Dean Ball, a member of the board of directors of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), recently launched on Substack, an online platform, Hyperdimensional. It will focus on emerging technology and the future of governance. A passion for technology and its uses motivated him to introduce this exciting new initiative. “My goal,” Mr. Ball stated, “is for this newsletter to be useful to you in understanding the technological change happening all around us.”
In addition to service on AHI board of directors, he is also the senior program manager at the Hoover Institution’s State and Local Governance Initiative. He has spent a decade educating, studying, and implementing public policy solutions at the state and local levels.
According to Mr. Ball, Substack, founded in 2017, “has become a kind of Republic of Letters. I’m excited to contribute in some small way.” All posts will be available free of charge, though you can subscribe, comment, and share with others.
On January 11 in his first Substack piece, “Let’s Talk About AI ‘X-Risk’: Why I don’t lose sleep about existential risk from AI,” Mr. Ball discusses the philosophical pros and cons of AI, as well as the technical capabilities currently existing. “Ambient, vague anxiety about the future, and actions we take in the present to combat that imagined future,” he observes in conclusion, “has a way of bringing about the exact outcomes we seek to avoid. A recent paper found that it’s possible to get better performance out of a model by telling it to “take a deep breath and think about this problem step-by-step.”
Good advice.
Leave A Comment