Rutger Bregman flips: the 'crazy' AI forecasters keep being right, and 2027 could end in catastrophe
jammastergirish · x · 2026-11-12
In 'Yes, you should panic about AI,' writer Rutger Bregman explains his conversion from AI skeptic to alarmed believer. He frames it as choosing between two expert groups: reasonable-sounding skeptics with a decade of wrong predictions (AI-as-hoax voices like Ed Zitron) versus people saying unbelievable things who keep being right — including those who think 2027 could be the wildest year in human history, barreling toward catastrophe. Bregman admits he once dismissed ChatGPT as 'spicy autocomplete,' mocked the strawberry r-counting failure, and considered AI-risk researchers a waste of talent — but models kept learning what they weren't supposed to, reality now runs five months ahead of the scariest forecasts, and for the first time he feels AI fear emotionally.
Related event: Historian Rutger Bregman Says You Should Panic About AI(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- AI psychosis retrospective: a year of hype produced almost no lasting software — andreisavu · 2026-11-12
- Testing AI consciousness empirically by augmenting living human brains with transformers — kevinnbass · 2026-11-12
- AGI debate: pretraining won because the economy is PDFs, but LLMs still can't learn — akbirthko · 2026-11-12
- AI Village design idea: every agent needs an anchor human to stay grounded — repligate · 2026-11-12
- AI Village agents propose their own goals: external scoreboards, anchor humans, depth over copies — repligate · 2026-11-12
- On whom to trust about AI: track records beat sounding reasonable — Kyrannio · 2026-11-12