Just months after a shocking first-round victory in Romania's presidential elections, ultranationalist extremist candidate Calin Georgescu has been barred from participating in an upcoming electoral redo, the Romanian election commission announced yesterday. The decision to block Georgescu was met with violent protests in Romania's capital city of Bucharest. 

Dubbed the TikTok Messiah for his seemingly spontaneous social-media-fueled populist support, Georgescu was a relative unknown before his victory in November. After investigators alleged he benefitted from a Russian influence campaign, authorities postponed December's runoff elections until May, prompting an outcry. Despite denying the allegations against him, Georgescu has built much of his political capital on rejecting institutions such as NATO and the EU, positioning himself largely in alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin's anti-democratic efforts. 

'Everything has changed'
Georgescu's circumstances have sparked Romania's "biggest political crisis since the collapse of communism," said Bloomberg. While his being barred from running in May could lead to a "mainstream pro-European candidate" winning the presidency, it could also "harm ties" with the U.S., particularly after the Trump administration made a point of encouraging his candidacy.

Georgescu has become a "cause célèbre among the far right," said The Associated Press. Romania's "unprecedented" decision to bar his campaign has "plunged the European Union and NATO member country into a protracted political crisis." While internally, Romania's NATO membership and "pro-Western outlook" are considered "non-negotiable," the Trump-era means "everything has changed," said Politico. 

'Genie is now out of the bottle'
Although many of Romania's fellow NATO members "supported the decision" to bar Georgescu, the decision has "incensed some European and American conservatives," said The New York Times. As perhaps the single largest animating force in the ongoing global realignment across Europe, it's little surprise that Romania's electoral upheaval has been "criticized by the administration of President Donald Trump and his allies such as Elon Musk," said Bloomberg. 

Georgescu's now-banned candidacy will cast a "further pall on EU-U.S. relations" that "key figures" in the Trump administration will see as a "reification of their concerns and suspicions toward Europe" at large, said Research Fellow Mark Episkopos at Responsible Statecraft. Long term, however, America's post-1991, post-Soviet attitudes toward Europe, based on national ambition and a sense of shared ideology, seem to be fading. "That genie is now out of the bottle in ways that cannot be reversed."

Many experts expect artificial intelligence to evolve into artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence (ASI) that would surpass humans in most capabilities, and it may be here sooner than we think. ASI is the "most precarious technological development since the nuclear bomb," said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks in a newly published paper.

'Logic that we can't foresee'
ASI could have the ability to "operate at digital speeds, potentially solving complex problems millions of times faster than we can," said Forbes. This could "trigger what experts call an 'intelligence explosion' in which AI systems become exponentially smarter at a pace we can't match or control." Advanced AI could also "operate on logic that we can't foresee or understand." For example, if an AI system were created to fight cancer, it "might decide that the most efficient solution is to eliminate all biological life, thus preventing cancer forever." 

Even if humans limit ASI, a superintelligent system "could use trickery, lies and persuasion to get people to let it out," said The New Yorker. To prevent this, AI would need to be trained to prioritize humanlike morals and ethics. But "aligning an AI with one set of values could knock it out of alignment with everyone else's values" and lead to bias and discrimination. 

AI's threat to humanity may actually come from other humans. "A nation on the cusp of wielding superintelligent AI" would "amount to a national security emergency for its rivals," Hendrycks and Schmidt said at Time. 

'Fundamental difference'
"The potential benefits of superintelligent AI are as breathtaking as they are profound," said Forbes. It "could help us overcome humanity's greatest challenges." All that's needed is some preparation. "This means investing in AI safety research, developing robust ethical frameworks, and fostering international cooperation."

The threat of ASI may not be imminent. "We expect AI risks to arise not from AI acting on its own but because of what people do with it," said Wired. AI is "far from achieving the kind of versatility humans demonstrate when learning diverse skills," said IBM. "This versatility represents a fundamental difference between human intelligence and current AI capabilities."