Runaway AI could be the issue of 2028

One weird trick to fix recall vote, Census population growth estimates, mainline Protestants, Americans owning stocks, the Dem technology landscape

No. 360 | May 16th, 2025

🤖 Artificial Intelligence 

Having a newborn and a toddler under 2 can make you blissfully unaware of happenings in the outside world. (For instance, it took me a whole two days to hear about the David Hogg firing.) One of the interesting things I’ve missed since April was the AI 2027 report, co-written by Astral Codex Ten’s Scott Alexander. 

The report lays out a specific scenario for how a superintelligent AI agent might develop by 2027. Amid reports that it’s trying to evade human control, the U.S. faces a choice of unplugging it and potentially losing an AI arms race to China. 

I’m not much into the AI doomer scenarios because they’re hardly ever specific about how specifically the apocalypse would happen. Filling in the blanks, I imagine it to be things like AI being plugged into the grid or the nuclear launch codes, and acting autonomously to end civilization. That would indeed be bad. But it’s also not a new risk. It’s the same risk we’ve faced from the thr…