LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

1. The obstacle to abolition was not the economic system, but an industry lobby.

I had always imagined the British abolitionist movement to be a broad battle between an unstoppable moral imperative and an immovable economic incentive. But in practice it started as more of a knife fight between a cabal of moral pioneers and a special interest group representing industry merchants.

The government and the political parties did not come in with any great agenda. MPs were mostly prizes in a furious contest between the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and a coalition of business interests:

"The merchants and planters availed themselves [...] to wait upon members of parliament by deputation, in order to solicit their attendance in their favour, and to renew their injurious paragraphs in the public papers."[1]

"The committee, for the abolition, when the work was finished, printed it at their own expense [...] sent it to every individual member of that House."

However, the public was heavily activated in favor of the abolition, which forced the issue to parliamentary attention.

"The committee also in this interval brought out their famous print of the plan and section [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) 1. The obstacle to abolition was not the economic system, but an industry lobby.

(02:40) 2. The slave trade was truly terrible for sailors.

(04:25) 3. The slave trade made Africa scary and violent.

(05:26) 4. The main argument against abolition was that if the British didn't do it, other countries would.

(06:24) 5. The early abolitionists explicitly distanced themselves from emancipation.

(07:11) 6. The slave trade may actually have been bad for the economy (at least after some date).

(08:29) 7. The 1780s are not so different from today

(09:39) 8. Thomas Clarkson is a hero for the ages

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDZcsojmRXo5qKNBm/surprising-facts-about-the-slave-trade

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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A notable fraction of people respond to hearing about existential risk from AI by saying they don’t really care if everyone dies. I think the idea is often along the lines of ‘well if we are all dead, then there's nobody to be unhappy about it’.

I’m personally skeptical that this is really the main thing going on, since it seems unlikely that many people are really mostly concerned for their own non-death out of selfless regard for the feelings of others. I’m also skeptical that this would be their view on a bunch more consideration.

So to help with the consideration—

My guess is that an important thing going on here is that the ‘everyone dying at once’ image seems kind of like a thought experiment—abstract, hypothetical, neat, not very sinister. Also, you literally can never see it, so it feels pretty surreal.

But it is interesting that we even have this assumption that everyone will die together.

It's true that in some prominent AI catastrophe stories, a single AI system suddenly emerges fantastically more powerful than anyone else and builds technology to quickly kill everyone, perhaps before they notice.

But this doesn’t seem like the bulk of [...]

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First published:

June 24th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/23HybCsJ7KYW4v7tP/ai-catastrophe-more-like-a-genocide-than-a-thought

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I often hear people say they think we should pause AI at some point, but not yet. Their basis for this seems to be some combination of:

If we pause at the last possible moment, then we will have the most advanced AI possible during the pause, which will be helpful for doing AI safety research during the pause

Implicitly, there is some quantity of ‘pausing credit’, that will buy us a few months of pause say, and if we use them now, we won’t have them to use later, when it is important

If we pause, and then AI doesn’t seem to be at dire risk of destroying the world, maybe the public will backlash against this and it will be harder to do any kind of AI safety (especially if it has major economic consequences)

The models aren’t dangerous yet

This all sounds very questionable to me. I suggest instead that the following are at least as likely to be true:

We can’t pause on a dime at the precise second that ‘we’ decide it is important to—pulling the breaks will take a while, during which time we will continue [...]

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First published:

June 24th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mEhS4wYTy9JXEpe9p/ai-pause-the-case-for-asap

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Tldr: Most strategic writing on AI governance on LessWrong describes the outsider game, which is most often visible: press, statements, open letters. Here I want to describe the other, invisible half: the insider work within ministerial cabinets and international fora, and the work of people within national and international institutions. Here are a few claims that I defend in the post:

A huge part of the work that mattered in AI governance has been invisible
There are many types of games in AI governance, which differ in how visible they are. Some of the most impactful work is highly invisible
Some of the most impactful work is in the executive branch and complements the legislative branch. This also explains some of my hesitations about replicating ControlAI in France. 
The community is probably overinvesting in intellectual production. There is a bias against invisible types of work. In particular, public work is not necessarily visible to whom it matters.
A few criticisms of both strategies
I think the AI Safety Community is under-indexing on the invisible part as a result, which might mean we miss large avenues for impact. Some of the strongest questions/objections of this type of invisible policy [...]

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Outline:

(02:40) A huge part of the work that mattered in AI governance has been invisible

(05:44) There are many types of games in AI governance.

(07:36) 3. types of meetings: the bazooka, the useful assistant, and the advisor

(10:46) Some of the most impactful work is within the executive branch

(12:53) People ask me regularly whether CeSIA should replicate what ControlAI does with parliamentarians?

(15:27) The community is probably overinvesting in intellectual production

(20:31) Limits of Outsider work

(22:17) Limit of Insider work

(23:47) An aside on one particular limit: the Defense-in-Depth Paradigm of present AI governance

(26:21) Closing & call for action

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 20th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWKkDLDnShemNCSzZ/the-invisible-side-of-ai-governance

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary

We've been building a theory of how prompt injections work under the hood.
We show it comes down to how LLMs perceive roles (the humble chat template tags).
We use this theory to create new attacks, explain some weird mech interp results, and predict when attacks work.
We also advocate for a new subfield focused on the science of roles, and sketch some unexplored new research problems.
Work supported by CBAI and Cosmos. Another version of this post (with more inline colors) is here, and full ICML paper here.
1. The World to an LLM

How does an LLM know the difference between its own thoughts and someone else's words?

To see why this is hard, let's look at what the world actually looks like to a model. Here's a simple chat where we ask Claude to check the day of the week. I took a snapshot of it midway through its follow-up response:

Left = what we see; right = what the LLM gets.

On the left is what we see in the chat interface: a structured conversation with distinct turns. On the right is what the model actually receives as input: a single, continuous stream [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Summary

[... 15 more sections]

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First published:

June 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d8xDGzCEYE639qqEv/a-theory-of-prompt-injection-and-why-you-should-study-roles

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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