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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
how shall we live together? mastodon: @saff@mas.to Co-director
@collect_intel
, was
@deepmind
@kernel_magazine
@harvard
🇬🇧saffronhuang.comJoined April 2013
725 Following
2,959 Followers

saffron huang’s Tweets

saffron huang
@saffronhuang
what we’ve been up to with
@collect_intel
in the last little while :) happy new year all
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Collective Intelligence Project
@collect_intel
Happy New Year from CIP! We’ve been a bit quiet in our start-up phase, setting our strategy, collaborating with partners and advisors, and working heads down on our initial projects. Sharing an update :) cip.org/campaigns/view
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saffron huang Retweeted
Murray Shanahan
@mpshanahan
My new paper is a critique of the way we talk about large language models. arxiv.org/abs/2212.03551 I argue that LLM-based systems are "simultaneously so very different from humans in their construction, yet ... so human-like in their behaviour, that
arxiv.org
Talking About Large Language Models
Thanks to rapid progress in artificial intelligence, we have entered an era when technology and philosophy intersect in interesting ways. Sitting squarely at the centre of this intersection are...
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
"So few of our most capable citizens aspire to enter public life. Many of them become leaders in their chosen fields. With the right encouragement and training they could also make a positive contribution to government and policy." Keep an eye out for the Fellowship in 2023!
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
Talent is a big bottleneck in public life, and I'm excited to say that I'll be on the advisory council of
@civic_future
supporting their work on improving public leadership in the UK.
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Civic Future
@civic_future
The world is changing fast. The challenges of emerging technologies, geopolitical conflicts and demographic shifts need leaders equipped to address them. Today we launch Civic Future to tackle these challenges and improve public leadership. [1/3] civicfuture.org
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
autonomous worlds await... 🎉🤳👪🐄👥🚢🌒🛸👞📵🇭🐂🎌🚲🐩🔷🎭🤠👪🌪🎈🛂👝🐊👦📥💟🌩🎌🚟💝🛹🎗🔆🔬🌫🎛🚏🍡🔴🎉🔆🍔🐵🎌🥅👩🚲🎞📵🏜🈳👥🚒🎥🔈👩🤰💝🔉👕🚟🌓🚳👪📥🆗🈸👢🔦🌞🔉🎈🤠🐝🐵👩🚏🌞🤓👞🔉🐝🚭🎐🤠🌞🐳🎖🤣🍕🔉👝🤰📟🚱🎛🤰🐝🐁🎈🚒🍔🔆🎍🔃☕☕
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
TOP (political party) in NZ advocating less tax on income + a UBI and taxing land instead - very cool also better urban development/more public housing
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TOP - The Opportunities Party
@top_nz
The status quo must go. It’s time for a fairer tax system to help deal with costs of living, housing affordability and supporting our most vulnerable. Here’s what we’re proposing 🧵 #nzpol
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saffron huang Retweeted
Mihailo Bjelic
@MihailoBjelic
Crypto will never get banned, that’s not a concern (anymore). The major concern moving forward is that it can become captured and subsequently fails to deliver on its promises/vision. Great article on this, with especially appropriate reference to Tim Wu’s concept of The Cycle.
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Josh Stark
@0xstark
9. This scenario, and some thoughts about what we might do about it, from this piece by @saffronhuang and myself: saffron.mirror.xyz/E6UKhw0KAZL1Tg
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
ummm this is going to be amazing!
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Emily
@_emilyliu_
In a landscape dominated by fatalistic views of tech or optimism weaponized as hype, @kernel_magazine articulates an alternate vision: critical analysis that still charts a path forward. Starting today, you can purchase a copy of our second issue at kernelmag.io ⚡️
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A mock of several copies of Kernel Magazine’s second issue
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saffron huang Retweeted
summonooor
@trent_vanepps
this is the kind of forward-looking scenario imagineering I love, you should read it too: - in what ways might our project fail? - what can we learn from previous info infrastructures? - how can we build norms towards resilient infra ahead of cooption?
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
@0xstark and I have been thinking about how the crypto ecosystem could become captured by a few entities--effectively, coming under centralized control. We wrote a piece on this called "Who will control crypto?" saffron.mirror.xyz/E6UKhw0KAZL1Tg
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
There's much to think about/act on/defend against! Writing this definitely showed me how important it is to think about capture in wider and more creative ways than just (de)centralization along particular axes, and to situate crypto in the wider, long-term political economy.
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
In general, how can crypto resist the Cycle, unlike other network technologies? We think people need to preserve the funding advantage, grow self-sufficient global communities, and make crypto's political value clear so people can opt in more as citizens than as consumers.
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
There are ways in which crypto is similar and different. One capture-resisting property is that crypto is more able to finance itself as an ecosystem through novel funding mechanisms than e.g. independent radio stations were able to. This property will need to be preserved.
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
Previous information technologies became captured/centralised in a few ways, which we can learn from: including regulatory pressure, financial means, control over (physical) infrastructure, and customer demands for quality of services.
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
This scenario is an example of how crypto could become captured in myriad ways other than the usual cases (e.g. 51% attack on a specific chain). There are at least 3 layers where capture could happen: protocol, application, or social layer (read the piece for the analysis!)
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
Also, statechains are better maintained, faster, and seen as more reliable. For all these reasons, gradually, the open networks fade into obscurity. They began the crypto revolution, but they weren't the networks that lasted.
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
Every dapp on an open chain is forked to a statechain. All phones come with statechain wallets. The statechain becomes a key part of the political tug-of-war; existing political issues become debates over whether to modify statechains for efficient enforcement.
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
One scenario we imagine is: if blockchains win, governments may start building "statechains." They could encourage people to move their assets on to state-owned centralised blockchains -- incentivized with tax deductions, pressure on tech companies, and legal stipulations.
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
For more on the case for collective intelligence (and what is meant by this term), check out Div's piece in Wired, hot off the press
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Divya Siddarth
@divyasiddarth
My ‘I love democracy, we need it desperately to effectively govern transformative tech & avoid dystopia, but to do that we must make it almost unrecognizably better via plural systems of collective intelligence + ownership’ manifesto is out in @WIRED! 1/ wired.com/story/collecti
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saffron huang
@saffronhuang
I'm spinning up the Collective Intelligence Project with
@divyasiddarth
and others! Very excited to enable collective intelligence experiments, and encourage both theory and practice in radical new ways of being and deciding together 🐝
@collect_intel
collectiveintelligenceproject.org
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Divya Siddarth
@divyasiddarth
We will be working to enable experiments in collective intelligence for collective progress at collectiveintelligenceproject.org. If you care about these questions and want to work on solutions, please reach out to me + @m_t_prewitt @saffronhuang!
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saffron huang Retweeted
Divya Siddarth
@divyasiddarth
My ‘I love democracy, we need it desperately to effectively govern transformative tech & avoid dystopia, but to do that we must make it almost unrecognizably better via plural systems of collective intelligence + ownership’ manifesto is out in
@WIRED
! 1/
wired.com
To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up
Calls to “democratize technology” ring hollow when both systems seem to be failing. The key is realizing that democracy is not yet in its final form.
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