Category: Misc

The UK recently passed a new law that effectively bans children under the age of 16 from using most social-media platforms, a move that the UK government notes was based explicitly on Australia’s similar law, which was passed in 2024 (Britain’s law comes into effect next year). The law covers platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and X but it excludes messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. Some social app features – such as livestreaming and the ability to be contacted by strangers – will be blocked from users under the age of 18, and those features will also be blocked in related services like online gaming apps. According to the UK’s description, all of these new rules will be backed up by stronger requirements for age checks. In the preamble to the British version of the law, the government tries to answer the question “Why are these changes being made?” and this is the explanation it gives:

The government ran a national consultation from March to May 2026, one of the largest engagement exercises undertaken by this government. The results showed overwhelming public demand for action, with 9 in 10 parents backing a social media ban for under‑16s, and two-thirds of young people agreeing under-16s should not be allowed to use at least some social media platforms. These changes reset the rules so that children are protected from the platforms and online features that create the most harm.

One thing you might notice about this explanation is a complete lack of any evidence that such a law a) is necessary and b) works. All we have is a statement that suggests that most parents and young people – or at least most of those who chose to respond to a request for input – wanted this law to be passed. Or if not this law specifically, then they at least wanted “action,” whatever that means. I’ll get to the part about whether such laws are necessary, but the lack of data on whether such legislation will work or not is interesting, since the British law is based on an Australian law that has been in effect for almost two years now. Surely by now there would be some evidence that it is working? If there is, the British government doesn’t supply any, which isn’t that surprising because as far as I’ve been able to determine that kind of evidence doesn’t exist.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

In a previous edition of this newsletter, I wrote about the launch of Anthropic’s newest AI model, code-named Mythos, and how the company said that it was too powerful to be trusted — mostly because of its ability to detect and potentially exploit software vulnerabilities — and therefore would only be available to a select few companies for testing as part of something called Project Glasswing. At the time, I and others drew an analogy between Anthropic’s repeated claims about the dangers posed by its AI models and the classic fable about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” (coincidentally, the latest update to Mythos is code-named Fable), because its claims are seen by some as primarily marketing. Well, regardless of the truth of those claims, based on recent events it appears that the townsfolk have created a Wolf Detection Department, and the full might of the Wolf Protection Force is being brought to bear on the boy and his company.

In his Understanding AI newsletter, Tim Lee put together a good overview of what happened over the past few days. Anthropic, he says, “stunned the AI world by  announcing it was revoking access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the powerful new models it released just three days earlier. The government, Anthropic said, had issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. Because Anthropic doesn’t have a way to limit access to Americans, this amounted to a de facto ban.” According to multiple news reports, researchers working for Amazon found it was possible to bypass Fable’s guardrails and gain access to its cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, however, argued in a blog post that the type of bypass that occurred does not pose the same risk as a broader jailbreak, and therefore a ban is unwarranted.

Whether it is warranted or not, however, is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) up to the government to decide, not Anthropic. The company may believe that it is the only one capable of managing or harnessing a tool like AI — and it may even be right — but that is not going to stop the government of Donald J. Trump from doing whatever the hell it wants, even if it doesn’t really know what it is doing or why. On top of that, as AI researcher and former White House advisor Dean Ball noted in a recent newsletter post entitled “Leviathan Waking,” there is a very real sense that Anthropic is either being naive or foolhardy in the way it went about releasing Mythos, since that release came so soon after the company was declared a supply-chain risk for not playing ball by allowing the Department of War to use its AI to target weapons (which I wrote about here). Ball described it in this way:

In D.C., Anthropic’s rapid release of Mythos after the supply-chain risk controversy with the Department of War was not just seen as another step in the development of AI, even if that is what it was. It was seen by many as a move against the United States Government—a private company, developing a weapon, as a move against the government. What else, really, could one have expected? The stark reality is that making superintelligence is a profoundly political act even in the healthiest of societies, to say nothing of the filthily political world we Americans currently inhabit.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

As regular readers will know, I’ve written a lot about the topic of AI and consciousness (too much for some perhaps!) because I find it fascinating, in much the same way that I find the issue of whether AI is dangerous or not fascinating – something I’ve also written about a number of times. And the main reason both of these topics are so interesting is that even the so-called experts, the people who built the fundamental underpinnings of these technologies, can’t seem to agree. On the subject of AI danger, for example, Geoffrey Hinton – the University of Toronto professor who was one of the main architects of neural networks – says that we are in deep trouble. His former colleague Yoshua Bengio agrees. But Yann LeCun – the former head of AI at Meta, who also worked on these technologies – says that this is ridiculous, and that current AIs are no more intelligent than the average cat. Timnit Gebru, a pioneering AI scientist formerly with Google (as Hinton was at one time) says they are just “stochastic parrots.“

On the consciousness question, discussions are inevitably filled with categorical statements. Those who think AI couldn’t possibly be conscious are convinced that the people who think it can be (or possibly already is) are idiots who are subject to “chatbot psychosis” or “AI derangement syndrome.” Others are convinced that there’s plenty of evidence that AIs are conscious – as Nobel Prize-winning biologist Richard Dawkins declared in a recent essay. It’s difficult to say when this debate began, but I think a good starting point is the essay from former Google ethicist Blake Lemoine in 2022, who argued that Google’s AI was either conscious or so close that it didn’t matter (he was ridiculed and then fired). To be fair, the anti-AI-consciousness side seems a lot more categorical than the pro – Anthropic cofounders Dario Amodei and Jack Clark haven’t said whether they think Claude is conscious, but they have left the door open to it (which seems to infuriate the anti-consciousness side as much as if they said it was).

Among the many categorical statements about AI consciousness, one of the most recent and most noteworthy – at least in terms of the amount of coverage it got – is the recent piece in The Atlantic from science-fiction author Ted Chiang (he wrote a story that became the movie Arrival). Chiang’s point is obvious from the title: “No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious.” Pretty definitive, Ted! To even discuss the question of AI consciousness is “absurd,” he says. And what is this based on? Is it his background in machine intelligence or the philosophy of consciousness, or perhaps his training in biological systems? It is not. From what I can tell, his conclusions seem to be based on what the kids like to call “vibes.” Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious and capable of receiving moral instruction, Chiang asks? “No. Absolutely not,” he replies. He continues:

If we give an LLM a prompt that reads “The following is a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan,” it will generate a coherent dialogue between the two historical figures. But no matter how detailed the responses are, no matter how vividly they recount their respective historical accomplishments, we would never conclude that the LLM has conjured up digital re-creations of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, nor would we suggest that the historical figures are conscious despite being disembodied and are happily conversing in a language that neither actually spoke. In reality, they are just characters in a piece of speculative fiction.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.