“AI by Default” by Jonny Spicer

Epistemic status: a good-faith guess at how the world might turn out, after ~30 hours of effort.

This post is an exercise in describing what I think will happen with AI progress "by default", i.e. by attempting to extrapolate various trends and considering their implications, before the next US presidential administration. As a TL;DR, I expect the following:

• We get many more warning shots.
• AI is a top-five issue in the election.
• The best models are withheld for internal use only, on safety grounds.
• AI-related job displacement is significant enough to show up in the data.
• Coding and ML R&D are fully automated or require only minimal human oversight.

This is intended to be one representative story of how things might go, in the vein of What 2026 Looks Like and the work of the AI Futures Project. Incidentally, the current AI Futures Model predicts the median date that we get ASI as December 2028 — one month after the election.

The rationale for doing so is largely the same as in What 2026 Looks Like. My goal is to tell a plausible story about what the state of the world might be when we are likely on [...]

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Outline:

(03:31) Q4 2026

(06:11) Q1 2027

(08:51) Q2 2027

(11:51) Q3 2027

(15:36) Q4 2027

(18:40) Q1 2028

(21:33) Q2 2028

(24:32) Q3 2028

(27:10) Q4 2028

(29:35) January 1st 2029

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 17th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQMzXuNJ3M6EEHZyv/ai-by-default

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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