Gary Marcus quote, Sep 18, 2026

Author and cognitive scientist · Sep 18, 2026 · Post, Wake up, people: what we should actually fear

What we should actually fear, near term, is not so much rogue superintelligence as unleashed agentic AI causing hacking the internet at scale.

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

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Sep 13, 2026	AI is not really going to take down the internet, and (as discussed in another earlier essay) it’s not going to cure cancer either, at least not anytime soon or on its own.Sep 13, 2026· Post	PostTwo cheers out of three for Dario	Source
Sep 13, 2026	I hope they will sign in blood, and put actual teeth in their agreement, and that the government will hold them to it and force it to become something substantive.Sep 13, 2026· Post	PostTwo cheers out of three for Dario	Source
Sep 13, 2026	We should all salute their tentative agreement to slow down the acceleration of this technology, given that not one of the AI companies seems to have good control over it.Sep 13, 2026· Post	PostTwo cheers out of three for Dario	Source
Sep 10, 2026	But in my view, the net effect of the last decade of “Doomer” talk (Coxon appears to be a card-carrying member of that party) has been to make the Frontier AI companies wealthier and more powerful.Sep 10, 2026· Post	PostNo, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us all	Source
Sep 10, 2026	Everytime they scream that AI is going to kill us all, VCs toss in billions more.Sep 10, 2026· Post	PostNo, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us all	Source
Sep 10, 2026	None of the AI safety work Doomers have sponsored has led to a demonstrated, implemented solution to the core problem.Sep 10, 2026· Post	PostNo, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us all	Source

Date	Quote	Context	Source
Sep 24, 2026	The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post	PostThe Specter Of Neuralese	Source
Sep 24, 2026	This is the new software engineering: designing the systems that let AI write code correctly at scale.Tomasz TunguzSep 24, 2026· Post	PostThinking in Systems, Shipping in Loops	Source
Sep 23, 2026	This story of misalignment says that LLM alignment makes AIs more aligned, RLVR makes them less aligned, and the exact level of alignment depends on how these two things interact or cancel out. But if this work generalizes, all the bad effects from RLVR get sequestered to RLVR like problems.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post	PostMysteries Of AI Generalization	Source
Sep 23, 2026	This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post	PostMysteries Of AI Generalization	Source
Sep 23, 2026	I address you today at a moment of global awakening: in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have acted in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote	KeynoteSpeech at the UN Security Council	Source
Sep 23, 2026	The companies building the most powerful AI systems admit their products pose catastrophic risks, yet offer no convincing technical solutions.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote	KeynoteSpeech at the UN Security Council	Source

About this quote

Said by: Gary Marcus, Author and cognitive scientist
Where: Wake up, people: what we should actually fear
Topics: Agents, Safety
Source: garymarcus.substack.com/p/wake-up-people-what-we-should-actually

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