Scott Aaronson: the AI skeptics' twenty-year-old defensible position has collapsed
avt_im · x · 2026-09-16
- Quantum computing researcher Scott Aaronson publishes "The Age of Wonders and Terrors," retracting his long-held AI skepticism.
- Twenty years ago the defensible take was: recursive self-improvement taking over the world without warning is sci-fi; we'd first see agents escaping containment, conspiring, and solving Millennium Problems — "wake me up then."
- His update: those prophecies came true — AlphaGo a decade ago, then LLMs, coding and reasoning agents, accelerating into a summer/fall "crescendo of wonders and terrors."
- He recoils from the moving-goalposts shell game where each AI milestone is instantly reframed as "no one ever denied that." The post includes the line that, by any honest accounting, Yudkowsky was right about civilization's greatest challenge.
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