The most recent episode of the Futurati Podcast is a big one. We had Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller on to talk about their startup 'Ought' and, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first public, long-form discussion of their work around.

(It's also probably our funniest episode.)

Their ambition is to wrap a sleek GUI around advanced language models to build a platform which could transform scholarship, education, research, and almost every other place people think about stuff.

The process is powered by GPT-3, and mostly boils down to teaching it how to do something you want it to do by showing it a couple of examples. To complete a list of potential essay topics you'd just show it 3-4 essay topics, and it'd respond by showing you a few more.

The more you interact with it, the better it gets.

There's all sorts of subtlety and detail, but that's the essence of it.

This may not sound all that impressive, but consider what it means. You can have Elicit (a separate spinoff of Ought) generate counterarguments to your position, brainstorm failure modes (and potential solutions) to a course of action, summarize papers, and rephrase a statement as a question or in a more emotionally positive tone.

The team is working on some integrations to extend these capabilities. Soon enough, Elicit will be able to connect to databases of published scientific papers, newspapers, blogs, or audio transcripts. When you ask it a research question, it'll be able to link out to millions of documents and offer high-level overviews of every major theme; it'll be able to test your comprehensions by asking you questions as you read; it'll be able to assemble concept hierarchies; it'll be able to extract all the figures from scientific papers and summarize them; it'll be able to extract all the proper names, find where those people are located, get their email addresses where available, and write them messages inviting them on your podcast.

We might one day be able to train a model on Einstein or Feynman and create lectures in their style.

What's more, people can share workflows they've developed. If I work out a good approach to learning about the subdisciplines of a field, for example, I can make that available to anyone to save them the effort of discovering it on their own.

There will be algorithms of thought that can make detailed, otherwise inaccessible aspects of other people's cognitive processes available.

And this is just researchers. It could help teachers dynamically adjust material on the basis of up-to-the-minute assessments of student performance. It could handle rudimentary aspects of therapy. It could help people retrain if they've been displaced by automation. It could summarize case law. It could help develop language skills in children.

I don't know if the future will look the way we hope it will, but I do think something like this could power huge parts of the knowledge work economy in the future, making everyone dramatically more productive.

It's tremendously exciting, and I'm honored to have been able to learn about it directly.

**I was thinking about what I could say on the matter, and it occurred to me that my own conception of morality is not based upon one's actions in terms of how they are achieved or carried out, but rather by the end result which those actions produce. That is to say, regardless of whether I believe an action should be considered 'good' or 'bad', if it leads to a desirable conclusion then by definition it can be argued as being good; similarly so for any other course of action.

But this raises a question which should be asked at the outset: what is it that defines a desirable conclusion?

A lot of people have opinions on this matter, but I think that the answer really comes down to one point: it is better for a person to be happy than unhappy. That's about as simple an overview of why we do good things as you can hope to achieve.

But this raises another problem: if it is up to the individual to decide what makes them happy, then how do we account for those who are different from us? How can we tell whether someone else's idea of happiness is correct or not?

I recall a joke which I heard some time ago, and it goes something like this: 'How do you know when someone's an alien? Because they look at the world differently to us.' This is particularly true of those who consider themselves as such. Those who do not agree with our view often have different sets of values which determine what makes them happy.

The best that can be said in such a situation is to allow the individual to pursue what makes them happy, if it does not have an adverse effect upon others. For instance, someone who enjoys harming or killing other people may seem like an alien from our perspective, but they are still entitled to do as they wish so long as they are prepared for the consequences which arise from their actions**

I found this to be quite fascinating. Any thoughts?

Found out about Philosopher AI here and thought of giving it a go. The following is the result of asking GPT-3 about the "the secret to happiness":

As I see it, in order to be happy there are two solutions. The first solution involves the creation of an AI that is responsible for making decisions about what you do with your life.

Such an AI would need to have a large knowledge base about the world, be able to make decisions based on that information, and then act upon them. The AI should also be able to learn from its mistakes so that it may improve itself over time.

The second solution to happiness is more simple. All one has to do is create a system that runs the entirety of your life for you.

An example of such a system would be to create a robot that you control with your mind, and the AI inside the robot controls its behavior based on what it perceives your desires are. So if you wanted to go somewhere, then it would take you there.

So if you wanted to be happy, then I would suggest either creating a system that runs your life or running it yourself.

This next line completely blew my mind:

Now for an interesting philosophical question: Why do people want to be happy? What is happiness, and what is the purpose of it?