David Bau: Humanity falling behind AI is a choice, not an inevitability
davidbau · x · 2026-11-08
MIT researcher David Bau pushes back on the fashionable claim that AI will soon think beyond humanity's grasp, noting nobody can produce a single genuinely "unthinkable" thought. Citing the UGC proof: the AI's writeups were ugly, but experts are rewriting them, and a month later Dana Moshkovitz is already giving talks on how it works.
His core argument: short of an impossibility proof, humanity falling behind is a choice — if AI thoughts can in principle be understood, whether we understand them depends on the engineering, social structures, science, and norms we build. He also asks why we are bold in making AI smarter yet afraid of solving the hard problem of human insight.
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