Scott Aaronson: The AI warning signs we said we'd wait for are here
paraschopra · x · 2026-09-16
Scott Aaronson reflects on how his views on AI risk have shifted. Twenty years ago, mainstream CS academics (including him) found the implausible part of the takeover story to be the lack of warning signs—"wake me up when AI escapes containment or solves Millennium Problems." His updated take: those wild prophecies are coming true, from AlphaGo a decade ago to LLMs, coding and reasoning agents, accelerating into a "crescendo of wonders and terrors" this summer and fall. He criticizes the perpetual shell game where skeptics concede each dramatic AI milestone and simply move the goalposts to the next thing AI hasn't done yet.
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