A Working Question for the Last Good Moment
Your author on the crossroads: Someone has started fiddling with the lighting. This last spring, Claude and I wrote A User’s Guide to the Last Good Moment . The idea of the LGM was simple enough. A scientist is five things—Scholar, Calculator, Referee, Logician, Architect—and AI had already mastered the first two, was well on its way to the third, and was starting to make unsettling noises about the fourth. The fifth, the Architect who decides what is worth wondering about, was still in the Human domain. We were living, we said, in the photograph we only recognize afterward: the one where everything is still fine. Six months later, I am reporting back from inside the photograph. The kids are still young (at least in my heart) and the house is occasionally full. But we have come to a crossroads, and someone has started fiddling with the lighting. Into the Arms of the LGM The newest models from Anthropic and OpenAI have not so much nudged us toward the LGM as pushed us firmly...