of exposure loses its sting. Establishing this requires committed leadership and, as always, trust.
The bottleneck does not lie in the knowledge base. Most institutions I have seen from the inside fail to even leverage their own mistakes—which would be the most relevant, most precious to learn from! It’s a matter of how we talk about mistakes, a question of culture.
One more observation: as stories of bad decisions are told online, LLMs are trained on them and become very adept at giving the kind of Good Advice that would have prevented the mistakes. Will all those witticisms of old people boil down to “should have asked your Claude first” in the future? Mixed with a pinch of “shouldn’t have trusted the AI”, of course.
*) I’m somewhat proud to say we have a special word for that in German, “Fehlerkultur” (“error/mistake culture”), which isn’t to say we don’t suck at it.

Tom Butterweich 15 Jun 2026 7:30 UTC
31 points
11
on: You need to know about the Baruch Plan
In December of 1994, Ukraine notoriously surrendered its nuclear arsenal* under the Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for two pinky promises: a non-aggression pact with Russia and security assurances by the US (and other, less powerful states).
We’re in the fifth year of the full-scale invasion, and the lesson the whole world has learned by now is: guarantees by world powers are worthless unless you have nukes, and threats by world powers are worthless if you do (see North Korea). This is a serious deterioration compared to the geopolitical climate in the 90s.
Each geopolitical player, when on their own, has an incentive to gain nuclear deterrence (and thus, territorial integrity) for the price of increasing collective existential risk. The only way out of this dynamic is to create trust—and that means costly signals. I guess what I’m saying is that the treaties are hard already but the real challenge is to sustainably back them up. I have tremendous respect for people who choose careers in international relations.
*) It’s worth noting that just keeping the bombs would not immediately have implied nuclear capabilities and posed challenges of its own.

Tom Butterweich 14 Jun 2026 19:53 UTC
1 point
0
on: Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don’t Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German
Very interesting, thank you. I had no idea there was a Low German speaking minority in Canada, of all places.
I listened to a snippet of Plaudietsch and found out the dialect is quite different from the Lower German still spoken around where I live (Northwestern Germany). That got me thinking: it would take a lot of effort for someone to learn an exotic language like this, so maybe it’s more feasible to rally some of the Mennonites who like the idea of vaccines to become ambassadors for their own wider communities? They would already be familiar with the communication channels.

Tom Butterweich 10 Jun 2026 16:08 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Three Filters: Why Almost Every Plan to Survive ASI Fails Miserably
I feel like at the heart of counterarguments to solutions that resemble those found in human history—cooperative / multipolar / non-inner alignment --, there is a fallacy of comparing time scales but not shifting perspective to the new subjects of post-human history, AIs. It’ll all go too fast for us, that’s for sure—but does that imply that one rogue AI will win everything? The speed of decision making will increase significantly, after all, possibly more than the speed of weapon development. The grounds for decision making will become more abstract, and a move by one ASI to simply secure computing ressources beyond a certain limit could be regarded as a provocation by its fellow ASIs, who could intervene incredibly swiftly. If it’s just one or two AIs who escape the peloton of the arms race: okay, that sounds bad, but if it’s a couple? The very thing that OP is working on—deep understanding for ASI risk—would be wide-spread among all relevant players.
Consider human development of the last century or so. We have surpassed the limits of traditional weapons and produced enough to destroy the world many times over. None of this is comprehensible to chimps. There have also been times at which one player had enough lead to establish total military control, but they didn’t really try, at least not by all means. Why not? Because there is multipolarity nested in multipolarity; people show signs of virtue to succeed inside their social environments and that is what saved everyone so far, including some of the underpowered players like, say, chimps. This behaviour is not a priori, it emerged under evolutionary pressure and has to be relearned by every specimen.
By comparing this to ASI timelines, I have probably committed a number of other fallacies, but so it goes.