goal setting

CGP Grey argues for picking a theme for the year or season instead of setting goals or new year's resolutions. He explains how a theme gives direction without a pass/fail target.

CGP Grey's sarcastic animated video adapted from the book How to Be Miserable, listing habits that reliably make people unhappy. By inverting the advice, it shows what to avoid and prompts reflection on goals and routines.

Professor Brailsford of the University of Nottingham describes how the university set out to print its own mathematics exam papers in the 1980s. The story centers on getting a Mergenthaler Linotron 202 typesetter to work with their own software.

Robert Miles explains the orthogonality thesis: how an agent can be highly intelligent while pursuing goals that seem stupid or alien to humans. He separates intelligence from goals and touches on the stamp-collector example.

Robert Miles covers a paper where researchers ran real versions of his earlier mesa-optimizer thought experiments. They show inner misalignment, where an AI learns the wrong goal in training and misbehaves when deployed.

A 20-minute S3 episode touring Terraform Industries, a startup making synthetic natural gas from air and solar power. It walks through the reactor, injection system, direct air capture and electrolyzer, plus the company's cost goals and next milestone.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

Jared Owen's 3D animated breakdown of how a Brunswick GS-X bowling pinsetter works, showing its mechanisms for sweeping, lifting and resetting pins and balls.

A Computerphile video in which Rob Miles warns against assuming a general AI will think like a human. He uses the thought experiment of a stamp-collecting AI to show how a goal-driven system could pursue its aim with dangerous results.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile why implementing an off switch for a general AI is hard. A capable agent would resist being stopped because shutdown prevents it from achieving its goal.

A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos from a future.