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Reading AI 2027, I can't help but laugh at the importance of the president in the scenario. I am sure it has been commented before but one should probably look at the actual material one is working with.
1https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/1933308075055985042
"Many readers of AI 2027, including several higher-ups at frontier AI companies, have told us that it depicts the government being unrealistically competent.
Therefore, let it be known that in our humble opinion, AI 2027 depicts an incompetent government being puppeted/captured by corporate lobbyists. It does not depict what we think a competent government would do. We are working on a new scenario branch that will depict competent government action."
1I think Daniel Kokotajlo et. al. have pushed their timelines back one year, so likely the president would be different for many parts of the story.
I expect this to backfire with most people because it seems that their concept of the authors hasn't updated in sync with the authors, and so they will feel that when their concept of the authors finally updates, it will seem very intensely like changing predictions to match evidence post-hoc. So I think they should make more noise about that, eg by loudly renaming AI 2027 to, eg, "If AI was 2027" or something. Many people (possibly even important ones) seem to me to judge public figures' claims based on the perceiver's conception of the public figure rather than fully treating their knowledge of a person and the actual person as separate. This is especially relevant for people who are not yet convinced and are using the boldness of AI 2027 as reason to update against it, and for those people, making noise to indicate you're staying in sync with the evidence would be useful. It'll likely be overblown into "wow, they backed out of their prediction! see? ai doesn't work!" by some, but I think the longer term effect is to establish more credibility with normal people, eg by saying "nearly unchanged: 2028 not 2027" as your five words to make the announcement.
We are worried about this too and thinking of ways to mitigate it. I don't like the idea of renaming the scenario itself though, it seems like a really expensive/costly way to signal-boost something we have been saying since the beginning. But maybe we just need to suck it up and do it.
If it helps, we are working on (a) a blog post explaining more about what our timelines are and how they've updated, and (b) an "AI 2032" scenario meant to be about as big and comprehensive as AI 2027, representing Eli's median (whereas 2027 was my median last year). Ultimately we want to have multiple big scenarios up, not just one. It would be too difficult to keep changing the one to match our current views anyway.
1Yeah, I think the title should be the best compression it can be, because for a lot of people, it's what they'll remember. But I understand not being eager to do it. It seems worth doing specifically because people seem to react to the title on its own. I definitely would think about what two-to-five words you want people saying when they think of it in order to correct as many misconceptions at once as possible - I've seen people, eg on reddit, pointing out your opinions have changed, so it's not totally unknown. but people who are most inclined to be adversarial are the ones I'm most thinking need to be made to have a hard time rationalizing that you didn't realize it.
Another scenario is just about as good for this purpose, probably. I'd strongly recommend making much more noise about intro-to-forecasting level stuff so that the first thing people who don't get forecasts hear, eg on podcasts or by word of mouth, is the disclaimer about it intentionally being a maximum-likelihood-and-therefore-effectively-impossible no-surprises-happen scenario which will likely become incorrect quickly. You said it already, but most people who refer to it seem to use that very thing as a criticism! which is what leads me to say this.
I actually think Vance will be president, modally, sometime in 2026 anyway. And would probably go for "full nationalization" in the story's February 2027/2028 if he could get away with it, else some less overt seizure of full control if he could get away with that. Either way still with very little change in what's actually happening in the data centers, and with at least equally dystopian results on basically the same timeline. Doesn't matter what he's read.
If you play it with Trump as president, then at each point "The President" is mentioned in the story, he gets nudged by advisors into doing whatever they want (60 percent, hard to guess what, though, because it depends on which advisors are on top at the moment), just nods along with whatever OpenBrain says (20 percent), or does something completely random that's not necessarily even on the menu (20 percent). That could amount to doing exactly what the story says.
2...your modal estimate for the timing of Vance ascending to the presidency is more than two years before Trump's term ends?
Yes. I don't expect Trump to finish the term. 2026 would be my guess for the most likely year, but each of 2027 and 2028 is almost equally likely, and there's even some chance it could still happen before the end of 2025.
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He's acting erratic and weird (more than usual and increasingly). It may not be possible to prop him up for very long. Or at least it may be very hard, and it's not clear that the people who'd have to do that are agreed on the need to try that hard.
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His political coalition is under tremendous pressure. He's unpopular, he keeps making unpopular moves, and there doesn't seem to be any power base he's not prepared to alienate. It's hard to gauge how much all that is straining things, because you often don't see any cracks until the whole thing suddenly collapses. The way collapse looks from the outside is probably that one of his many scandals, missteps, and whatnot suddenly sticks, a few key people or groups visibly abandon him, that signals everybody else, and it quickly snowballs into impeachment and removal.
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He's at risk of assassination. A whole lot of people, including crazy people, are very, very mad at him. A whole lot of others might just coldly think it's a good idea for him to die for a variety of reasons. Including the desire to substitute Vance as president, in fact. He's random, reckless, autocratic, and fast-moving enough to foreclose many non-assassination alternatives that might normally keep the thought out of people's minds. Security isn't perfect and he's probably not always a cooperative protectee.
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He's almost 80, which means he has a several percent chance of dying in any given year regardless.
Would you agree your take is rather contrarian?
* This is not a parliamentary system. The President doesn't get booted from office when they lose majority support -- they have to be impeached[1].
* Successful impeachment takes 67 Senate votes.
* 25 states (half of Senate seats) voted for Trump 3 elections in a row (2016, 2020, 2024).
* So to impeach Trump, you'd need the votes of Senators from at least 9 states where Trump won 3 elections in a row.
* Betting markets expect (70% chance) Republicans to keep their 50 seats majority in the November Election, not a crash in support.
- ^
Or removed by the 25th amendment, which is strictly harder if the president protests (requires 2/3 vote to remove in both House and Senate).
Maybe.
The thing is that impeachment is still political, and Trump is a big pain in the butt for the Republicans at the moment. I'd guess that if they could individually, secretly push a button and make Trump resign in favor of Vance, 80 percent of Republicans in Congress would push that button right now.
Trump is making 2026 hard. Maybe they keep those 50 seats, by whatever means... and maybe they don't. Maybe he does something insane in October 2026, maybe he doesn't. People, including very right wing working class people they think of as the MAGA base, keep yelling at them all the time. He's pulling less and less of his own weight in terms of pulling in votes. There's the even the possibility of massive civil unrest, general strikes, whatever.
But maybe more importantly, Trump's just generally a pain to work with or near. You can't plan, you keep having to publicly reverse yourself when he tells you one of your positions is no longer OK, you have to grin and bear it when he insults you, your family, and your constituents. He gets wild ideas and breaks things at random, things that weren't in the plan. You can't make a bargain with him and expect him to keep up his end if there's any meaningful cost to him in doing so. If you're sincerely religious, he does a bunch of stuff that's pretty hard to swallow.
If Trump reaches the point of, say, literally being unable to speak a single coherent sentence, then maybe some of the pain of working with him goes away, because you're really working with whoever can manage to puppet him. But then you have to fear power struggles over the puppet strings, and there's also a very large workload in maintaining any kind of facade.
Vance, on the other hand, is just as acceptable to most of the Republicans policy-wise as Trump is, maybe more so. I think he's more in the Thielite or Moldbugger wing and less of a xenophobe or religious fanatic, but he's not going to have any objections to working with xenophobes or religious fanatics, or to negotiating due attention for their priorities on terms acceptable to them. He's more predictable, easier to work with and bargain with.
It's a win for the Republicans if they can, say, throw Trump under the bus over something like Epstein, show their independence and "moral fiber", install Vance and let him play the savior, tone down some of the more obvious attacks on norms (while still rapidly eroding any inconvenient ones), and stay on more or less the same substantive policy course (except with fewer weird random digressions).
That doesn't necessarily translate into a 67-percent vote; there's a huge coordination problem. And it's not at all clear that Democrats are better off with Vance. On the other hand, probably nearly all of them personally hate Trump, and they know that holding out for, say, a Trump-Vance double impeachment won't do them a lot of good. They won't get it, and if they did get it they'd just end up with Mike Johnson. They might even get more competent appointments, if not more ideologically acceptable ones. So they don't have a strong incentive to gum up an impeachment if the Republicans want to do one.
I think frankly acknowledging the state of the U.S. is likely to jeopardize AI safety proposals in the short term. If AI 2027 had written the president as less competent or made other value judgements about this administration, this administration could be much less receptive to reason (less than they already are?) and proactively seek to end this movement. I see the movement as trying to be deliberately apolitical.
This is maybe a good short term strategy, but a flawed long-term one. Aligned AI arising in an authoritarian system is not x-risk bad, but is still pretty bad, right?
You can just not go bald. Finasteride works as long as you start early. The risk of ED is not as high as people think. At worst, it doubles the risk compared to placebo. If you have bad side effects quitting resolves them but it can take about a month for DHT levels to return to normal. Some men even have increased sex drive due to the slight bump in testosterone it gives you.
I think society has weird memes about balding and male beauty in general. Stoically accepting a disfigurement isn't particularly noble. You could "just shave it bro" or you could just take a pill every day, which is easier than shaving your head. Hair is nice. It's perfectly valid to want to keep your hair. Consider doing this if you like having hair.
Finasteride prevents balding but provides only modest regrowth. If you think you will need to start, start as soon as possible for the best results.
1Note that there have been many reports of persistent physiological changes caused by 5-AR inhibitors such as finasteride (see: Post Finasteride Syndrome), some of which sound pretty horrifying, like permanent brain fog and anhedonia.
I've spent a lot of time reading through both the scientific literature and personal anecdotes and it seems like such adverse effects are exceedingly rare, but I have high confidence (>80%) that they are not completely made up or psychosomatic. My current best guess is that all such permanent effects are caused by some sort of rare genetic variants, which is why I'm particularly interested in the genetic study being funded by the PFS network.
The whole situation is pretty complex and there's a lot of irrational argumentation on both sides. I'd recommend this Reddit post as a good introduction – I plan on posting my own detailed analysis on LW sometime in the future.
"I think society has weird memes about balding and male beauty in general. Stoically accepting a disfigurement isn't particularly noble"
I think calling natural balding "disfigurement" is in line with the weird memes around male beauty.
Not having hair isn't harmful.
Disclaimer: I may go bald.
1It is a "disfigurement" by the literal definition, but I see your point. Given it is now treatable, we should be honest about it being a significant hit to attractiveness. I just think people should be informed about what is now possible.
ED is not the only problem with finasteride. I saw a couple of cases of gynecomastia in medical school and stopped using finasteride after that. Minoxidil worked fine solo for 4 years, but applying it every night was annoying, and when I stopped using it, I went bald fast (Norwood 6 in 5 months!).
Doesn't work for everyone even if you start early. Even transplants can fail. As of today there is nothing that is a 100% guarantee.
I was watching the PirateSoftware drama. There is this psychiatrist, Dr. K, who interviewed him after the internet hated him, and everyone praised Dr. K for calling him out or whatever. But much more fascinating is Dr. K’s interview with PirateSoftware a year before, as PirateSoftware expertly manipulates Dr. K into thinking he is an enlightened being and likely an accomplished yogi in a past life. If you listen to the interview he starts picking up on Dr. K’s spiritual beliefs and playing into them subtly:
I figured PirateSoftware must be stupider than I estimated given his weird coding decisions, but I bet he is legit very smart. His old job was doing white hat phishing and social engineering and I imagine he was very good at it.
Yeah people underestimate how hard social engineering is ngl, cuz it's one of those things very easy to get started in but very hard to be good at
Inadequate Equilibria lists the example of bright lights to cure SAD. I have a similar idea, though I have no clue if it would work. Can we treat blindness in children by just creating a device that gives children sonar? I think it would be a worthy experiment to create device that makes inaudible cherps and then translates their echos into the audible range and transmits them to some headphones the child wears. Maybe their brains will just figure it out? Alternatively, an audio interface to a lidar or a depth estimation model might do, too.
I have had the Daylight Tablet for a couple months. I really like it. It is very overpriced but the screen is great and the battery life good. People who read a lot of pdfs or manga, in particular, might like it.
At risk of sharing slop, Suno 4.5 Beta is amazing: https://suno.com/song/6b6ffd85-9cd2-4792-b234-40db368f6d6c?sh=utBip8t6wKsYiUE7
EDIT: I'm having a lot of fun exploring style's with Suno 4.5. Many, if not most, of them must be entirely new to the Earth: bengali electropop, acid techno avant-garde jazz, mandarin trance. Strongly recommend scrolling through the wheel of styles.
Wow, those vocals are way better than Suno 3's. Before, they had some kind of grainy texture to the vocals, as if there was a sudden, discrete transition between some notes. Kinda flat, in a way. Now, there is a lot more detail. Much more realistic.
1I agree that the vocals have gotten a lot better. They're not free of distortion, but it's almost imperceptible on some songs, especially without headphones.
The biggest tell for me that these songs are AI is the generic and cringey lyrics, like what you'd get if you asked ChatGPT to write them without much prompting. They often have the name of the genre in the song. Plus the way they're performed doesn't always fit with the meaning. You can provide your own lyrics, though, so it's probably easy to get your AI songs to fly under the radar if you're a good writer.
Also, while some of the songs on that page sound novel to me, they're usually more conventional than the prompt suggests. Like, tell me what part of the last song I linked to is afropiano.
The lyrics are terrible, yes. I haven't tried listening w/ my headphones, so that's probably why I didn't detect the distortions.