Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:
The web is for everyone and must remain so: Tim Berners-Lee
“This Is for Everyone,” by Tim Berners-Lee, traces the origins, evolution, and potential future of the web, ending with a call for action to reclaim the web.
Sorry Mr. Yudkowsky, we’ll build it and everything will be fine
Review of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” (2025), by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, with very critical commentary.
Breakneck: the race between Chinese engineers and American lawyers
In “Breakneck” (2025), Dan Wang repeatedly underlines that China is an engineering state and the U.S. is a lawyerly society, and delivers warnings.
Anthropic will include user interactions in Claude’s training data
By including interactions with users in training data, AI models could gain improved statistics on how people actually interact and an improved ability to resolve imprecisions and capture shifting language patterns.
Geoffrey Hinton on AI intelligence and superintelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics, shared his insights on AI in two recent videos published by The Royal Institution.
Starship’s tenth test flight encourages optimism in the future of spaceflight
SpaceX’s Starship rocket achieved a good performance during its tenth integrated flight test, encouraging optimism in the race to return humans to the Moon and beyond.
To boldly go toward a bright nuclear future
The new book “Rad Future” by Isabelle Boemeke makes a strong case for nuclear electricity, with a confident and optimistic outlook.
How AI is becoming the new God in a lonely world
Taylor Lorenz argues that the rise of “robotheism” is a symptom of deeper societal issues, including loneliness, cultural conditioning, and the erosion of traditional meaning-making structures.
The second Terasem Colloquium of 2025 will take place on Sunday, December 14, 2025, from 10am ET to 1pm ET, via Zoom. The theme of the Colloquium, centered on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is:
Where is AI, and where is it going?
The confirmed speakers are: David Brin, David Orban, David Pearce, Gregory Stock, Natasha Vita-More.
Mark your calendar! Everyone is invited. We’ll publish a page with agenda, speakers bios and Zoom access coordinates. Stay tuned.
The Terasem Colloquium on December 14 will follow the previous one on July 20, dedicated to space expansion in the age of AI, and in particular to the question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI?
My current thoughts on AI are summarized in Chapter 12 of my last book “Irrational Mechanics” and my article “Bats or bits to the stars?” in the first 2025 issue of Terasem’s “Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness.”