Your average day starts with an alarm on your phone.

Sometimes, you wake up a couple of minutes before it sounds.

Sometimes, you find the button to snooze it.

Sometimes, you’re already on the phone and it appears as a notification.

But when you finally stop it, the lights in your room turn on and you start your day.

You walk out of your room. A presence sensor detects your motion, and a bulb in a cute little bamboo lamp from IKEA outside your room lights up.

You go downstairs, into the living room/kitchen/workspace area. As you come in, 20 different lights turn on in perfect sync. It is very satisfying.

You put some buckwheat to boil. Go upstairs to load a washing machine. Go through your morning routine (when you stop by your room, the lights turn on as you enter).

You go back downstairs. The lights are still on: You’ve not left the area for long enough. You eat your buckwheat with oat milk, open the laptop, and do some work.

An hour later, a notification appears: the washing machine has finished washing. (Depending on whether you tapped an NFC tag next to the washing machine with [...]

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Outline:

(04:28) 1. Home Assistant

(06:52) 2. Local network

(08:16) 3. Lights

(10:02) 4. Sensors and actuators

(13:30) 5. Automations

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I am a professor of economics. Throughout my career, I was mostly working on economic growth theory, and this eventually brought me to the topic of transformative AI / AGI / superintelligence. Nowadays my work focuses mostly on the promises and threats of this emerging disruptive technology.

Recently, jointly with Klaus Prettner, we’ve written a paper on “The Economics of p(doom): Scenarios of Existential Risk and Economic Growth in the Age of Transformative AI”. We have presented it at multiple conferences and seminars, and it was always well received. We didn’t get any real pushback; instead our research prompted a lot of interest and reflection (as I was reported, also in conversations where I wasn’t involved).

But our experience with publishing this paper in a journal is a polar opposite. To date, the paper got desk-rejected (without peer review) 7 times. For example, Futures—a journal “for the interdisciplinary study of futures, visioning, anticipation and foresight” justified their negative decision by writing: “while your results are of potential interest, the topic of your manuscript falls outside of the scope of this journal”.

Until finally, to our excitement, it was for once sent out for review. But then came the [...]

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[Meta: This is Max Harms. I wrote a novel about China and AGI, which comes out today. This essay from my fiction newsletter has been slightly modified for LessWrong.]

In the summer of 1983, Ronald Reagan sat down to watch the film War Games, starring Matthew Broderick as a teen hacker. In the movie, Broderick's character accidentally gains access to a military supercomputer with an AI that almost starts World War III.

After watching the movie, Reagan, newly concerned with the possibility of hackers causing real harm, ordered a full national security review. The response: “Mr. President, the problem is much worse than you think.” Soon after, the Department of Defense revamped their cybersecurity policies and the first federal directives and laws against malicious hacking were put in place.

But War Games wasn't the only story to influence Reagan. His administration pushed for the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") in part, perhaps, because the central technology—a laser that shoots down missiles—resembles the core technology behind the 1940 spy film Murder in the Air, which had Reagan as lead actor. Reagan was apparently such a superfan of The Day the Earth Stood Still [...]

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Outline:

(05:05) AI in Particular

(06:45) Whats Going On Here?

(11:19) Authorial Responsibility

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As far as I'm aware, Anthropic is the only AI company with official AGI timelines[1]: they expect AGI by early 2027. In their recommendations (from March 2025) to the OSTP for the AI action plan they say:

As our CEO Dario Amodei writes in 'Machines of Loving Grace', we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties:

[...]

They often describe this capability level as a "country of geniuses in a datacenter".

This prediction is repeated elsewhere and Jack Clark confirms that something like this remains Anthropic's view (as of September 2025). Of course, just because this is Anthropic's official prediction[2] doesn't mean that all or even most employees at Anthropic share the same view.[3] However, I do think we can reasonably say that Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, and Anthropic itself are all making this prediction.[4]

I think the creation of transformatively powerful AI systems—systems as capable or more capable than Anthropic's notion of powerful AI—is plausible in 5 years [...]

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Outline:

(02:27) What does powerful AI mean?

(08:40) Earlier predictions

(11:19) A proposed timeline that Anthropic might expect

(19:10) Why powerful AI by early 2027 seems unlikely to me

(19:37) Trends indicate longer

(21:48) My rebuttals to arguments that trend extrapolations will underestimate progress

(26:14) Naively trend extrapolating to full automation of engineering and then expecting powerful AI just after this is probably too aggressive

(30:08) What I expect

(32:12) What updates should we make in 2026?

(32:17) If something like my median expectation for 2026 happens

(34:07) If something like the proposed timeline (with powerful AI in March 2027) happens through June 2026

(35:25) If AI progress looks substantially slower than what I expect

(36:09) If AI progress is substantially faster than I expect, but slower than the proposed timeline (with powerful AI in March 2027)

(36:51) Appendix: deriving a timeline consistent with Anthropics predictions

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I like to wake up early to watch the sunrise. The sun hits the distant city first, the little sliver of it I can see through the trees. The buildings light up copper against the pale pink sky, and that little sliver is the only bit of saturation in an otherwise grey visual field. Then the sun starts to rise over the hill behind me. My house casts a blue shadow across the street, and a few trees start to get washed in pale gold. The fog burns away.

I sit at my window for an hour, and I don’t check my phone once. It's in another room. It doesn’t matter.

I have thoughts, looking down at the people below me. Most of them are fleeting, the kind of thing I think about texting to my boyfriend, but instead I let them pass. If something is worth remembering or exploring, I’ll write it down in a notebook, or on my digital typewriter. Sometimes it’ll become a 1500-word essay, sometimes a poem or a song. Often, the thought just stays there, to be returned to, turned over in my mind until I’ve figured out the larger shape of it.

I [...]

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I applaud Eliezer for trying to make himself redundant, and think it's something every intellectually successful person should spend some time and effort on. I've been trying to understand my own "edge" or "moat", or cognitive traits that are responsible for whatever success I've had, in the hope of finding a way to reproduce it in others, but I'm having trouble understanding a part of it, and try to describe my puzzle here. For context, here's an earlier EAF comment explaining my history/background and what I do understand about how my cognition differs from others.[1]

More Background

In terms of raw intelligence, I think I'm smart but not world-class. My SAT was only 1440, 99th percentile at the time, or equivalent to about 135 IQ. (Intuitively this may be an underestimate and I'm probably closer to 99.9th percentile in IQ.) I remember struggling to learn the GNFS factoring algorithm, and then meeting another intern at a conference who had not only mastered it in the same 3 months that I had, but was presenting an improvement on the SOTA. (It generally seemed like cryptography research was full of people much smarter than myself.) I also considered myself lazy or [...]

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Outline:

(00:41) More Background

(02:05) The Puzzle

(04:10) A Plausible Answer?

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When Sofia Corradi died on October 17th, the press was full of obituaries for the spiritual mother of Erasmus, the European student exchange programme, or, in the words of Umberto Eco, “that thing where a Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, meets a Flemish girl, falls in love with her, marries her, and starts a European family.”

Yet none of the obituaries I’ve seen stressed the most important and interesting aspect of the project: its unprecedented scale.

The second-largest comparable programme, the Fulbright in the United States, sends around nine thousand students abroad each year. Erasmus sends 1.3 million.

So far, approximately sixteen million people have taken part in the exchanges. That amounts to roughly 3% or the European population. And with the ever growing participation rates the ratio is going to get even gradually even higher.

Is short, this thing is HUGE.

***

As with many other international projects conceived in Europe in the latter half of the XX. century, it is ostensibly about a technical matter — scholarships and the recognition of credits from foreign universities — but at its heart, it is a peace project.

Corradi recounts a story from [...]

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Third in a series of short rationality prompts.

My opening rationality move is often "What's my goal?".

It is closely followed by: "Why is this hard? And, what can I do about that?".

If you're busting out deliberate "rationality" tools (instead of running on intuition or copying your neighbors), something about your situation is probably difficult.

It's often useful to explicitly enumerate "What's hard about this?", and list the difficulties accurately, and comprehensively[1], such that if you were to successfully deal with each hard thing, it'd be easy.

Then, you have new subgoals of "figure out how to deal with each of those hard-things." And you can brainstorm solutions[2].

Sometimes, those subgoals will also be hard. Then, the thing to do is ask "okay, what's hard about this subgoal, and how to do I deal with that?"

Examples

I'll do one example that's sort of "simple" (most of what I need to do is "try at all"), and one that's more complex (I'll need to do some fairly creative thinking to make progress).

Example 1: Bureaucracy while tired

I'm trying to fill out some paperwork. It requires some information I don't know how to get. (Later [...]

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(01:04) Examples

(01:17) Example 1: Bureaucracy while tired

(06:58) Example 2: Getting an LLM to actually debug worth a shit

(12:00) Recap

(12:37) Exercise for the reader

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1. 

I have claimed that one of the fundamental questions of rationality is “what am I about to do and what will happen next?” One of the domains I ask this question the most is in social situations.

There are a great many skills in the world. If I had the time and resources to do so, I’d want to master all of them. Wilderness survival, automotive repair, the Japanese language, calculus, heart surgery, French cooking, sailing, underwater basket weaving, architecture, Mexican cooking, functional programming, whatever it is people mean when they say “hey man, just let him cook.” My inability to speak fluent Japanese isn’t a sin or a crime. However, it isn’t a virtue either; If I had the option to snap my fingers and instantly acquire the knowledge, I’d do it.

Now, there's a different question of prioritization; I tend to pick new skills to learn by a combination of what's useful to me, what sounds fun, and what I’m naturally good at. I picked up the basics of computer programming easily, I enjoy doing it, and it turned out to pay really well. That was an over-determined skill to learn.

On the other [...]

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(00:10) 1.

(03:42) 2.

(06:44) 3.

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Below is the a transcript of the recent deposition of Ilya Sutskever on his time at OpenAI and the firing of Sam Altman. I'm posting it here in plain text so that it is easier to read and discuss.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA
OAKLAND DIVISION

ELON MUSK, et al.,
Plaintiffs,

v.

SAMUEL ALTMAN, et al.,
Defendants.

Case No. 4:24-cv-04722-YGR

VIDEOTAPED DEPOSITION OF ILYA SUTSKEVER

San Francisco, California
Wednesday, October 1, 2025

========
PAGE 128
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ATTORNEY MOLO: Well, you put -- you put these two screenshots in your memo; correct?

WITNESS SUTSKEVER: Yes.

ATTORNEY MOLO: All right. And then you sent your 52-page memo, Exhibit 19, to the independent directors of the board; correct?

WITNESS SUTSKEVER: Correct.

ATTORNEY MOLO: All right. Why didn't you send it to the entire board?

WITNESS SUTSKEVER: Because we were having the discussions with the independent directors only.

ATTORNEY MOLO: Okay. And what -- why didn't you send it to Sam Altman?

WITNESS SUTSKEVER: Because I felt that, had he become aware of these discussions, he would just find a way to make them disappear.

ATTORNEY MOLO: Okay. Were you careful about what you included in this document?

ATTORNEY [...]

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