A rationalist blog forum popular in the Bay Area, LessWrong is known for its sprawling, hyper-logical takes on everything from AI research to optimal reproductive strategies. But during the 2025 holiday season, a version of a post beginning with three concise and concerning sentences appeared on the site in dramatic fashion: “I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, lots of jobs will be gone soon. Probably, the smartest thing alive will no longer be human.”

Those who kept reading only encountered more of the writer’s malaise: “Everywhere around me there is this incredible sense of freefall and of grasping. … I stop going to lecture; I can no longer justify the time, and no one notices in a 300 person class anyway. I spend most of my time in the research building instead.…