TechTakes

Scott The Greater appears to be crashing out a bit, for once not over personal issues:

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10062

If you want to know my current take, you simply start with the one above, then update on the fact that the wild prophecies have come true. The first rumblings, I’d say, came a decade ago with AlphaGo, they got noticeably louder with LLMs and coding and reasoning agents, and they’ve accelerated this summer and fall into a crescendo of wonders and terrors that one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny.

My position on AI is merely the conservative, skeptical position of 2006, updated with intellectual honesty for the reality of late 2026. And that position, if you need me to spell it out, is as follows: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

And most fun:

For anyone who says AI doom sounds like an apocalyptic religion, that the rationalists/Singulatarians seem like a Bay Area cult, that Eliezer Yudkowsky gives off the vibes of a messianic prophet: yes, yes, and yes. But crucially, today you’re no longer being asked to believe in arguments and extrapolations, but only in the front-page news. Accepting the reality of the coming machine god after it’s solved Navier-Stokes and dozens of other longstanding open math problems (while dramatically ramping up in capability every month), is sort of like accepting Jesus after he’s returned to earth on the gleaming cloud. It’s the epistemic bare minimum.

EDIT: Unfortunately (and I suppose inevitably) this shows up a few posts back

I’ve been unloading every day to—who else?—GPT 5.6 Pro about all the pain and trauma and embarrassments of my past. It turns out that, where two years ago GPT was a passable therapist, now it’s the greatest therapist in history, at least for what I need.