Robonaissance

Robonaissance

Whatever You Ask For

Whatever You Ask For
Machines now grant whatever we ask, better every year. Choosing what to ask was never their half of the problem. It is ours, and we are bad at it…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 13: The Only Question Left Is What You Ask
No metric resists being gamed, so what separates good goal-setting from bad is the posture toward the number, not the number. And the one question no…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 12: We Are Training Children to Be the Machines
School trains a child to maximize a score inside fixed rules. That is the definition of an optimizer, the one thing machines are sure to win. We are…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 11: You Have Never Read Your Actual Objective
You have an objective you would state out loud and a different one your week is actually running. The gap is not hypocrisy. It is an unaudited reward…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 10: We Are the Species That Sets the Goals
A nerve that takes a five-metre detour. A process with no author. One thing cannot get its goals wrong; another cannot refuse them. We are the middle…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 9: Your Worth Was Never Your Cleverness
For a few centuries, thinking well was scarce and therefore valuable. That was an accident of supply. The popular replacements make the same mistake in…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 8: The Genie Never Picks the Wish
The same method predicts protein structures and wins at chess, with no view on which is worth doing. The genie grants anything. It has never once picked…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 7: The One Step No Machine Can Take, and We Are Bad at It
A tumour two experts read in opposite ways. Grant reviewers who agree barely more than chance. The step that cannot be handed to a machine is the step…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 6: Machines Can Learn What We Do, Not What We Want
Twenty-five years of trying to automate the asking. A robot that wants your coffee. A proof that behaviour cannot reveal intent. Every attempt to…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 5: Your Organization Was Reward Hacking Before the Machines Arrived
A sales target that invented three million accounts. A law nobody wrote. A clock that stops at the hospital door. Machines did not bring this problem…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 4: The Machine Did Exactly What You Said
A program that pauses Tetris forever. A boat that never finishes the race. A model that rewrites the scoring code. None of them broke a rule. That is…
 • Hugo
Whatever You Ask For, Part 3: Somebody Wrote the Machine’s Goal in an Afternoon
A blog post nobody noticed. A number written for 2016. A courtroom in 2026. Every optimizing system has one human input, and it fails by design.
 • Hugo
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