So many things are happening that it’s hard to decide which to write about. So I’ll briefly cover several that would each deserve a full post on a normal week:

1. The Fed voted unanimously to raise rates to 4%, showing that the Warsh Fed still has some independence from the President.

2. The 10-year Treasury bond hit 5%. The CBO’s long-term budget forecasts assume 4% rates for the 10-year, and looked unpleasant even with that rosy assumption. The UK dumped Prime Minister Liz Truss over their 10-year hitting 4.5%.

3. Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic over AI safety concerns and set off a surprisingly large firestorm over it.

4. The Trump administration reacted by insisting we move forward with AI, with the Department of War blaming Effective Altruists for trying to slow it down:

I suspect this could lead many people to get into Effective Altruism by promoting it from ‘weird thing for nerds‘ to ‘something you can do to oppose Trump’. If that interests you, this is a good place to start.

5. EA hero Michael Kremer (whose work inspired many donations to deworming) was just appointed Chief Economist of the World Bank.

6. But AI progress keeps rolling. Quantum theorist Scott Aaronson declares the Singularity is here:

I recoil from the neverending shell game where you say “oh sure, of course AI can now [escape from its sandbox / solve Millennium Problems / whichever dramatic thing it most recently did], no one ever denied that [I did deny it], wake me up when AI does [thing AI hasn’t yet done but is going to do next year], that’s when I’ll reevaluate my whole worldview [no I won’t].” Where no matter how fast the rollercoaster accelerates, even after your whole familiar world has vanished behind you, you’re still inventing reasons why it doesn’t count.

My position on AI is merely the conservative, skeptical position of 2006, updated with intellectual honesty for the reality of late 2026. And that position, if you need me to spell it out, is as follows:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

It seems to me that the Singularity has already started; it’s just wildly unevenly distributed.

I’m honestly surprised we have yet to see an upsurge of millenarianism. Y2K concerns came and went 2000 years after Jesus’ birth. But see how much people worry about AI now, and realize it will only get more powerful as we approach 2000 years after his death- 2033, or if you trust the revisionists, 2030.