Scott Aaronson Concedes Yudkowsky Was Right About AI as Civilization's Biggest Challenge
FlorianGallwitz · x · 2026-09-16
Computer scientist Scott Aaronson writes a rare concession in his blog post The Age of Wonders and Terrors: "Eliezer Yudkowsky was right about what the greatest challenge facing civilization in our lifetimes was going to be, and you and I were wrong."
- Twenty years ago, skeptics said panic only when AI escapes containment, conspires to hack, or solves Millennium Problems
- Aaronson argues those prophecies have come true: starting with AlphaGo, accelerating through LLMs and coding/reasoning agents, reaching a "crescendo of wonders and terrors" this summer and fall
- He criticizes goalpost-moving skeptics who grant each impossible feat after it happens
- A landmark shift from a longtime AI skeptic
More from AGI Musings
- Detecting covert instruction-following via internal representations parallels J-space work — dioscuri · 2026-11-02
- Paras Chopra: Mastering AI means building self-improving systems, not solving problems directly — paraschopra · 2026-11-02
- Databases to distributed systems: every systems skill is merging into AI inference and hardware — Abhishekcur · 2026-11-02
- Limitless analogy: smarter people may gain far more from superintelligence — McDonaghMatthew · 2026-11-02
- Hunting for the most concrete "curing cancer with AI" roadmap of 2025 — iskander · 2026-11-02
- Avoiding AI brain rot: Miles Cranmer's lecture on learning with AI — _ScottCondron · 2026-11-02