“AI by Default” by Jonny Spicer

LessWrong (30+ Karma) · Oct 18, 2026 · 30m

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…