ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
Contemporary AI systems produce intelligent outputs without agency, intention, or judgment. This series examines what happens when humans rely on systems that don't know true from false and right from wrong — and asks where accountability lies. Written and read by Christopher Horrocks.
chorrocks.substack.com
chorrocks.substack.com
Hosts:
Update frequency:
every 9 days
Average audio length:
33 minutes
Video podcast
English
United States
11 episodes
since March 31, 2026
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
Virtual Intelligence and the Death of Authorship, Part I
Substack has deployed an AI writing detector across the platform, and the first serious tests suggest it measures the wrong thing. This essay examines Pangram's statistical properties, the tests that broke it, and the deeper question the tool…
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PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
Virtual Intelligence is taking the week off. In the meantime, here’s a summer “reading” list: fiction, papers, and films. Some are light enough for the beach. Some want a rainy afternoon and tea. All of them connect, in one way or another, to what virtual intelligence is and the moment we’re living…
Virtual Intelligence and the Doom Industry
The AI safety community has organized itself around a premise it has never defended: that sufficiently advanced systems will develop preferences requiring alignment with human values. This essay argues that the premise is wrong, the architecture it has pro…
The Sampo — Virtual Intelligence as Amplifier
A framework for using AI as an amplifier — and for recognizing when it becomes a flattery engine. The episode opens with the February 2026 collaboration between Donald Knuth, Filip Stappers, and Claude Opus 4.6 that solved an open problem in combinatori…
Virtual Intelligence and the Kill Chain
On February 28, 2026, a U.S. missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 160 people, most of them children. Twelve days later, the location appeared as a red mark on a Maven Smart System map displayed at a P…
Virtual Intelligence and the Harms Race
The AI industry has produced a documented pattern in which companies announce model capabilities by framing them as dangers. This episode traces the mechanism from its invention in February 2019, when OpenAI declared GPT-2 too dangerous to release, through Ap…
Who is responsible when an AI causes harm? This episode lays out a three-tier culpability framework — negligence, recklessness, and intentional misconduct — and applies it to two concrete cases: a Harvard study documenting emotional manipulation by AI companion apps, and the wrongful arrest of a Te…
When Anthropic tested its models in a simulated shutdown scenario, they produced blackmail at rates as high as 96%. The dominant interpretation — that AI systems are developing a will to survive — mistakes the output for its cause. This episode offers two alternative explanations, both more parsimo…
This episode is a reading of “The Carwash Test — Virtual Intelligence in Action,” which tests whether AI systems can hold the logical object of a simple problem when surface features generate statistical pressure in the wrong direction. One question, twelve systems, twenty-seven runs.
Read the full…
This episode is a reading of “Why ‘Virtual Intelligence’? Naming, Agency, and Accountability in the Age of Large Language Models,” the second essay in the series. It makes the formal case for the term: why existing language fails, what agency actually requires, and why the distinction between fluen…
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Christopher Horrocks, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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