Sunday, October 18, 2026

Bounded Sovereignty and the Control Tax: Pricing AI Oversight When the Deployer Does Not Own the Model

arXiv:2608.19216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI control research asks how to deploy models safely even when they may be misaligned, but many control protocols assume that the deployer can instrument the model and its surrounding pipeline. That assumption often fails for regulated organisations using frontier models through APIs or managed endpoints, where the deployer may…

How to Navigate Uncertainty About AI Consciousness

arXiv:2608.19215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting…

Robust Metaheuristics under Uncertainty for Berth Allocation and Quay Crane Assignment: A Review

arXiv:2608.19214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem (BACAP) is a representative port-terminal scheduling problem in maritime transportation and freight logistics, where vessel arrivals, berth positions, service durations, and quay?crane availability are tightly coupled. Under uncertainties such as arrival deviations, handling-time fluctuations, and resource disruptions, schedules optimized under nominal assumptions…

Active Inference as Context Acquisition for AI Agents

arXiv:2608.19202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive AI agents must acquire the right context as efficiently as possible. When a user omits a constraint, preference, file, or task variable, an agent can proceed with a default assumption or spend tokens on a clarifying question, retrieval call, tool call, or prompt trial. We formulate this tradeoff as…

When AI designs a drug, who gets the credit?

When the biotech company Insilico Medicine used its computer models to propose a promising drug for pulmonary fibrosis, it enthusiastically claimed in a press release that the molecule had been “discovered by” its generative AI platform. Insilico leads a pack of companies using AI to rapidly come up with drug ideas humans might never think…

Mother tongue

“Daddy?” Theo curled against my side in bed. “Where do words go when they die?” I’d orchestrated the bedtime routine flawlessly: bath (taken), teeth (brushed), potty (tinkled), books (two), song (one, poorly sung), and snuggle (his chin on my second rib). Now was the moment when our son’s eyelids were supposed to flutter gently closed,…

Interaction valence reveals contrasting social networks in dairy cattle

arXiv:2608.19222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social relationships shape access to resources, exposure to conflict and group stability, yet automated livestock monitoring typically treats behaviour as isolated events. Here, we present a valence-aware social-network framework that transforms video-derived interactions into herd-level representations of affiliative and agonistic organization. A pose-based computer-vision pipeline analysed 7 h 39 min…