Show Notes
A Is For America It's increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real. Some people have suggestions, but they're all things like "regulate a little more" or "regulate a little less" or "react to things as they come up". This won't be enough. Not just because things may move too quickly - although they will - but because in order to regulate or react, you need to know what you're aiming for, and it's increasingly clear that people can't even visualize what AI going well could look like. What would it take to honestly tell our children that we rose to the occasion, to make the AI transition go down alongside the American Revolution and D-Day as one of our country's finest hours? If your brain sputters and throws an error message at the question, isn't that a problem? It's a total coincidence that Plan A comes out the week after America's 250th birthday. It was supposed to come out earlier, but got delayed. Then it was supposed to come out later, but got pushed forward. Still, the saying goes "A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives exactly when he means to." And if anyone qualifies as wizards, it's Daniel Kokotajlo and his team of forecasters at the AI Futures Project. I previously wrote about Daniel's eerie accuracy over the 2021 - 2025 period. Since then, they've gained worldwide fame for their AI 2027 scenario, which predicted the rise and quick takeover of coding agents in early 2026, plus something like the fight over Fable1. Plan A isn't another prediction. It's a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future. It describes the best course of action that Daniel and the AI Futures Project can come up with, and what would happen if we took it. "Really? You got America a policy paper for its 250th birthday? Doesn't America already have enough policy papers?" Sort of, but it's not exactly a policy paper. It starts in a timeline similar to that of AI 2027, on track for a poorly-controlled intelligence explosion that either ends the world or dooms it to permanent techno-oligarchy. But this time, America is blessed with some extra foresight and determination, and makes only good choices (all non-Americans behave naturally, including trying to thwart America when incentivized to do so). It gives a year-by-year description of this best-of-all-possible-worlds, from now through 2040, as predicted by the best AI forecasters alive, with over a dozen supplements explaining all the implementation details. This is a crazy thing to try releasing. Daniel gave me several justifications for doing it anyway, but the one I remember most is that it's supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better. 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. (related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a
More from Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Finalist #8 in the Book Review Contest This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] [Content warning: Sexual and relationship practices from a thousand years ago, from a time and place with a very different morality than what you probably subscribe to.] The past is an alien civilisation Around the year 1000, the Imperial Court of Japan in Kyoto was a world of opulence, aesthetics, and ambition. Isolated from the lives of regular commoners, every aspect of the lives of the elite were governed by complex etiquette rules, and relationships were thoroughly intertwined with politics and the ambition for power and wealth. High-ranking women and men lived lives so separate that they might have a passionate love affair without properly seeing each other's faces. It was in this world that Murasaki Shikibu, an intelligent and educated lady in Empress Shōshi's court, wrote The Tale of Genji, which is widely considered to be the world's oldest novel. It is an extraordinary masterpiece and a highly questionable soap opera, and I've never read anything like it. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-tale-of-genji
I am Daniel Böttger1. In 2023, my review of On The Marble Cliffs took second in the ACX book review contest, and Scott offered me the right to pitch him more essays. I have worked as a neuroscientist, so in 2024 I pitched a post with my theory of consciousness. Later that year, my connection to neuroscience took an unexpected turn, and I wrote about my experience getting diagnosed with brain cancer. This post is an update on how I'm doing. I'm doing well. Very well, in fact. Suspiciously well. So well that the only other person I've ever heard of doing as well as I am was Jo Cameron, who was profiled on ACX for her rare genetic mutation that makes her incapable of negative emotion. My case can't be a mutation, so it must be related to my brain cancer and subsequent surgery. I write about it here in the hopes of making a novel contribution to the study of low-suffering phenotypes. Content warning: the first part of this review contains medical details that some people might find gruesome; I am bad at judging these things since I can no longer feel disgust or fear myself, and have tried to err on the side of completeness. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/absurd-adventure-and-amygdalectomy
I. Econblogger Nicholas Decker is not a fan of AI 2040: One of the centerpieces of AI 2040 is the proposal that we pause the development of AI at a high level, use the AI to research alignment, and only then proceed. I am skeptical of this, and not only because it seems impractical to get such cooperation. My first argument is that I do not believe a period of "researching alignment" is meaningful – alignment research is simply capabilities research, patching particular bugs in the system, and we're not going to find anything deep without actually being in contact with the systems […] I envision AI alignment as being like research into aviation safety. There is no grand theory of why airplanes crash, unless you take that to mean gravity. Instead, we patch little problems. The airplane crashed because of metal fatigue in the engine – okay, we mandate inspections of engines, and prevent crashes from occurring by that source. As new problems arise, we iterate. We don't even need for there to be a crash to make improvements – we test proactively, we build in redundancy, and we monitor for deviations which could be a threat. What we are not doing is thinking about how we are going to keep flying saucers from crashing. If flying saucers are invented, then we will work to keep them from crashing, but we will use exactly the same methods. We will test them, see how they perform, and patch particular problems. AI will be the same way […] We should expect alignment to happen by default. My challenge for Nicholas is: would this work on you? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nicholas-decker-in-hell
Finalist #7 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] This is not a review of Rabelais. This is a review of a certain, incomplete translation of Rabelais. It is also arguably one of the greatest translations in our language. Let's meet the hero of our story. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-thomas-urquharts
[Original post: Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate] Ben Smith writes: This post sure reads like participating in the object level debate, not just "writing a post about how I won't participate". I did joke about this at the end, but I also want to defend calling this a post about how I won't participate. This essay presented a kind of hand-wavey heuristic for why I'm not spending lots of time examining the details of every individual argument. This is fine, everyone has to do this or be overwhelmed, but I think it's important to keep hand-wavey heuristics for not participating in arguments, vs. actual participation in arguments, distinct. Little annoys me more than when I spend weeks carefully gathering citations and making a substantive contribution in a domain, and somebody responds with "well that's obviously all bullshit because it vaguely reminds me of something I have negative affect towards". It's not necessarily wrong to deprioritize a topic because it vaguely reminds you of something that you have negative affect toward, but I would prefer these people admit they're dismissing/ignoring it rather than claim to be engaging with it. I'm working on a longer post about this topic. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-491