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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Your AI predictions should include who wins the longbet 1 in 2029.

I think it just depends on how adversarial the judging ends up being rather than saying anything about capabilities.

If the judges have to stay within guardrails then 3.5 could probably win the longbet, but if they're allowed to exploit jailbreaks or known LLM failure cases, then nothing short of ASI is going to pass the test.

Probably Ray Kurzweil because the Turing Test is weak. It seems plausible LLMs pass it right now.

I always viewed the Turing Test similar to Moore’s Law (which isn’t really a law at all; in some areas it’s already stopped; in others it’s expected to stop very soon if it hasn’t very recently). A useful empirical regularity or heuristic, provided you don’t put too much weight on it.

It's also typically presented in a pretty oversimplified/watered down way -- like, "what if a computer could talk to you and you couldn't tell that it wasn't a human -- wouldn't that computer be reasonably described as 'intelligent'?"

In Turing's actual paper, he proposes a very specific and adversarial game -- with which I think current AIs would struggle greatly. Not that Turing's arguments that winning would mean AI are all that convincing either (as I recall he knocks down a bunch of strawmen for like 2/3 of the paper) -- but his game itself is deliberately very hard to win.