Joining the Cosmos Institute
A personal update and what it means for the blog
Last week I joined the Cosmos Institute, where I’ll be working with Brendan McCord and the team to research and write about how AI can help us live the good life. Every big technological shift has forced us to rethink what it means to live well, and Cosmos is one of a handful of groups taking that idea seriously for a world with powerful AI systems.
Today, AI’s intellectual culture is guided by philosophy without practice or practice without philosophy. Many builders with a worldview don’t necessarily create in a manner commensurate with it (or in a way designed to encourage human flourishing). Cosmos is about finding, funding, and fomenting those who do.
I’ll be thinking about what it means to create AI to advance truth-seeking, preserve human autonomy, and resist central control. But I’ll also be working with the team to make Cosmos the place where builders test their ideas in public. That means I’ll be able to help Cosmos produce more posts like these:
As for what this means for Learning From Examples, I’ll be switching the cadence to one post a week. I might change that in the future, but for now I’ll be alternating between one essay and one AI history on a bi-weekly basis.
If you’re interested in AI and philosophy, you can sign up to the Cosmos Institute Substack here. And if you’re building something great that you’d like Cosmos to back, you can apply for a grant here.