"Stochastic terrorism" is the idea that if you spread fear and mistrust against a target, then eventually people will commit violence against that target, and it will be your fault, even if you never specifically said the words "you should commit violence".

Some other popular examples of the concept:

• Nativists spread fear and mistrust about Muslim immigrants, and then racists go on shooting sprees in mosques.
• The #Resistance insists that Donald Trump would destroy democracy, and then various people try to assassinate Donald Trump.
• Conservatives spread fear and mistrust about transgender people, and then bigots commit hate crimes against transgender people.
• Woke people say the police are racist and brutal, and then other woke people murder police officers.
• Socialists call health insurance companies greedy and accuse them of blocking life-saving treatment, and then Luigi Mangione murdered a health insurance CEO.
• AI safety activists say that Sam Altman's AI could destroy humanity, and then a guy threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house.
• Liberals said that Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger who was driving Americans apart, and then an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk.
• The pro-life movement describes abortion as murder, and then pro-life activists assassinated abortion doctors and pro-choice politicians.

The "stochastic terrorism" concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. "Stochastic terrorism" mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you're too blinkered to realize that.

(in fact, one could argue that accusing someone of stochastic terrorism is itself stochastic terrorism! Here in America, we consider it justified to kill terrorists before they can threaten us further. Reclassifying criticism as terrorism implies it is potentially legitimate to apply the same norm to any especially harsh critics!)

Still, a sliver of concept-users make some fig-leaf argument that the cases they approve of are different than the cases they disapprove of. Some proposed principles:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-stochastic-terrorism

This was one of the most common objections to Plan A. The plan proposes AI chip regulation to ensure that both China and America know where all the chips are, making their deal to regulate AI together "trustless" (ie neither side can defect even if they want to). Several people argued that this kind of regulation amounted to some kind of "Orwellian dystopia" or "global panopticon".

I'm reminded of a story I heard - I can't find it, maybe one of you can - from a DC insider who said it was enraging to work with Silicon Valley, because he would bring up what he thought was the obvious regulatory framework, the tech people would launch into jeremiads on how it could only be enforced by world dictatorship, and he would have to interrupt and say that no, this was how eggs or milk or something had been regulated for fifty years.

What regulations does Plan A propose on AI chips?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-chip-regulation-is-not-a-dystopian

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

[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]

The Book of Abraham opens with this paragraph:

"A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."

As you can read, The Book of Abraham was written by grand patriarch Abraham upon papyrus while he was in Egypt. Someone managed to get their hands on these papyri and then subsequently translated them into English. This is of profound historical importance if true, because otherwise there is no direct evidence that Abraham existed as a specific historical individual.

Who got their hands on these writings? The Mormons. More specifically their founding prophet Joseph Smith who a few years previously translated some other Egyptian writings into the Book of Mormon. The Book of Abraham is not that well-known in comparison, but it's considered canonical scripture in the Mormon church.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-book-of-abraham

The annual prediction market conference was earlier this month. This was the year prediction markets went from an obscure hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry; from semi-illegal to having the President's son as an advisor. I can't remember if anyone talked about any of that. It didn't even register. All eyes were on the AI superforecasters.

I met an AI superforecaster startup founder who told me his AI had turned $35 into $2 million on Kalshi over seven months. I met another who said they were beating the stock market by 25% with a market-neutral portfolio - of course this could be luck, but they'd beaten Kalshi and Polymarket by similar margins.

In fact, I believe all of these people. The extending-lines-on-graphs community has long predicted that AIs would beat the best human forecasters sometime in 2026 - 2027. What did you expect the bots-finally-beat-humans-at-predicting-the-future moment to look like? Vibes? Papers? Essays? In retrospect, sure: it will look like AIs making crazy profits on prediction markets and beating the stock market by some comfortable amount.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ai-superforecasters-are-here

I.

Having kids has given me new appreciation for old poetry. The first time I read Song of Hiawatha, I skimmed over the part in Book 3 where Hiawatha first meets his father Mudjekeewis:

Filled with joy was Mudjekeewis
When he looked on Hiawatha,
Saw his youth rise up before him
In the face of Hiawatha,
Saw the beauty of Wenonah
From the grave rise up before him.

"Welcome!" said he, "Hiawatha,
To the kingdom of the West-Wind!
Long have I been waiting for you!
Youth is lovely, age is lonely,
Youth is fiery, age is frosty;
You bring back the days departed,
You bring back my youth of passion."

But this passage communicates a secret of parenthood, something I've never seen discussed anywhere else. By the time you're a parent, you're on your way to being old, ugly, tired, and cynical. I certainly was. This felt like a brute fact about the world: we all know time only moves one direction. Then I had kids, and got confronted with people who were basically me, but young and beautiful and happy. That part of them which wasn't me was the other person I love best in the world, also transmuted into a young and beautiful and happy form. This was a completely unexpected delight which nothing besides this one fragment of poetry had ever tried to prepare me for.

I might never have noticed this if I'd only had girls. I love my daughter, but I've never been a little girl; it doesn't bring anything back for me. It's like Mudjekeewis says - you've got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chip-off-the-old-block

In recent posts on Trump and dictatorship, people have asked me - how do you know you're not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome?

I take this seriously; we've all lost loved ones to this condition. The best check on my reasoning would be an objective measure of the health of American democracy. There are several "democracy indices" that purport to do this, but they have a mixed reputation. My impression is that most current accusations of bias are relatively weak - I agree with Claude's analysis here - but they rely enough on "expert" opinion that I don't expect them to convince a skeptic.

The newest entrant in this space - Metaculus Democracy Threat Index - works differently, and deserves a closer look.

Metaculus is a prediction site - like a prediction market, except that no money changes hands. People can record their guesses for how future events will turn out, which get aggregated by an algorithm (currently just a recency-weighted median, although they've done fanicer things in the past).

Their Democracy Threat Index is a collection of 153 questions relevant to US democracy. For example:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-metaculus-threat-to-democracy

The most controversial part of last week's article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts' recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI).

Isn't this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and side effect burden to investigate - that it ends up net negative. But isn't this just a problem of setting thresholds correctly? Can't you commit to only investigating the most obviously bad things, then ignore the rest?

This seemed like an interesting problem to investigate in more depth, so I've tried to get numbers. These are rough estimates loosely based on parameters extracted from unsatisfactory studies1 - please don't take them seriously as exact values, just as right-order-of-magnitude estimates. We'll focus on whole-body MRIs, since this is a well-studied existing technology, then speculate later on how the results might generalize to whole-body ultrasound.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening