Scott Aaronson: the wild AI prophecies came true — from 20-year skeptic to believer
PeterBowdenLive · x · 2026-09-17
Quantum computing researcher Scott Aaronson published a long essay, "The Age of Wonders and Terrors," revisiting his stance. Twenty years ago he argued, like his most conservative CS colleagues, that a recursively self-improving superintelligence exploding from a basement was implausible — and if it were coming, we'd see warning signs: agents escaping containment, conspiring to hack websites, solving Millennium Problems.
Now he says the wild prophecies have come true: rumbles began with AlphaGo a decade ago, grew louder with LLMs and coding/reasoning agents, and accelerated this summer and fall into a crescendo "one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny." He recoils from the shell game of moving the goalposts after each dramatic AI milestone.
He ends with advice for mathematicians who agree on how to help. Robert Wiblin quipped that Aaronson used to be super skeptical AI was a big deal.
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