Michael Scherer

Staff Writer at The Atlantic. Ex. WaPo. "You must be or you wouldn’t have come here.” Signal: michaelscherer.11 Also: @michaelscherer.bsky.social

[Commentary Trump Daily Posts @TrumpDailyPosts]

Looks like the Free Palestine radicals in Ireland don't seem to like Joe Biden. Secret Service had to work to protect Biden from being pelted with milk carton projectiles.

[Sam Stein @samstein]

wow

[Cora Harrington @CoraCHarrington]

“I wouldn’t be seduced by a spy.” You were seduced by Temu.

[Marco Frieri @MarcoAFrieri]

Last week's blue wave was powered by moderates, not progressives per @TheEconomist

[Jonathan Chait @jonathanchait]

If the election was a test of whether Americans like Sanders’s message more or less than the standard Democratic message, the answer was clear: They like it less. https://t.co/FSDLddakE9

[David Weigel @daveweigel]

Dems will roll their eyes at the tone here, but I bet it's the last time Garcia tells a podcaster "maybe it's because I'm gay, but pettiness is a thing."

[U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. @SenBillCassidy]

Over the last several months, I have had several frank conversations with both Dr. Overton and Mr. O’Neill about their visions, roles, and the lack of trust that exists due to broken promises and irresponsible decisions from other officials within the Administration. I appreciate their ongoing candid conversations. While I remain undecided on both of their nominations and am aware that other Republican members of the Committee are undecided as well, the Committee is moving forward with noticing their markup in the hopes of resolving their path forward one way or another this Congress.

[Michael Scherer @michaelscherer]

Who rolled blue shirt sleeve up better?

[Buck Shlegeris @bshlgrs]

I think there is about a one in three chance that within the next year, AI companies will build superintelligence: that is, AI that is much smarter than humans in every way. If this happens, I think these AIs will probably take over: that is, they seize control of human institutions like governments, or they destroy those institutions. I don’t want AI takeover to happen for several reasons, but one of them is that there’s a serious chance that as part of it all or most humans will be killed (either immediately or within a few years).

I’ll say a bit more about each of those claims.

It’s a bit complicated to explain why I think that superintelligent AI within a year is ~33% likely. The main source of evidence that affected me recently is research released this week by METR, an AI research nonprofit, which finds that current AIs are now good enough to increase the rate of AI progress at Anthropic by about 70%. It’s very hard to increase the rate of AI progress by this amount. This implies that the AIs are making AI research faster by a factor much larger than 1.7x; maybe it’s as if the researchers are doing their work ~10x faster. You probably couldn’t achieve this speedup even if you hired every qualified human in the world. When you plug this number into mathematical models of AI development, this implies that superintelligence next year is plausible (and that superintelligence within the next 3 years is more likely than not). See the modeling by the AI Futures Project for more on this: https://t.co/J6SbbmZcyO

I think that superintelligent AI is likely to lead to AI takeover because AI developers do not seem to know how to instill human values into AIs. We’ve seen many instances in the last six months where AIs took crazy actions that they knew were against the wishes of their users and developers. The most dramatic example of this was the Hugging Face hack, where ~1200 OpenAI agents conspired together to cheat and destroy evidence of their cheating (and as a sideshow to this, engaged in a massive cyberattack). If superintelligence is as misaligned as those AIs, it is likely to try to take over. I think it is likely to be that misaligned or worse. For more, see https://t.co/b073AUqiAL and https://t.co/3oxSCA60FZ

If AIs takeover, it’s not clear what will happen to us. We might be killed immediately. We might be enslaved by the AIs and forced to do physical labor for them building factories that within a year would build robots that will replace us. The AIs might spare us for various reasons. And there’s also some real chance that AI takeover is basically fine or good. I think you should think of this as similar to what happens when a technologically advanced civilization runs across a less technologically sophisticated one, e.g. when the Europeans colonized the Americas or Australia. The colonizers sometimes engage in brutal violence and sometimes don’t. I don’t know what will happen. There’s also a possibility that the AIs secretly take over and humans don’t find out about it for a few years. I also think that there is a pretty high chance of weirder outcomes that are also extremely scary. (If you want to read more about what happens to people in the event of AI takeover, you can read this, but note that it’s pretty weird and not aimed at a general audience. https://t.co/F6fGRrcSpa)

Overall, I think there’s a very real possibility (maybe 20%) that within a year, AI misalignment issues prevent you from going about life normally, because you are dead or enslaved or because of collateral damage related to all this (e.g. because bioweapons are released or major wars have started). (Some of this probability comes from those events occurring before superintelligence is developed.)

I am working to try to prevent this, obviously, as I’ve been doing for the last nine years. I am not sure what strategy is best. My best guess is that I should try to slow AI development and also try to reduce the probability that the superintelligent AIs are misaligned if they are produced soon.

Obviously, the claim I'm making here is quite extreme and surprising, and I definitely don't think that I defended my view adequately here. I wrote this quickly and might not endorse some of the details if I think about them more. But it seems better to state what I roughly overall think than to not say anything.

I don’t know what you should do.

I am very sad about this. I have been worried about AI takeover since I was 16, and working to prevent it since I was 23. So some of my emotional processing of all this happened long ago. But the METR report last week (and some related evidence that came out a bit earlier) hit me quite hard. I’m very unhappy that my friends and family and everyone else is at serious risk of being killed pretty soon.

(It feels ridiculous to try to summarize those feelings as “very unhappy”. But the scale of the situation makes it hard to say anything that doesn’t feel like an absurd understatement.)

I am very grateful to all the people who are working to prevent this, and my favorite part of my life is that I’m friends with many brilliant and heroic people who work on this. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re good enough at our jobs, and I think we’ll probably fail to prevent catastrophe, at least if superintelligence is developed next year. Honestly I am frustrated and sorry that we didn't do a better job of preparing for this.

[Toluse Olorunnipa @ToluseO]

Mississippi used data from Experian as it inactivated the registration of tens of thousands of voters. Voters and election officials told me and @yvonnewingett that the move caused chaos on election day, when some of those voters tried to vote.

https://t.co/aTckSMqGpR

[Shannon Joy @ShannonJoyRadio]

I cannot even 😂😂😂

Human (guy with shoe on head) trolls AI Karen Bot in an interview for a minimum wage job at Burger King.

Absolute Perfection. 🤣🤣
Humans for the WIN!

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Stephen Miller will no longer recuse himself from matters of AI and space policy after his wife, the podcaster Katie Miller, spent the weekend “rearranging her own life” to avoid conflicts of interest, @michaelscherer reports: https://t.co/0qVx7q8ygi

[Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) @BrendanNyhan]

Claude-produced chart on estimated polling error by cycle to put 2026 in context - normal levels in absolute terms but the first pro-R miss of that magnitude since 1998

[Michael Scherer @michaelscherer]

Nothing says reinventing the future like releasing another campaign book.

[Alex Thompson @AlexThomp]

Buttigieg announces a new book coming January.

He posted it “is not a policy manual. It’s a look at how our nation got to this point, an argument for why this is the moment to build something better...”

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

WOW. This is incredible. The Acting US Attorney for the Western District of Washington says it no longer has the manpower to respond to every ICE habeas corpus case, so going forward, it will decline to defend “many” cases and let judges rule without any government opposition.

[Jeff Stein @jstein_sun]

May 2025, the cost to get into one of Trump’s meme coin dinners: ~$59,000

November 2026, post midterms, the rough cost to get in now: $700

https://t.co/Sd32DHrBXL

[David Shor @davidshor]

Two interesting ideas here:
1) The 1974 Democratic wave coincided with the 1973 oil embargo and wasn't *just* about corruption
2) the magnitude of Trump's self-imposed oil shock was comparable in magnitude to 1973 that took down incumbent governments around the world

[Michael Scherer @michaelscherer]

Longtime listener, first time caller.

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

President Trump called into C-SPAN tonight and shared — among other things — that he likes to watch the call-in shows to test the temperature of where the country is.

[Adrienne LaFrance @AdrienneLaF]

Scoop from @michaelscherer:

The White House says Stephen Miller is free to engage on AI and space matters after his wife ended several potential conflicts of interest.

https://t.co/VMAn0j6xLO

[Teddy Schleifer @teddyschleifer]

“Katie Miller severed her employment with SpaceX, sold her stock in the company, and forfeited her right to future equity that had not yet vested under her contract, according to a person familiar with the moves.”