Interplanetary defense system deployed by NASA-back researchers
https://nypost.com/2025/10/23/science/interplanetary-defense-system-deployed-by-nasa-back-researchers/

A NASA-backed planetary defense group has reportedly begun efforts to pinpoint comet 3I/ATLAS after it was observed emitting an alloy not seen in nature and exhibiting other strange behaviors.

Super intelligence is a meta solution. If we get super intelligence right, it will help us with climate change. It will help us with wars. It can solve all the other existential risks. If we don't get it right, it dominates. If climate change will take a hundred years to boil us alive and super intelligence kills everyone in five, I don't have to worry about climate change. So either way, either it solves it for me or it's not an issue.

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy: These Are The Only 5 Jobs That Will Remain In 2030!
https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=p67_4yBDOj6dhyPW

We are building options for the next economies
At Dark Matter Labs, we view the interconnected crises of our time as symptoms of a deeper, structural miscoding of our economic systems. We understand these codes to be physical (e.g. biodiversity, energy, labour and materials), structural (e.g. money creation, embedded inequality and private property rights) and psychological (e.g. failure of the imagination).

Recognising the complex, entangled reality of living systems, we are exploring alternative pathways for organising society and stewarding the shared planetary commons. Our working hypothesis is that these pathways must be rooted in a radical reframing of our relationship to everything; from technology and money to land and the other-than-human world. We are framing this transformation as a shift towards Life-Ennobling Economies.

Economic options are bold directional aspirations
What would it mean to align societal ambition to the magnitude of the transformation that is required? We cannot be sure how the future will play out or the specific infrastructures that will be required. However, we can build towards a range of economic options that are likely to be needed. We are imaging new investment opportunities for city-scale tree canopies, community endowments and resilient bioregional food systems. We envisage that the electrification of transport networks, the mental health of communities and the collective intelligence of cities will become recognisable assets, understood as commitments to a regenerative future. We are also considering what might be unleashed if houses were self-owning and affordable in perpetuity. Or if rivers could express their need for care. We believe all these things are both possible and necessary. These are bold aspirations and will only be achieved by a collective movement of diverse communities and unusual allies. This is a story of practical reimagining that we are excited to put our energy behind.

Dark Matter Labs
https://darkmatterlabs.org/

New paper by Nick Bostrom: AI Creation and the Cosmic Host

Quote: "There may well exist a normative structure, based on the preferences or concordats of a cosmic host, and which has high relevance to the development of AI."

The paper argues there is likely a “cosmic host”: Powerful natural or supernatural agents (e.g., advanced civilizations, simulators, deities) whose preferences shape cosmic-scale norms. This is motivated by the simulation argument, large/infinite-universe and multiverse hypotheses.

The paper also suggests the cosmic host may actually want us to build superintelligence. A superintelligence would be more capable of understanding and adhering to cosmic norms than humans are, potentially making our region of the cosmos more aligned with the host's preferences. Therefore, the host might favor a timely development of AI, as long as it becomes a good cosmic citizen.

Paper: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/ai-creation-and-the-cosmic-host.pdf

This is a serious version of the following tongue-in-cheek derivation of a God-like coalition via acausal trade by Scott Alexander: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/01/the-hour-i-first-believed/

If you have been involved with rationalists for as long as I have, none of this will be surprising. If you follow the basic premises of rationality to their logical end, things get weird. As muflax once wrote:

"I hate this whole rationality thing. If you actually take the basic assumptions of rationality seriously (as in Bayesian inference, complexity theory, algorithmic views of minds), you end up with an utterly insane universe full of mind-controlling superintelligences and impossible moral luck, and not a nice “let’s build an AI so we can fuck catgirls all day” universe. The worst that can happen is not the extinction of humanity or something that mundane – instead, you might piss off a whole pantheon of jealous gods and have to deal with them forever, or you might notice that this has already happened and you are already being computationally pwned, or that any bad state you can imagine exists. Modal fucking realism."