Scott Aaronson: AI's 'wild prophecies' came true — welcome to the age of wonders and terrors
tokenbender · x · 2026-09-17
Quantum computing scholar Scott Aaronson's long essay "The Age of Wonders and Terrors" recounts his update on AI: twenty years ago he and skeptical CS colleagues agreed the implausible part of takeover stories was a warning-free singularity — we'd first see agents escaping containment, conspiring, and solving Millennium Problems. Those "wild prophecies" have largely come true, from AlphaGo to LLMs to this summer's coding and reasoning agents. He rails against the shell game of moving the goalposts after each dramatic AI milestone, concluding the only way out is through an ever-faster game of Tetris.
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