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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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AI 2040: Plan A

The AI 2027 authors published a follow-up. Scott Alexander also wrote a separate blogpost and although not in the author list contributed.

It's a very speculative and optimistic timeline of AI's future evolution. It presents five ways or "plans" the US government will intervene. Unsurprisingly, the ASI-pilled authors favor strong, global regulation to ensure alignment. Summaries:

  • Plan A (recommended): the US makes an international treaty with China, pauses AI training (not inference, i.e. no new models but we keep using existing ones), enforces full transparency of future research, then when alignment research advances enough carefully resumes

  • Plan S: the US makes an international treaty with China and pauses AI training for as long as possible

  • Plan B: the US regulates AI at home and demands China also regulate, but doesn't negotiate with them, probably leading to a war

  • Plan C: the US regulates AI and ignores China, so they overtake it and reach ASI first

  • Plan D: the US doesn't regulate AI, we get ASI in early 2031 and it probably kills everyone

Personally, I just don't share the optimism of these guys in either direction.

I think politicians will prioritize culture war and the failing economy over AI regulation, and at most pass some executive orders suggesting companies be more careful. But I also doubt we'll have ASI that can solve the abstract problems "take over the world" or even "keep existing world leaders in power" (they're getting old and increasingly unpopular, their parties may remain in power but only if their policies significantly shift).

What I expect from AI:

  • Basically solve legacy code by rewriting entire codebases, applying very niche domain knowledge, and actually finding and handling edge-cases better than humans

  • Greatly speedup research, leading to new discoveries and inventions. Important but background things like food preservation and medicine will improve from AI-assisted discoveries. Major advancements in math and theoretical physics

  • Much better and cheaper education, therapy, initial medical/legal appointments, personal repairs...maybe reducing but not eliminating human jobs, because human experts will offer these services "premium"

  • Won't replace human artists. Some advertisements and infographics will be AI but even some will still be human. At best it will assist them in a way where the human still fully controls the output, e.g. by generating code leading to new and improved software tools to learn, practice, and create art

  • Used by the vast majority as a personal assistant, but doesn't replace human relations

Personally, I just don't share the optimism of these guys in either direction.

I think it's worse than that. They had, what, a decade of a head start on this subject? Two? Did they come up with a single actually applicable benchmark that can be used to judge a model's progress to "ASI"? Did they come up with a single benchmark to judge alignment?

I'm struggling to understand why I should listen to a single word they are saying.

Yeah and also there is a surprising amount of overlap between the people who think AI is going to plausibly kill us all and the people actually involved in building cutting edge AI.

"Hey guys ASI is an existential risk. Btw have checked out this new model we've made, it's so awesome we're going to get ASI any day now."

Hmmm all the normies think we're either insane or evil or both. Wherever could they have gotten that idea?

"Our model is so powerful that we are scared of releasing it" is a recurring marketing ploy that has been used since gpt-2

Nobody including AI optimists believed that the key to the whole thing would be a relatively basic semi-novel kind of statistical model. GPT-2 could have been trained in like 2005. There are thousands of ideas in physics, math, philosophy, biology, whatever that are vastly more conceptually complex than transformer models. They had no idea how it could be built, or would be built, so why expect them to predict how it could be tested reliably?

GPT-2 cost about $40k of compute to train in 2018. Naively applying Moore's law, that much compute would have cost about 400 times as much in 2005, so someone would have needed to be willing to drop $16 million on a hunch. (What actually happened is that the first deep learning models were used on narrower problems so you could get a higher performance on less training).

Very much one of those "if you can imagine in extreme detail exactly how a new tech would work, you should in principle be able to build that tech RIGHT NOW, given the materials" situations.

They didn't predict it because anyone who could predict it that well would have just built it.

We have an ASI benchmark, courtesy of ByteDance Seed. Or rather, a framework for one. https://edge-bench.org/ has no ceiling.

Though what does it matter? The steam hammer won.

The fact that they dominate these but still stumble on basic interactivity with the same inputs a human should tell you something about the validity of "intelligence" as a single unified metric for these tools. We'll most likely get ad hoc solutions fix it, but "AI" is a complete and utter misnomer, and not having come up with good categories for these is one of the worst philosophical blunders in recent times, and it predictably generates insane results like these totalitarian proposals.

Also ARC-AGI. Specifically, when an AI beats ARC-AGI 3 it’s not necessarily ASI; when it beats ARC-AGI 4, 5…until we cannot make a test that a human can still beat and it cannot, then it’s ASI.

I agree, whenever rationalist types discuss AI, it sounds like they're living in an alternate reality.

Yet their discussions are still interesting and, via insight, occasionally useful. Scott Alexander started (what eventually led to) this forum; him, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others invented lots of terminology and concepts we take for granted. I doubt they would've if not for the same personality traits that cause them to keep being wrong about AI (mainly, logic over empiricism). A person can't predict anything without occasionally being wrong, or have any good ideas without occasional bad ideas.

Yet their discussions are still interesting and, via insight, occasionally useful.

Yeah, but it feels like putting Gene Roddenberry in charge of Earth defense, upon news of an alien invasion.

I mean, they've kind of done just that at times.

Wether that's a case of actually producing something worthwhile or 'A fool and his money are soon parted' depends on which side of the debate you stand, I suppose.

The discussions are indeed interesting and maybe even worthwhile, but then they start dreaming of carving up the lightcone and we'll all have our own solar systems and be immortal uploaded transhumans working on how to reverse the heat death of the universe thanks to god-tier AI making us all post-Singularity post-scarcity, and I go "goodnight and good luck, boys" because even though I've loved SF since I was seven years of age, I've lived long enough to see the glowing forecasts of the dreams of my fellow nerds not come to pass now that we're in the far-flung glorious future age of the 21st century.

“It is well that I have heard you,” said Oyarsa. “For though your mind is feebler, your will is less bent than I thought. It is not for yourself that you would do all this.”

“No,” said Weston proudly in Malacandrian. “Me die. Man live.”

“Yet you know that these creatures would have to be made quite unlike you before they lived on other worlds.”

“Yes, yes. All new. No one know yet. Strange! Big!”

“Then it is not the shape of body that you love?”

“No. Me no care how they shaped.”

“One would think, then, that it is for the mind you care. But that cannot be, or you would love hnau wherever you met it.”

“No care for hnau. Care for man.”

“But if it is neither man’s mind, which is as the mind of all other hnau—is not Maleldil maker of them all?—nor his body, which will change—if you care for neither of these, what do you mean by man?”

This had to be translated to Weston. When he understood it, he replied:

“Me care for men—care for our race—what man begets—” he had to ask Ransom the worlds for race and beget.

“Strange!” said Oyarsa. “You do not love any one of your race—you would have let me kill Ransom. You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, that what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left.”

“Tell him,” said Weston when he had been made to understand this, “that I don’t pretend to be a metaphysician. I have not come here to chop logic. If he cannot understand—as apparently you can’t either—anything so fundamental as a man’s loyalty to humanity, I can’t make him understand it.”

But Ransom was unable to translate this and the voice of Oyarsa continued.

“I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little, blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you why it is a law you give no other reason for it than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to disobey. Do you know why he has done this?”

“Me think no such person—me wise, new man—no believe all that old talk.”

“I will tell you. He has left you this one because a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one. He has only bent you; but this Thin One who sits on the ground he has broken, for he has left him nothing but greed. He is now only a talking animal and in my world he could do no more evil than an animal. If he were mine I would unmake his body for the hnau in it is already dead. But if you were mine I would try to cure you. Tell me, Thick One, why did you come here?”

“Me tell you. Make man live all the time.”

“But are your wise men so ignorant as not to know that Malacandra is older than your own world and nearer its death? Most of it is dead already. My people live only in the handramits; the heat and the water have been more and will be less. Soon now, very soon, I will end my world and give back my people to Maleldil.”

“Me know all that plenty. This only first try. Soon they go on another world.”

“But do you not know that all worlds will die?”

“Men go jump off each before it deads—on and on, see?”

“And when all are dead?”

  • C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

Thank you for reminding me to read more C. S. Lewis.

As theistic debates go, this appears to be a particularly crude one on part of Lewis. Not only being inherently deficient because he writes for both his side and his opponent, but also writing his opponent's side inarticulately. This is the equivalent of drawing the christian as the chad and the atheist as the soyjak.

Well, it's not an essay – it's a novel. I think the antagonist's weak grip on this Martian tongue (I don't recall which of the two they are speaking in this scene) is symbolic and not just to make his argument look weak.

It's justified in universe because the protagonist is a philologist, specifically J.R.R. Tolkein with the serial numbers filed off, while the antagonists are mad scientists who aren't particularly trained in languages. They built a working spaceship with 1930s tech, learned a non-human tongue to at least a broken level, and survived long enough to argue with a planetary archangel/god, so they might be fools but they aren't idiots.

If you dislike this one then you'll absolutely hate what he does in the sequel. One of the main ideas in the sequel is roughly "Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits. Sometimes you just need to beat him to death (literally, physically, with your bare hands)."

I liked the sequel more, actually. "I guess we'll just have to kill 'em" is far more honest. Every atheist who's talked to smart theologists knows there can be those who can beat you in an argument even when they're wrong.

Speaking as a Christian, one flaw in CS Lewis’ otherwise great writing is that he cannot depict atheism without curling his lip and stacking the deck. Agnosticism, yes, many of the defects of faith yes, but not atheism.

To be fair to him, he was at Oxford at the time when English socialite atheism was at its most arrogant and self absorbed, when atheism (as opposed to agnosticism) was a stance you took on to Make a Statement.

Likely because CS Lewis was an atheist and only converted back to Christianity later in life, partly due to one unremarkable fellow by the name of Tolkien.

I used to be firmly on the side of Brave New World being the relevant dystopia novel for our world rather than 1984. I've recently reread the space trilogy and I am forced to come to the conclusion that if half of what the techno-capitalists dreamed up turns out to be more than a power fantasy by a bunch of delusional nerds, the Space trilogy might turn out to be the best literary description of the evil facing us presently.

Lewis calling his villains NICE (the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) and then we unironically get NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence).

He was spot-on about politicians just loving some acronym that sounds, well, nice in order to sell shit to the public 😁

I agree, whenever rationalist types discuss AI, it sounds like they're living in an alternate reality.

That's largely my feeling here - a baffled "what the heck are you talking about?", in that what they describe this supposed 'AI' being or doing is just totally detached from anything these systems have been able to do in reality. It feels that they are inhabiting a totally different world entirely.

I guess it's fun that they're indulging their hobby of amateur science fiction writing, but I'm just not seeing any of the points where this is supposed to touch on the real world.

Well for the last 4 years we've been burning through benchmarks at great speed. We're onto ARC-AGI 3 now, SWE-Pro is just now out... What benchmark were they supposed to make 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago? How would that benchmark help with anything? We can already see a clear trend in rapid capability growth. Just the other day OpenAI's entry trounced a bunch of people at the AtCoder world programming contest. In that sense it's 'superhuman'. Not in all senses but in some, certainly.

These were the guys who are worried about recursive self improvement and then we have Anthropic nerfing Fable's ML skills so it doesn't help competitors making AI, we have OpenAI guys on twitter saying 'GPT5.6 Sol did the post-training on GPT5.6 Luna'.

That seems pretty self-improving to me? Doesn't seem like ASI is too far distant.

Has the legal system come up with a benchmark for aligning humans in the last 5000 years? Not really, that's not something we can do. We can tell between more or less trustworthy people though, set up incentives and checks and scrutiny. Same with AIs. There are a tonne of benchmarks for safety, just like there are tonnes of checks put on people working in intelligence agencies. Do they actually work, would they work on something inhuman and super smart? Who knows! That's the whole point!

It's an innately tough problem. How do you tell if your subordinate is planning to betray you? This issue is older than human civilization and has certainly not been benchmarked!

There are lots of other reasons to be skeptical about their assumptions. Them not producing a tonne of benchmarks should not be one of them. Their desire seems to be pretty good, it's just an innately hard problem.

These were the guys who are worried about recursive self improvement and then we have Anthropic nerfing Fable's ML skills so it doesn't help competitors making AI, we have OpenAI guys on twitter saying 'GPT5.6 Sol did the post-training on GPT5.6 Luna'.

This was mostly adapting an existing config.

He said that would've taken a couple of engineers a few weeks to do, so not a small effort.

Well for the last 4 years we've been burning through benchmarks at great speed.

Ok, and how many of them were done by MIRI?

We're onto ARC-AGI 3 now, SWE-Pro is just now out... What benchmark were they supposed to make 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago?

Exactly the ones we burned through? We're talking about math and theory here, I don't see a reason why these things couldn't be prepared ahead of time.

These were the guys who are worried about recursive self improvement and then we have Anthropic nerfing Fable's ML skills so it doesn't help competitors making AI, we have OpenAI guys on twitter saying 'GPT5.6 Sol did the post-training on GPT5.6 Luna'.

That seems pretty self-improving to me?

No? Distillation is not self-improvement. The kind of recursive self-improvement the Rats were talking about would be if you could distill Fable just from the output of Opus.

Has the legal system come up with a benchmark for aligning humans in the last 5000 years?

Interesting comparison. Let me take a particular aspect of the legal system that is analogous here. Way back when, people would occasionally get into fight about gun control on this forum (and I think that the kind of dynamics I'm about to describe still occasionally pop up). A blue triber would say they're just in favor of "common sense regulation", and what would inevitably surface from conversation is that:

a) They have no idea how guns actually work, leading them to suggest laws far more unreasonable than they imagined, and
b) To the extent their ideas were "common sense", they had no idea of what laws were already on the books, and didn't know that laws far more restrictive were already in effect

I don't think we should listen to people like that on policy, and I think it's roughly analogous to the Rat crowd on AI.

The kind of recursive self-improvement the Rats were talking about would be if you could distill Fable just from the output of Opus.

It's not distillation that we're talking about, this is what the guy is saying. The model is actually doing the training process directly. Aidan works at OpenAI on post-training.

https://x.com/aidan_mclau/status/2075328409400738229

i cannot tell you how routine it is for me to have 5.6 e2e do an entire rl run

He also says that it's guided a lot by his taste.

Likewise, it's not Fable distillation that we're talking about but Fable actually directly performing research tasks in machine learning, overseeing experiments, improving utilization. 'How do I get GPU utilization up Fable, look at these stats for me and these logs, should I change the kernel?' is what we're talking about. Anthropic deliberately degrades that ability.

Now I agree that what is being proposed in AI 2040 is very difficult and a little naive. The notion that the US is gonna build all these datacentres in Mongolia so China could feel confident they could capture them is pretty unlikely, that's not really how it works... It has a sense of nerdy 'here's my rules-lawyering to fix the problem' to it. But what is the alternative path? Unilateral racing? A free for all between the most psychopathic/paranoid billionaire and intelligence agency spook for control? This is the best answer they could find, given the constraints of the system. I can't come up with anything better, so even while I have criticisms I think that on the whole they did a decent job.

When you say "they" are you referring to the authors of this piece?

What is the value of having a benchmark to judge progress?

Yud and Scott in particular at a minimum, and/or the AI 2027/2040 people, but honestly, the entirety of the AI-focused Rat-sphere in general.

What is the value of having a benchmark to judge progress?

Approximately the same as the value of a thermometer when you want to talk about global warming.

Yudkowsky, MIRI, and related orgs sure, but why would Scott, a psychiatrist who happens to be interested in ratsphere ideas, be responsible? That's like saying a random Trump voter should already have solved the Iran crisis.

But at least on the former, I would agree with post by RandomRanger above that it's not clear what value creating a benchmark 10 years ago would even have in the current environment. I'm pretty sure that MIRI were working on solving alignment itself, rather than working on hypothetical benchmarks for potential future AI technologies. Unless there is a demonstratable link, why would you ask them to do that?

but why would Scott, a psychiatrist who happens to be interested in ratsphere ideas, be responsible?

Why does Scott, a psychiatrist who happens to be interested in ratsphere ideas, coauthor these websites that purport to be about serious policy proposals?

You want someone who can write, write well, write persuasively, and has people skills. The maths stats and rats people can come up with the theory, now you need to present it to the normies (and you hope, people in power).

(I'm hoping they learned some lessons re: "politicians and people in power" because I'm still laughing about the massive misjudgement of the Carrick Flynn campaign. "It's a bunch of rubes in redneck country, how hard can it be for Smart Intelligent EA-aligned people to win that election?" God bless their good intentions, it took me two minutes looking the race up online to figure out "his opponent has union backing while he's been away in the Big City for years by this point? yeah I know who I'd bet on as winner").

In fact he did not coauthor "plan a".

I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this—and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback—we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be.

Even if he's not an official coauthor, he did make substantial contributions.

Because that is within his potential remit, while the hard maths of alignment is well outside his potential remit

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