After seeing a few references to it (and against my better judgement), I listened to the latest episode of the NYT’s Hard Fork podcast, in which Casey Newton and Kevin Roose talk to one of the guys behind this new “A.I. 2027” thing. My main takeaways are:

1. Hard Fork is an extraordinarily dumb podcast.
2. There is a group of people who will fall for almost anything if you dress it up with the trappings of high-concept science fiction.

Have we forgotten that Roose is the person who, on his first interaction with Microsoft’s shitty Bing chatbot, managed to convince himself it was conscious and had fallen in love with him?

As for the 2027 thing—I’m not going to dignify it by calling it a “study” no matter how many times its creators might do so—they have basically strung together a whole series of “What if?” scenarios after talking to a bunch of people who already think this stuff is going to happen. And any objections or criticisms are met with “Yeah, but seriously—WHAT IF?!”