But, granting it for the sake of argument, yeah, they're clearly failing there: if other companies are able to outcompete them on the regulatory capture front, then if that's their strategy then they're losing.

On the other hand, Anthropic really needs to up its game here. I am sympathetic to their position, but their actions betray a lack of understanding of the seriousness of the situation. If we're to believe that only they can align a super intelligence, they should start by aligning the Trump administration into a productive relationship.

"Yeah, and quotas on web scrapers!"

Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action potentials give an entity a conscious soul are eager to extend that to other animals, with broadly similar hardware.)

Human proofs are themselves a kind of a proof of work. They certainly write flawed proofs, but you can expect a human author of a paper to have put in more effort--substantially more--than the human reader needs to verify it. Arguably, this asymmetry disappears for generated proofs.

Automated theorem provers help a bit here, but they don't eliminate the human verification cost.

In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wielding labor. People want to strike because of intolerable working conditions? Send in robot scabs. People want to demonstrate en masse against a regime? Have robot officers police them, and have models identify participants so post-event disincentives can be applied. They want to have a violent uprising? Send in the mass fleet of drones.

Ideally, you'd avoid these outcomes entirely by molding the population into ideal consumers and distract them with superficial sports team style conflicts, so they never get to the point where collective action is even conceivable. But they're a useful backstop if those strategies fail.

(There are limited situations where it does make sense, logistically, for schools to provision social services. E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as opposed to curricular and classroom management practices that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver that.)

I understand the motivation to deny that San Francisco banned middle school algebra: it's embarrassing, and it was disastrous for student outcomes. But it was a very real thing.

(The Lowell debate was a separate thing: should an academic-focused magnet school be able to use a standardized test to determine proficiency? Or should it be a lottery?)

At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program. So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed to the lender and students likely to succeed.

Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at.

The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.

For now. Soon, the ladder will be a pair of stilts; best get to the very top before that point.