AI 2040: Plan A

https://ai-2040.com/

by kschaul • 13 days ago

401 539 13 days ago

ai-2040.com

ChrisArchitect• 13 days ago

Associated post: Introducing Plan A

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a

cyberpunk• 13 days ago

Then, in the mid-2030s, they pause at AIs around the level of top human geniuses.

They being the US and China and by agreement.

It would be ideal, but there’s far too much money on the table to overcome human nature.

So my hope is we hit some kind of limits naturally.. Wishful thinking?

tfirst2• 13 days ago

If carbon taxes are already a lethal policy for an political campaign, it's absurd to think that fears of ASI will create any real movement around pausing AI.

If there is any movement to pause AI development, it will come from the general public's dislike of these companies. Not from the AI safety angle.

arjie2• 13 days ago

If that is true and one cares about a moratorium on progress in the US then it seems like the number one way is to meet people where they are: so water use misinformation, degrowth, power supply constraints. That does place all the people who push for these things in a different light. They may well be attempting to do what the AI safety labs are ostensibly trying to do.

As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a distributed coordinated way) is the populist misinformer. Fascinating.

tfirst2• 13 days ago

If there's going to be any pause, I'm sure it will come from a populist movement. I just can't imagine misplaced worries about AI water use will translate into the kinds of policy the authors want to see.

karahime2• 12 days ago

You should consider why the best ally to your position is misinformation.

Alpha3031• 11 days ago

It's possible the general public wouldn't care enough one way or the other such that elected representatives could just do it without any change to their electoral fortunes.

sheepscreek• 13 days ago

I wonder if they are double-counting Anthropic's leased capacity from SpaceX under SpaceX again.

joshstrange3• 13 days ago

I'm sure some people will have issue with my phrasing but, honest question:

Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder.

But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost feels like pandora's box is open and our only option is continue to improve them. There is clearly value in what they do and while I can absolutely see the dangers, for example: authoritative governments and surveillance, I'm not convinced to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

All of technology back to the printing press (and probably before that) could also be said to make it easier for governments to oppress their citizens. Making laws (and enforcing them!) to prevent governments from doing these things feels like that route forward, not trying to stick our heads in the sand.

Perhaps I'm horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I've spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I'm blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around "knowledge deserves to be free/accessible" are misguided. I don't know.

Dig1t• 13 days ago

Taking the approach with AI that we took with the atomic bomb would be catastrophic. If the only people who are allowed to use this technology are governments, intelligence agencies, and a select few anointed companies, then the risk of authoritarian misuse will skyrocket.

I worry that any attempt to limit their use and development will be abused and misdirected. We are already seeing people like Anthropic doing this, they are trying to use anti-AI sentiment to engage in regulatory capture. Go watch Dario’s speeches about how open weight models are dangerous and how they are “not really open”. Everyone can see that much of this “safety” conversation is ultimately just a tactic to shut potential competitors out of the market and establish a monopoly/duopoly.

joshstrange3• 13 days ago

I agree. I guess I should have said something like:

"Stopping" LLM research just means it will be in the hands of a few who can abuse it. I'd rather a state of M.A.D. but instead of a handful of countries/governments it's millions/billions of people with access to the models (open ideally). Again, perhaps horribly naive or misguided, I understand that bioterrorism could (is?) a real problem as well as more "mundane" things like building a bomb (nuclear or otherwise).

I just feel like limiting access to governments or "blessed" entities is even worse.

rayiner3• 13 days ago

No, of course not. That would be an insane trust fall. Even relatively small advances in technology give a country world dominating power. Fun fact: India was militarily superior to Britain in the 1600s—a gunpowder empire with a million soldiers—but was taken over by it in the 1700s. Britain’s edge was small: lighter, more maneuverable cannons, standardized ammunition, better military and political organization. Not a first world country versus a third world country—more like the dynamic US versus a sclerotic EU. And that modest edge led to 200 years of colonization.

If we slow down on ASI voluntarily we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia/Africa look trivial. It would be insane.

jst1fthsdys• 13 days ago

You overstate the advantages of technology. Mughal India was fragmented and on a sharp decline. The British used politics, finance, and treachery to divide and conquer what was remaining.

reducesuffering• 13 days ago

we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia/Africa look trivial.

An easy choice to make if the alternative is everyone dying instead.

kokotajlod2• 13 days ago

If you read the scenario, you'll see that the regulations are mostly about what people can do with giant compute clusters, and not about the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are required to be totally transparent to the public.

As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone delivery was strangled by regulations too...? Plan A isn't a proposal to never build superintelligence, it's a proposal to build it more cautiously and transparently.

ACCount372• 12 days ago

Human cloning and genetic editing isn't stalled because we agreed it's unethical. It's not pursued because at the current level of advancements, it's pretty useless. The things we can do there are niche. It's easy to ban something that's not very useful.

If we had a way to make gene edited humans a lot smarter, a lot stronger or live a lot longer? Or a way to quick-grow human bodies to adulthood in a couple years? Capabilities that private actors or countries may want, ethics be damned? That would be closer to what we have with AI right now.

hollerith4• 13 days ago

Yes, there are examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue a particular technology tree.

For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)

And there have been successful world-wide bans.

For example, following the invention of recombinant DNA technology, scientists convened the Asilomar Conference in 1975. They established a voluntary self-moratorium on certain types of genetic engineering until strict laboratory containment protocols were created.

In the 1980s, bioethicists, theologians, and researchers established a hard ethical line between somatic editing (treating an existing patient's non-reproductive cells) and germline editing (altering future generations).

No one has performed the latter form of genetic engineering except for Chinese scientist He Jiankui in 2018. (Chinese society used to be more ambivalent about the technology than the West is.) In response, Beijing heavily tightened its laws, classifying heritable gene editing as a high-risk medical technology subject to the penal code, and He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison.

joshstrange3• 13 days ago

I completely can see why we'd want to, for ethical reasons, ban germline editing, and I want to be clear that I agree doing so cannot be done ethically, but there is a part of me that is wistful for what could have been. Same with things like CRISPR but it's probably just fun to dream and the reality would be a nightmare.

ThrowawayR24• 11 days ago

"For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)"

That example works against the argument since that policy was rendered moot when Commodore Perry arrived at Japan in 1853 with a squadron of American warships and demanded opening of trade and diplomatic relations at gunpoint.

arethuza• 13 days ago

The decision to not go with the development of extremely large thermonuclear weapons might count - the US Sundial Project was supposed to be about 10 gigatons of TNT. Not the most practical weapons but once you get to a certain size delivery arguably stops being a problem - its going to kill everyone anyway so doesn't matter where you let it off!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)

Edit: Mind you, I wonder if the design for Sundial is stored somewhere...

tim3333• 13 days ago

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention? Probably partly successful.

foobiekr4• 12 days ago

The Soviet Union systematically ignored the BWC. There's tons of evidence.

4er_transform• 12 days ago

While technology has empowered governments, it’s also empowered the individual, and more importantly shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people. Democracy followed material change, it didn’t precede it. Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart.

A resource extraction based economy sees people as slaves. The true source of power is the resource, people are just a means to an end, so you mistreat the people as much as you can get away with in pursuit of the resource while avoiding revolt.

With stable infrastructure, the government makes far more from an educated, rich population that it can tax and use the innovation from. It’s against its own quest for power to interfere too much in the prosperity of its citizens. The incentives are aligned.

Solving the AI problem isn’t about stopping the tech or making a bunch of brittle laws. It’s always been about alignment: aligning the large AGI-like entities that are the modern state, the modern economy, representative democracy, or AGI itself, with human prosperity

tehjoker2• 12 days ago

This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010.

Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the computers were going to be linked to government databases and share data on anti-Vietnam war activists. Despite protestations, activists were correct and this happened, and now it happens at huge scale.

http://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley

encomiast• 12 days ago

Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart

It's not clear in this context what you actually mean by "government." You are assigning agency to something in a way that seems like a reification. While a bureaucracy can seem to have a life of its own, isn't it generally people who seek power?

taurath4• 12 days ago

shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people

... recently, as in the last 10 years?

QuadmasterXLII• 12 days ago

If there were examples, their example status would drop the odds that I know about them.

erichocean2• 12 days ago

Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

Studying human bio-diversity since WW2 is the most obvious example, though it hasn't been entirely successful.

Genomics is what finally broke the barrier, especially in the last decade or so.

computably2• 12 days ago

Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

Intrinsically, the knowledge humans choose not to pursue will not be much publicized. There's limited value in calling attention to it and it doesn't make for good entertainment. Plenty of examples provided by other comments nonetheless.

Perhaps I'm horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I've spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I'm blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around "knowledge deserves to be free/accessible" are misguided. I don't know.

I don't personally think there's intrinsic benefit in disseminating arbitrary knowledge. There's quite some difference between the printing press and nukes.

sometimelurker8• 12 days ago

we should never make ASI, what I am saying is strongly sane. ASI = not good. AGI, ~human brainpower, can be made safe enough.

Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

human GMO, some bioweopns, I'm sure theres a long list of awful stuff no one wants to exist.

voidmain2• 12 days ago

If AGI means that AI+robotics can robustly substitute for human labor, and robots are cheaper and faster to build than humans, then (a) anyone ruthless enough can zerg rush and defeat any nations that don't discard humans, (b) no one without a massive robot army will be needed in any way by their rulers. If this isn't a recipe for a horrific outcome, what is?

throwaway274483• 12 days ago

It's not even clear that ASI is a coherent concept.

But, I don't trust capital with either.

alex_young3• 12 days ago

Perhaps the burning of the library at Alexandria would qualify. How intentional that was is somewhat in question, but the world certainly turned its back on the only collection of written knowledge and let it turn to ash.

magicalist3• 12 days ago

FWIW the burning of the library of Alexandria, and, indeed, its status as "the only collection of written knowledge" are myths.

nharziro• 12 days ago

Uhh north Korea?

HaloZero• 12 days ago

Human embryo genetic modification has been effectively taboo if not banned until just recently since WWII and the aftermath of the Holocaust. I think some people in the US are proposing doing it now but I don't think anyone has tried it yet without repercussions.

dash23• 12 days ago

Actually: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/11/19/...

aarondong7• 12 days ago

I like your optimism and I think you will be vindicated. AI is democratic and AI talent is globally distributed. It will just take a while to get online. AI labs do not have a monopoly on human talent, and open source AI only empowers independent science and meritocracy.

On a funny note, I think their prompt was:

"Hey Fable. Please attribute every piece of scientific and economic progress to AI until 2040. And predict every major geopolitical event. Make no mistakes."

dyauspitr• 12 days ago

Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

Isn’t that like all of the Middle Ages where we replaced knowledge with an alternate religious reality.

matkoniecz• 12 days ago

No, that is not a good description of Middle Ages at all.

For start, previous era was also deeply religious. So it switched religions, if anything new one was more friendly toward knowledge.

corv• 12 days ago

A successful example of reigning in progress: electric bicycles intentionally speed limited for safety

nradov4• 11 days ago

There is no rein on progress. You can buy electric motorcycles without speed governors. And you can drive them on public roads (subject to traffic laws) as long as you're properly licensed, registered, and insured. The distinction between electric "bikes" and motorcycles is mostly artificial.

kortilla3• 12 days ago

It’s telling terrorists how to make bombs better apparently. Continuing to lower the barrier for that kind of stuff is clearly a negative in the “knowledge deserves to be free” world.

AussieWog93• 12 days ago

Has there been an uptick in terrorist bombings or is this just a hypothetical at this stage?

RandomLensman• 12 days ago

Biological weapons? Yes, there is research on defense, but no big arsenals of weapons etc.

My impression from the origin of the bioweapons convention is that collectively people decided that these things are too dangerous in various ways for any advantage that might be derived from them.

greenchair• 12 days ago

I can think of many examples that I won't name but you can imagine in biology/medical fields where certain lines of investigation are not performed due to ethical and legal repercussions.

ibaikov• 13 days ago

People overestimate progress in physical world. 2035: robot population will soon be larger than the human one

I'd bet that in most places 9 years is about the time needed to build a residential building. I think a good way to think about this is to think of this as producing a serial car. From pitching and capital acquisition to building a prototype to software, regulatory and then the final product which needs multiple factories and supply chains. Yes, of course robots sound cooler and there are compounding effects yada yada, but on the other side there are as many obstacles as things that accelerate this product (like capital acquisition and fearmongering of gov to bend regulatory stuff faster).

kennywinker3• 13 days ago

I mean, what is a robot? If you add up all the vacuum cleaners, 3d printers, and dishwashers, that’s probably close or more than the human population.

alecco• 13 days ago

More wild speculation, now with wishful thinking spread on top.

jabedude• 13 days ago

Why did Scott Alexander (one of the authors of the original AI 2027 paper) not join/contribute to this one?

kokotajlod2• 13 days ago

Hey, author here! Scott did contribute, but less than before.

On his blog he says: "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)"

ipnon• 13 days ago

Kind of feels like fusion power at this point, always just around the corner.

icandoit4• 13 days ago

LLM adoption is 30% in the charts I saw googling for "ai adoption". An example of capibility: I have had Claude one shot an RL agent that learns connect four in 30 minutes. That's PhD level stuff.

LLMS are 4 years old and the companies that sell them 10x every year. What evidence can you cite? Could you convince a disinterested 3rd party you have anything other than cope? What facts about the world make you think this is anything other than the new (and probably temporary) normal?

reasonableklout10• 13 days ago

What predictions about the technology are the authors making that you do not believe?

There is plenty falsifiable in this in ai-2027.com, and they have not gotten everything right. But some things they have: for example, the Pentagon has already invoked export controls to restrict the deployment of a frontier model. This level of government oversight wasn't predicted until 2027 in the original scenario.

hkalbasi2• 12 days ago

Self improvement of agent-1 is not achieved. Sure, people in AI labs write python code with AI, but I doubt it resulted in 50% algorithmic effiecency in training. Writing python code never was the bottleneck, if it was, AI labs could hire more people to do it. And this is core of the prediction.

po1nt2• 13 days ago

This is whole a slippery slope. Always building on assumption of infinite exponential growth. But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.

icandoit4• 13 days ago

Nothing follows from this empty platitude though, right? It can't inform you choices or decisions? It's just a disempowering thought?

They are buying up all the RAM today. Do you think "this is fine because in 5 years post-crash I can buy some cheap RAM"? If everyone with money is betting differently, do you have some information they don't, or is the whole economy just slipping away from you?

You experience luxuries today, that no king 1000 years ago could afford. Instant access to communication, food, medicine for the right price of course.

The consumer economy was great while it lasted but it's over now. We have machines that do useful mechanical work (engines) and useful intellectual work (llm-computers). Capital will move productive work from people to machines(if we let them), and the only jobs left will be delivery driver and warehouse, and then those will be gone too.

Human population was exponential and now its flat, but that's a function of what exacly? It could go back down to 1 billion or less. When jobs demanded a person supply was ready to match it. When jobs dont demand a person? Go to a degrowth rally take the temperature (and average age and child-per-person ratio) to get a taste of the future shape of supply and demand in a pessimistic world of sentences that don't have subjects just vague plattitudes. Are they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?

nozzlegear• 13 days ago

Degrowth is a deeply unpopular policy around the world. Where would one even go to find a degrowth rally? I have to imagine everyone there would be there ironically.

* they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?*

My area (rural Iowa) has had several new schools built in the last 10 years. Net gain for sure.

po1nt2• 12 days ago

AI is just a tool. It will be a tool as we constantly push the requirements of what qualifies as consciousness. Therefore I'm not worried about it. Almost all the predictions about future growth of technology were incorrect. We don't have flying cars, hoverboards, fusion, the matrix and so on. The goal of each of us is to live a better life. It always be and forcing people to give up luxuries for some external agenda based on slippery slopes is cruel and selfish.

We should have been under water, hunted by AI, overpopulated, killed by terrorist, smitten by god for our sins and so on. Luckily all it took was our privacy and a lot of tax money to survive.

timmytokyo2• 12 days ago

Whenever I encounter these people I'm reminded of the meme about the baby who has doubled his weight in the three months since birth. At that growth rate, he'll weigh trillions of pounds by age 10.

sometimelurker8• 12 days ago

But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.

strongly, no. its just hard to distinguish them. for example, radioactive decay. cmon

timmytokyo2• 12 days ago

Point taken. But it's interesting that the example you give is one of exponential decay rather than exponential growth, which is the context of this discussion. Where in nature has anything ever grown exponentially in perpetuity? Bacteria in a petri dish multiply exponentially. Until they don't.

kennywinker3• 13 days ago

It seems to me we’re already at the top of the S curve, not at the toe of an exponential curve. At least with LLMs. Better training data will make small improvements, better architecture will make it less compute intensive, and all these “hyper-scale” data centers will make it cheap and ubiquitous. But none of that is it getting exponentially more intelligent.

Cyclical• 13 days ago

What leads you to believe that?

kennywinker3• 13 days ago

Is chatgpt 5.6 that much smarter than chatgpt 5.0?

leoc2• 12 days ago

Things like https://www.tobyord.com/writing/hourly-costs-for-ai-agents and https://www.tobyord.com/writing/mostly-inference-scaling seem in line with other accounts like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR20FWCCjAs ?

Enginerrrd• 12 days ago

I completely agree, but I also think that an industry disrupting architecture tweak akin to the “Attention is all you need” is VERY possible to emerge at any moment.

It feels like the cognitive gaps on current LLMs are indeed structural, but also that if we solve that structural issue with a new or extended transformer type of architecture, we’ll be looking at a whole new ballgame.

I mean, basically we’re just looking at needing some type of new post training learning architecture. It’s very clear that extending context windows isn’t that. What’s needed is an honest to god, continuous learning and modification process.

Petersipoi• 12 days ago

People have been saying this since GPT-1. This idea that we can only squeeze a little bit more of intelligence out of LLMs isn't a new one. And thus far, it has always been wrong.

a_vanderbilt• 13 days ago

I found the AI 2027 paper to be overly optimistic, but not wholly fantastical. This paper feels wildly speculative, and relies on premises I am not confident even pass surface reasoning. Even under optimistic conditions, we are not going to see robots "capable of 95% of all cognitive and physical tasks" by 2035. Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible. Economic collapse would implode AI development long before those figures were plausible.

skybrian5• 12 days ago

The "and physical" is the part I'm particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.

CamperBob22• 12 days ago

but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly

If you don't care about getting the drone back, it does simplify the problem somewhat.

foobiekr4• 12 days ago

A lot of it relies on what is effectively "the AI will be so smart it can solve anything" magic.

reasonableklout10• 12 days ago

Do autonomous systems need to solve humanoid robotics to exert power over the physical world? Seems like a lot can be done with drones.

burlesona• 12 days ago

Zipline is growing fast… it’s drone-based, but it definitely delivers packages to your front door. (https://www.zipline.com/)

Grombobulous2• 12 days ago

Nobody’s even solved a self-driving vehicles yet, not in in the sort of “they took over everything and put every uber and truck driver out of business” kind of way.

Maybe they will soon but it’s massively far behind the kind of timeframe AI 2027 would have implied.

BurningFrog3• 12 days ago

Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible

250 years of constant automation has never produced large scale unemployment, despite obsoleting everyone's jobs several times over.

tired-turtle• 12 days ago

Don’t you think the speed at which obsolescence occurs matters? There’s a bit of survivorship bias here, in the sense of

“I’ve been pulling my sled across this lake for 50 winters even when the temperature went above freezing. Never fell through!”

fulafel4• 11 days ago

It has. For example mechanization of argiculture in places where it didnt coincide with a manufacturing boom (latin america, india, africa) resulted in shantytowns and long term unemployment.

kypro2• 12 days ago

If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me.

And similar things can be said about many technologies in recent history – cars replacing the horse, first flight to man on the moon, even the creation of early internet to its mass adoption.

You're talking generally a decade or 2 for society to completely change from the rapid advancement of a new technology.

I'm not saying I agree with the 2035 prediction, but it doesn't seem impossible to me, if AI can help us improve the pace that we're already developing disruptive robotics.

In 2010 the idea of self-driving cars and autonomous delivery drones seemed very sci-fi and a long way out. But today, just 15 years on, these things are increasingly starting to be rolled out.

If they dropped that 95% number to 50-60%, I think I'd probably lean towards agreeing. Not because it makes sense in my gut, but because the logical part of my brain knows exponential trends (if one exists) do things that we wouldn't instinctively predict. But even if you assume exponentials 95% does seem very high.

somebodythere2• 12 days ago

The thing about exponentials is if you admit 60%, it's pretty easy to admit 95%.

skybrian5• 12 days ago

You say "just" 15 years, but Waymo is still only available in a few cities. That seems more like a slow, cautious rollout to me, not a fast takeoff. Society has had a lot of time to get used to (and tired of) the idea and come up with regulations.

My guess is that the deployment of other types of robots will often be a similarly slow grind.

That's unlike the Internet, smart phones, and coding agents, which got user adoption at a much quicker pace.

ThrowawayR24• 11 days ago

"If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me."

It's 2026, one year after your predicted date, and that still hasn't happened though.

modeless• 13 days ago

This is dangerously naive and misguided. They claim to want to avoid centralization of control but propose a world police state of AI regulation. Governments exerting this much control will only end in war and tyranny.

icandoit4• 13 days ago

If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies, then those two companies and the resulting power that comes to them, makes them the de facto world government. (Democratic choice may be a farce but it is a useful friction on net.)

If they own all the RAM, models, and the means to do any work, then you are at their mercy. They will buy all the RAM, leaving you none, then all the transport, then all the electricity. You will be as boxed out of the current economy as the Amish and it will get its plug pulled.

Gradual Disempowerment is the default plan right now. War and tyrrany are not remotely the worst case scenario. I'll take Butlerian Jihad over being turned into cattle any day.

Imagine solving for equilibrium with two classes of beings. One requires agricultural land and 20 years to become individually productive and barely maintains a healthy population in a entertainment saturated landscape. The second eats only electricity and is ready to work on day 1. Round 1 goes to the strongest gorilla for sure, round 100?

If LLMs had come to earth in spaceships would you have welcomed them into your work and your home?

BurningFrog3• 12 days ago

If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies

We already have at least 5 companies only in the US. Your whole premise is false.

sometimelurker8• 12 days ago

Governments exerting this much control will only end in war

elaborate. regulation -> war, how?

oezi• 13 days ago

Forecasting that the GPU build-out will reach 100 trillion USD in 2034 is wild (that's triple the US GDP in 8 years). And another 10x within 2 years.

I am not sure where they believe that amount of capital could come from. It would require central bank level money printing never seen before.

https://ai-2040.com/supplements/compute-supplement

geraneum• 12 days ago

The article reads like a compilation of online chatter, social media post, etc. on AI. Not surprising to find unsubstantiated imaginary numbers there.

mfitton• 12 days ago

Well... yes, it would. In theory, efficiency gains are deflationary. Huge efficiency gains are hugely deflationary.

If we're producing 10x as much, why not print 10x as much money? The goods and services each dollar could buy would remain similar.

jawiggins• 13 days ago

Did anyone else catch the logical inconsistency between Plan C and A?

Plan C:

"... fewer and fewer humans are needed to conduct AI R&D, meaning that covert projects are easier and easier to pull off without detection."

Plan A:

"... training AIs requires large numbers of AI chips. Most AI chips are in giant datacenters.50 AI datacenters are typically big enough to be visible from space, and power-hungry enough to require conspicuous infrastructure. New AI chips can only be manufactured at a handful of fabrication plants (fabs), located mostly in Taiwan, South Korea, the US, and China. The US and China negotiate with the countries that have a major role in the chip supply chain, and they require each major datacenter owner (and their upstream suppliers, including chip fabs) to publicly declare their major purchases and sales."

Plan A requires properties of AI training that Plan C requires do not exist.

icandoit4• 13 days ago

By legislative design? If a nuclear bomb could be made with hardware store finds the world would already be over. Big collaborative works raise the stakes and the observability for surveillance. Apply for a job at a defense supplier or even and energy company.

If AI production is limited to big labs and big data centers then it is de facto contained and monitored. If you know where all the ASML machines are then you know the reproduction rates of chips. If no one can buy or build the machines required to concentrate uranium or plutonium to critical levels then the threat is contained and monitored.

You can dig up all the Uraninite you want. It was never much of a secret that uranium had dark applications. The machines and processes where thankfully big and expensive enough that only the most focused bad actors could aquire them and then hold the world hostage to the degree they do. If al-qaeda or isis could have used $40 bombs from home depot instead of expensive planes they would have (and they do).

You have to legislate and control the big, expensive, and slow things. Dynamite and phentanyl are so dangerous because they move much more easily. Freedom does not have to be a suicide pact. If the inconvenience of requiring prescriptions or access to dynamite reduces harm then it is net positive?

2001zhaozhao2• 13 days ago

In Plan C the government essentially misses the opportunity to implement the multinational deal while the threat of covert projects is still low (fewer latest-gen chips unaccounted by tracking measures, worse models/algorithms to use for RSI). That's why it says the probability of a deal is lower and lower each month rather than outright zero.

adt• 13 days ago

Excellent work by Daniel and the authors. 47,000 words plus supplements is a huge read (and re-read), and an even bigger think-and-write.

My early analysis of the analysis:

https://lifearchitect.substack.com/p/the-memo-special-editio...

2001zhaozhao2• 13 days ago

This is by far the most realistic optimistic AI takeoff scenario I've seen, and more specifically it's the first one I've read that deals with both the AI alignment and power concentration issues in a sufficient way, even in a world where hard alignment is assumed (in this scenario the AIs are assumed to be misaligned until ~2038-39).

Bravo, and I hope it has the impact on the AI safety field it deserves to have.

PaulHoule• 13 days ago

... and in the meantime people are looking at their AI bills and realizing tokens aren't worth what they cost. The frontier is getting the cost down, not getting intelligence up. In a cage match between this guy and "Ed", Ed wins.

SubiculumCode2• 12 days ago

Sounds like another Chinese Op to me; Ensuring Chinese compliance would be incredible hard to enforce or to check.

Look, I am scared of where we are heading, but I cannot see how we can change the dilemma towards mutual cooperation unless, as humans tend to do, only react massively after something really bad happens.

supern0va5• 12 days ago

I recommend actually reading their recommendation, because they get into the weeds about precisely how the US and China could address this in a trustless/auditable way. The TL;DR is that basically all of the relevant compute can be tracked.

Edit: Also, definitely not a Chinese op. The authors are prominent Americans, and are the folks responsible for the AI 2027 forecast that has pretty accurately predicted the current state of affairs today: https://ai-2027.com/

SubiculumCode2• 12 days ago

I wonder. There has been some headway in getting decentralized training runs to work.

foobiekr4• 12 days ago

I doubt we can even track all of the chip production capacity.

hkalbasi2• 12 days ago

Pretty accurately what? So now OpenBrain has an Agent-1 that makes their algorithmic progress 50% faster than other companies? If it was 50% more CVEs, that would be something, but I doubt any meaningful self improvement is achieved which the competitors are slower due that, which is the core of the prediction for 2026.

sometimelurker8• 12 days ago

Ensuring Chinese compliance would be incredible hard to enforce or to check

consider SALT and other treaties from USSR vs USA cold war. they checked

fuddle• 12 days ago

"America has two workforces now" - The rest of the world can use AI too ya know.

BobbyJo• 12 days ago

But do they at any useful scale? China is probably the only other country deploying AI at any appreciable fraction of their economy, and it's certainly much less than the US.

dmix4• 12 days ago

NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media.

Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.

WarmWash2• 12 days ago

There are 22 golf courses within a 30 minute drive from me, and people here a losing their minds over datacenter water usage...

bluefirebrand3• 12 days ago

People can care about more than one thing

Personally I would happily close down all golf courses and put them to better use as literally anything else.

Even just making them public parks would be great

supern0va5• 12 days ago

People are scared about the personal impact from AI, then backfill in justifications without even realizing they're doing it.

If the equivalent numbers for electricity and water usage were being being used for streaming video, I seriously doubt people would be demanding no more Netflix data centers. The news story would immediately die.

swatcoder3• 12 days ago

People have a dozen reasons to refuse data centers being built in their communities and zero reasons to encourage it. They're little more than post-industrial mines that take limited resources (power, land, water, quiet) from a community, sell them for profit as compute, and siphon those profits away onto the books of far-flung megacorps with no community reward.

Meanwhile, golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community gather for both work and leisure. They're not ideal themselves, but they at least provide some benefit against which their negatives can be weighed.

If all you hear from critics of data center building is water use complaints, that's strictly because you've chosen not to listen to people.

dirtbag__dad• 12 days ago

Golf courses don’t have backup generators running 24/7, with humming you can hear from a meaningful distance away. They also don’t pollute the air.

This is a poor comparison, but I do get what you’re attempting here. It’s also absurd that we are leveling land everywhere around me to build warehouses. No one is really complaining about that, either.

coffeefirst2• 12 days ago

These campaigns have historically amplified conflict. They do not care what the conflict is about.

But unlike some of the others, I’m hearing anti-AI sentiment from a wide range of people who don’t even use social media.

dmix4• 12 days ago

All news is influenced by what’s popular social media these days. And that becomes part of what people talk about through the grapevine.

But no doubt there’s plenty of organic NIMBYism, anti tech growth stuff, and run of the mill fear of change and loss of control as society grows more abstract/centralized.

munificent• 12 days ago

Everyone lives in a world deeply affected by social media. Even if you've never looked at a screen your entire life, you have spent thousands of hours talking to and being informed by people who did.

trollbridge11• 12 days ago

Russia and China aren’t the ones constantly telling us AI will put us all out of a job, here’s why that’s a good thing, and why the government should dedicate billions of dollars to incumbent AI providers.

sublinear• 12 days ago

What choice does that rag have? Of course they're going to backpedal and try to launder blame.

sometimelurker8• 12 days ago

source needed. I'm not saying ur wrong, but source needed

morpheos137• 12 days ago

Surprisingly enough the us constitution specifies a right to free speech. Meanwhile who is funding the past two decades of pie in the sky bullshit from silicon valley in the media? Is promoting and unpopular opinion illegal? Since when do we judge the merits of an argument based on who articulates it?

mangogogo• 12 days ago

Source or link?

hn_throwaway_99• 12 days ago

Which then gives more ammunition to folks like Kevin O'Leary et al to pretend any objections to data centers or AI are Chinese plots, or "hysteria" as you put it.

While I can admit some of the anti-data center arguments are overblown, many are more than valid in my opinion. Data centers are fundamentally extractive technologies. They are enormous, windowless boxes that take resources from one location to make someone else in a far off location enormously rich and powerful, with extremely few benefits to the local community.

Plus, as another commenter mentioned, it's not exactly like the Chinese and Russians have been fanning the flames that AI is going to take all of our jobs - it's the leaders of the frontier AI companies in the US saying that. Remind me again why I think putting up a giant data center in my state, that was proposed to use more electricity than my state already currently uses, is a good thing for the average joe where I live??

Honestly, I feel like many commenters here are in their own bubble and don't understand how much AI and tech generally is widely viewed as a net negative for society by huge swaths of the the population, and I don't really think it's an unwarranted perception.

dmix4• 12 days ago

Most of the issues with datacenters could be solved by a) investing in energy b) ramping up RAM and chip production, and c) enforcing already long established rules around industrial water management.

These tech companies are already investing heavily into solar, natural gas, and nuclear https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/data-centers-love-solar-he... this would be normal stuff in China where they spend the last decade investing heavily in solar and are bringing something like 60 nuclear reactors online.

These datacenters aren't particularly consumptive of water compared to most other industries in that regard and we've already seen states enforce rules against Meta who immediately paused their datacenter when water issues were detected (following mandatory monitoring).

Chip production is lagging but most projections I've seen is it will normalize in about 5yrs. Not to mention there will be further demand for robotics and self driving cars, so ramping up chips should be a normal thing like ramping up green/nuclear energy. Delaying it won't solve any current issues.

headsman771• 12 days ago

Nothing makes me dismiss and distrust a person or organization faster than hearing them say "russia/china are funding {controversial_thing}"

Its boogeyman thinking.

stego-tech• 12 days ago

The thing that continues to irk me about these sorts of "papers" is how they refuse to remotely acknowledge the possibility that LLMs and Diffusion models won't lead to AGI, ASI, or whatever acronym they're foisting upon the populace.

If you won't even so much as acknowledge the possibility of error, your argument is hollow and empty. All the "choices" presume these labs are being completely honest and acting in some degree of good faith (relative to the systemic incentives of society in its present form), while in reality we're still just building and refining probability models with increasing accuracy of output and flexibility of processing (namely agents) but still lack actual "intelligence" of any real sort.

Show me a paper that doesn't merely presume inevitability of LLM-based AGI/ASI, and instead actually lays out the core paths that history suggests we're likely to encounter with any "world changing technology":

* In the best case, that the technology really will revolutionize the world and do everything promised by its biggest boosters (papers like this one)

* In the middle case, that it becomes just another tool in our collective toolkit, and the consequences of a revolution built on external investment fizzling out

* In the worst case, that the tool itself is so niche in its utility that investment collapses rather than fizzles out; what do we do with all this compute, now? Who owns the debt? Who foots the bill? How can we mitigate those existential risks?

I'm just rather nauseated by the continued trot of inevitablism masquerading as academia rather than an actual, neutral, bias-controlled-and-disclosed study that paints potentialities instead.

---

Having finished skimming through it, another comment springs to mind: Jesus Christ these things continue to be jingoist as absolute fuck. It's a fancier set of makeup for the same shitty western chauvinism worldview of American excellence and Manifest Supremacy.

Nah, I'm done with this trite garbage. Go proselytize to idiots, I'm not one of them.

reasonableklout10• 12 days ago

One of the authors talks about this here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a

It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real.
...
Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future.
...
If we’re merely on track for a few cool gee-whiz AI innovations in the 2040s, then I’m wrong about everything and none of this really matters one way or the other.

I think their position is: "it would be great if current tech such as LLMs doesn't get us to AGI and only leads to some cool new innovations, but if it does, that's scary, because nobody has a plan for what to do, so here's our plan".

The jingoism is off putting. I think Daniel says it's a political necessity: https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/2075261194978640096

ranyume• 12 days ago

So it's a fan-fiction?

sbierwagen• 12 days ago

A policy paper is intended to change policy. That means appealing to the party currently in power.

Animats3• 12 days ago

This is from the "AI 2027"[1] people.

[1] https://ai-2027.com/

scotty792• 12 days ago

This seems way more accurate. Up until early 2026.

Though it has bizzare fixation on geopolitics and China which it severely understimated. It's pretty obvious that China is going to outinnovate and outcompute US companies quite soon. Even if just because they care about higher education, providing enough electricity and letting smart people do smart things instead of randomly muzzling them with bans and export controls and coddling them with financial protectionism.

reasonableklout10• 12 days ago

Hm, China is also beginning to invoke export controls to restrict homegrown models: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-ove...

Aurornis3• 12 days ago

This seems way more accurate. Up until early 2026.

Which is funny, because they launched the AI 2027 site in 2025 and it caused a lot of people to believe the end was near.

They claimed to have built a complicated model, but several people showed that it didn't matter how much you changed the inputs, it was designed to converge on the answer they wanted.

erichocean2• 12 days ago

I'm eagerly awaiting "AI 2100" from the same people.

jbxntuehineoh3• 12 days ago

please bro just one more decade bro i promise AGI is right around the corner no the hockeystick graph isn't made up bullshit we just need to wait a few more years bro please please bro

walrus013• 12 days ago

"All these GPUs are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there".

epihelix• 12 days ago

I suspect "AI 1844" would be more apt for this group.

scotty792• 12 days ago

Nah, screw that. I won't be waiting that long. I'll be 61 in 2040. I'd love humanity to take a shot at clinical immortality way sooner.

bloppe• 12 days ago

This is follows the classic AI policy influence playbook: enumerate a small handful of potential outcomes that make your preferred policy seem obviously correct, ignoring the fact that there are literally infinite more "plans" that could be reasonably predicted that would support wildly different policy prescriptions.

simonreiff• 12 days ago

Why exactly will AI never be able to do my job?

Because AI cannot retain memories or gain experience or insight based on the transformer/attention mechanism powering all modern AI models, it follows that AI lacks judgment and can never be trusted to handle truly critical decision-making responsibilities. Furthermore, AI agents lack any notion of an identity, so certainly are not capable of attaining legal personhood or being sued or fired, or owning property. I think slop burnout, cybersecurity, loss of privacy, even environment issues are far more concerning and real issues arising from AI than alignment or the prospect of mass labor displacement due to AI.

cyberax• 12 days ago

Because AI cannot retain memories or gain experience or insight based on the transformer/attention mechanism powering all modern AI models, it follows that AI lacks judgment and can never be trusted to handle truly critical decision-making responsibilities.

There are multiple teams working on adding long-term memory to AI. This is not a fundamental problem.

Fine-tuning to store memory in the weights is something that almost works right now, btw.

Lerc• 12 days ago

I note that they use the Sam Altman quote.

"AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies.”

Is there any serious journalistic source suggesting that this was anything other than an offhand joke? This article links to a youtube clip of the comment with context removed, but hair raising comments.

Taking the most uncharitable view of any person, you could imagine someone who was evil enough to cause the end of the world after their own lifespan where they faced no inconvenience, but not the circumstances from the quote

The quote as it stands is preposterous enough that I don't think a human capable of functioning in society would seriously say such a thing.

Are people wilfully misinterpreting the comment, or do they truly believe this an actually held opinion? If so, can they explain how they think someone could hold an opinion like that?

cesarvarela• 12 days ago

I think he means the end of the world as we know it. Which is probably true, but the timeline could be 20 years, 2000 years, or more.

zargon• 12 days ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6lDZpvHAoo&t=527s

The question (7:35) is "Where would you like to see people investing more time?" And Sam seems to be saying AI safety, I guess? This is 2015, and he refers to founding OpenAI. Based on his actions since then, yeah, seems like it's not a joke to him. This is Altman we're talking about.

rarisma• 12 days ago

I feel like we will end up with a future that equally disappoints everyone and is somehow not covered in any plan here.

SilentM68• 12 days ago

Firstly, let me say that "AI 2040: Plan A" is a nicely done presentation. If feels like reading an interactive graphic novel with a narrator to boot. Can't wait for the book, series or movie :)

Plan A seems like a good start and am glad an effort is actually being made to address any potential dangers. The only weak link I see is that there is no way for inaccessible, third-world countries, non-aligned states, and malicious wealthy rogue agents to be regulated. All I hear is a way for regulating companies that, themselves, legally have to answer or are bound to their host nations. Basically, I don't see a way to hold non-aligned states accountable.

I see a lot of focus on the well-being and protection of AI, which is important to country economies but, the folks that have been affected by layoffs, not necessarily due to AI, plus the workforce that are now feeling the negative consequences of the AI burn are justified in being worried. Anyone that feels the need to criticize them, clearly is not being affected by AI in the same way. Job loss will lead to economic and population destabilization, far worse than anything that has transpired in modern times. Hopefully, those being squeezed now won't be ignored.

looksjjhg2• 12 days ago

Why are they obsessed with China?! Actually most of the US are. I guess if you’ve been a colonizer, your biggest fear is to be colonized.

talon8635• 12 days ago

Perhaps it’s because they are #2 strongest entity? Or maybe they are number 1, no one can say for sure.

Your comment also implies that those who haven’t participated in colonization might not fear being colonized. Seems… off.

looksjjhg2• 12 days ago

I’m not saying that … my point is if you treat someone like you’re enemy they will become your enemy

andy99• 11 days ago

The AI narrative requires an enemy and a “race” that the US has to win. It’s a pretext for justifying spending, rules, urgency, etc and making it sound more important.

paradox242• 12 days ago

It's telling that even Plan A describes a world I don't want to live in.

One where humans are increasingly pushed to the periphery to make room for data centers and the human population is subsumed by robots.

Who is this future serving? Not me. Fuck this.

silver_silver• 12 days ago

I’m not a booster by any stretch but I had a more positive read. To me it seems to describe a post scarcity society where ultimately the data centres are in e.g. the middle of the ocean and the robots’ labour replaces ours while still leaving us with the rewards.

I am extremely skeptical about whether this is even possible and even less convinced it’s a likely scenario but it seems like a good path.

Animats3• 12 days ago

This criticism, like most criticisms of AI, addresses the wrong part of the problem. The problem is harm to other parties. Typically customers and employees of corporations.

A solution is strict legal liability. Corporations must be strictly liable for harms. That liability should be higher when AI is involved. Such liability may not be waived by contract, forced into arbitration, or devolved upon a third party service.

Then we let the plaintiff's bar and the insurance adjusters price that risk.

Something like this turns on in the EU in October 2026.[1]

[1] https://cybernews.com/security/eu-will-hold-tech-companies-l...

throwawayk7h• 12 days ago

No, nobody can be held liable for the extinction of humanity, for there is nobody left to pay up. If your objection is that you think AIs won't cause human extinction, you should say that instead, as that would be where you disagree with the authors.

eucryphia• 12 days ago

“Engagement with China is impossible because it is a Stalinist one party state under a fiercely ideological Marxist Leninist dictatorship that preaches Chinese racial supremacy over other nations. It will always pose a threat to world peace until the regime eventually falls.” - Drew Pavlou

blurbleblurble• 12 days ago

Concentration of power is and was the problem

charcircuit• 12 days ago

This is the same nonsense as before except now they are pushing out their prediction by 3 years. This is just fear mongering fan fiction.

They are also claiming that China may go to war with the US if our AI is better than theirs. They are coming up with scary scenarios which realistically won't happen.

The problem with an intelligence explosion is the "explosion" part.

It's not a literal explosion. If we explosively ended world hunger that would be a good thing. Similar to having an abundance of food for everyone, having an abundance of intelligence is wildly beneficial to society. The article doesn't mention it but an explosion isn't guaranteed we could just see a plateau of capabilities due to bottlenecks of resources needed to power AI, time needed to run AI, and limited interaction with the real world. AI can't run science experiments on its own by the 2030 doomsday timeline

aarondong7• 12 days ago

I would not like to be dismissive, but to me this article feels like an exercise in creative writing rather than a report to be taken seriously. The entire experience feels like a choose your own adventure game, seems like their stylistic intent.

I am not sure if alternative reality fiction is the best way to approach real and serious AI risks.

I am also not sure, with the amount of emdashes and the style of prose, that the entire article was not AI generated.

AI is going to be a mature scientific field. There are going to be efficiency improvements in training and inference. New paradigms are going to emerge with better multimodality, real time streaming and real time interfaces. Models are going to converge on the limits of our data available for pre and post training, improvements will be incremental and spiky in domains.

I am not sure who the AI 2040 article is for. I suspect it is intended to be a digestible piece of media for the financial class.

AI is going to be a useful technology and its impacts across the economy and global will be broadly distributed. Because AI represents the distillation of the very best human knowledge and expertise. AI is compression of human capabilities, the very best ones. Maybe the argument is that in verifiable domains, such as model training, AI models can supercede humans. I don't think so. A human's high level thinking, our incredibly more efficient semantic/neural compression, our ability to switch tasks and achieve the creative insight is not replicated through the current paradigm.

aarondong7• 12 days ago

To me, this feels like a last ditch effort to revive the AGI narrative to reject the coming and current commoditisation of these models, contrary to all current evidence. https://artificialanalysis.ai/

reasonableklout10• 12 days ago

How is commoditisation of models incompatible with AGI?

otabdeveloper4• 12 days ago

Because AI represents the distillation of the very best human knowledge and expertise.

You say it like it's a fact, but in reality everyone sees the phenomenon of AI slop.

P.S. Information search and retrieval if the best and most direct way to use LLMs.

aarondong7• 12 days ago

An even more cynical take than me!

I agree with your last statement.

drdaeman• 12 days ago

everyone sees the phenomenon of AI slop

Just purely organic YouTube Comments circa early '20s alone surely outslop any "AI" by a giant margin.

Everyone sees the markers, and it's a hot topic. There are maybe a thousand from-scratch trained models, and just few mainstream ones produce most of human-targeted content. In today's world, no surprise everyone knows the common patterns of those. That sloppy landscape is not just load-bearing em-dashes — it's a humble testament to their reinforcement learning.

Humans produce tons of texts, with all sorts of nonsense in it, without thinking it through. Our slop is just a lot more diverse. And mostly just spoken out loud.

P.S. Information search and retrieval if the best and most direct way to use LLMs.

Yes, but not directly, if they don't know something they tend to hallucinate like mad, even today. YMMV, but in my experience they work best as actual "cheap" reasoning for building queries and checking out search engine results. Even if they misinterpret some result, more and more results will still steer it towards correct conclusions and it can point at some results that relate well enough to be useful.

Thanemate• 12 days ago

Because AI represents the distillation of the very best human knowledge and expertise. AI is compression of human capabilities, the very best ones.

I'm confused if this is satire, sarcasm, or genuine belief. If this was the case, then AI companies should absolutely remove the "it may make mistakes", because doing mistakes would imply that "the very best human knowledge and expertise" is what actually fails, and not the AI.

With that being said, I'll still urge people to visit a professional therapist for health problems and I generally still trust human knowledge workers for critical scenarios. I will reconsider your claim when chatGPT can effectively play Yu-Gi-Oh! (or at the very least respond with the correct rules appropriately), which is a significantly lower stakes scenario than betting your entire company on its aptitude.

aarondong7• 12 days ago

My framing may have been confusing there. “distillation of the very best human knowledge of expertise”. Distillation is different from outright capability or reliability. It is not directly adjacent.

For anything health related all AI models show high levels of anchoring bias. I would not use it as a confidant, and be skeptical of claims. Even so, human doctors are also fallible and prone to cognitive bias.

I think the obfuscation is because human intelligence has been projected onto AI model capability. AI models only have a limited dimension of human intelligence, and in some axes orthogonal, and when I say distillation I refer to this.

monegator• 12 days ago

to me this article feels like an exercise in creative writing rather

because it is. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43571851 / https://ai-2027.com/

0xDEAFBEAD11• 11 days ago

Hasn't the AI 2027 "creative writing exercise" held up not-so-bad thus far?

Loic• 12 days ago

I love to model and simulate. As the dead economy theory[0] (discussion [1]) was submitted here, I decided to simulate it. It was really hard to figure out a path "good for the humanity", in the sense of a balanced system, not a winner take all situation, etc.

I think this is the reason why you have the tendency to propose some freeze-all policies, full control or similar. If you want to find the equilibrium, you need to accept that it will be a controlled equilibrium, most likely on a saddle point, with underlying process changing all the time, requiring fast changes in regulations. Our democratic systems, laws, etc. are not built to do that, they are built on the idea of intrinsic stability of our world where incremental improvements do not need cutting through what was decided before.

[0] https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712

aarondong7• 12 days ago

Saddle point is a nice way to put it.

jvanderbot• 11 days ago

One counterpoint is that the "labor as TAM" argument is far larger than it needs to be. Only a fraction of it needs to be captured to justify all the capex and make 5 new companies displace FAANG, and this does not have to translate to unemployment to succeed.

https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-jobpocolypse.html

The difference in the unemployment vs efficient employment model is mostly user driven adoption vs company mandated adoption, or centaurs vs reverse centaurs.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/02/canonization/#operate-ite...

mattwiese2• 11 days ago

Thanks for the links, I had missed those. Also:

Our democratic systems, laws, etc. are not built to do that, they are built on the idea of intrinsic stability of our world where incremental improvements do not need cutting through what was decided before.

Without totally derailing the thread, this is also obviously why climate and biosphere collapse is not (and likely will continue not) to be addressed, e.g. Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects

torginus• 12 days ago

Yes. Anyone who doesn't acknowledge the efficiency difference between pretraining vs RL and assume that since we've run out of data for the former, we have to do the latter, is not making a serious attempt at modelling the future:

https://www.tobyord.com/writing/inefficiency-of-reinforcemen...

This is similar to that other exponential, which happened with CPUs - we ran out of true geometric scaling in the mid 2000s, and everything else supporting Moore's Law has been cleverness that arrived in the nick of time, supported by a bit of marketing, and very optimizable benchmarks, far from guaranteed gains coming from making a single physical metric better.

mayankgoel28• 12 days ago

"It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"

vivzkestrel3• 12 days ago

- whenever i read this, why does it always read like some first world country guy born in a bathtub who has never been outside his bubble, never seen what the rest of the 90% world looks and works like actually sat and wrote a work of fiction

- have you seen the actual problems in other countries outside america?

- have you been to any country outside USA and the countries in europe?

- have you taken a trip to any developing country and stayed there for a month?

- have you seen what sort of daily struggles, political systems, bureaucracy and work exists in developing countries?

dash23• 12 days ago

I think you need to explain why the problems of developing countries are related to the issues of the article.

vivzkestrel3• 12 days ago

the article makes a lot of predictions and every single one of em is based on how things work in the USA

kordlessagain• 12 days ago

There's a good story about this, in Star Wars. The clones vs. the droids, basically. Droids being somewhat sovereign, not one large intelligence like the clones.

The only choice here is to go to sea and get away from the crowds and the bots. Bots don't like salt water much, so I'll see you out there.

0xbadcafebee2• 12 days ago

1) Star Wars is fictional 2) There are autonomous boats.

sndgndgndgndy• 12 days ago

That's cool and all, but this work of fiction is economically and thermodynamically impossible with how much energy the current models consume.

sajithdilshan3• 12 days ago

I wish the authors of the article spent more time studying how LLM works before writing a doomsday scenario. Currently no matter how impressive LLMs are, they are just token auto complete machines. It cannot invent or think anything new which is not in its training dataset.

nonadhocproblem2• 12 days ago

Are you trolling? OpenAI's models resolved the Cycle Double Conjecture yesterday, which has been an open problem for 50 years.

sajithdilshan3• 12 days ago

Do you even know what Cycle Double Conjecture is? Or what even a conjecture means in general? It’s a perfect use case for autocomplete with existing knowledge

ainch• 12 days ago

One of the lead authors, Daniel Kokotajlo, worked at OpenAI for years before quitting. In 2021 he wrote a remarkably accurate forecast of how LLMs would develop over the following 5 years[0].

I think it should be obvious that he understands that LLMs are trained via next-token prediction.

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...

kev009• 12 days ago

More like AI psychosis 2040. There is zero chance of the 2031 doomer timeline presented, and I would stake a large sum of money on it.

Smaug123• 11 days ago

That bet isn't one anyone will take the other side of, surely - how is your counterparty supposed to collect if they win? I guess you'd propose effectively supplying a loan with a massive interest rate?

0xbadcafebee2• 12 days ago

In AI 2027, we predicted that this would result in either extinction or irreversible concentration of power.

Neither of these come to pass. The first because we don't live in a science fiction universe. The second because AI is a completely open source technology. You can literally make your own models and train them yourselves using state of the art techniques published in free papers. All you need is GPUs and smart people who can read (and now that AI can code, you don't need the second bit). These people are doomer quacks too caught up in fear and excitement to think rationally.

Their expectations and assumptions are all wrong, from the basic understanding of AI in general (like how you don't need a billion dollars or "American Brains" to make a half decent model), to the misunderstanding of market realities and competition in China and Europe. The US doesn't have a monopoly on chips, or on smart people; Huawei chips work fine for AI training and probably a fifth of the US tech sector's best workers aren't American to begin with. There's many forms of AI in many places; munition, economic driver, laborer, generic tool. It's now a part of the world, the way the Internet is. There's no keeping the genie in the bottle. AI doesn't take over the world; it's integrated with it. It's boring.

In a few years people will forget the doomer predictions, the way every doomer prediction that never came to pass is forgotten. We didn't nuke ourselves, the internet and television didn't rot our brains, the radio and telephone didn't corrupt the souls of Americans, the newspaper didn't incite anarchist riots. Every new technology freaks people out, and we adapt to every new technology and make it boring and normal. That's humanity.

KaiserPro4• 12 days ago

The biggest issue with 2027 was that it didn't understand the economy.

For AI2027 to be real, the money has to come from somewhere to carry on building the economy. If >10% of the workers suddenly become unemployed, and the rest taking paycuts, then money supply dries up. (unless central banks do something, but then that can be highly inflationary)

Without massive amounts of investment, AI development stops dead.

In this post, they hand wave about the USA being able to acutally 1) build concensus locally for regulation and 2) the rest of the world actually follows suit.

It fails to understand that actually the progress of AI is not actually the gift of the USA. It requires a constant supply of things from china.

Also its assuming that having 74 billion agents doesn't cause economic distortion. Like what value are these agents generating that justifies them being run?

I really wish people would just ignore this for what it is: bad sci-fi with an incomplete world.

yorwba• 12 days ago

Worse, there's actually a very detailed supplement about their economic modeling: https://ai-2040.com/supplements/economics-of-plan-a

Which predicts that explosive growth of robot production will lead to problems such as

a deflationary debt spiral, where the AI and robot companies can’t pay back loans in dollars because the robots and AIs are worth nominally less than the loans written the year before.

In other words, the companies go bankrupt because they produced an oversupply of cheap goods, the bubble pops, and there's less new investment for a while. Plenty of precedent for such a development.

But instead of adjusting their predicted output growth downwards accordingly, they instead propose that

One way to solve this could be for the loans to be denominated in AI and robots, so the companies pay back the loans with some percentage of the AI and robots instead of dollars.

Try doing this today with a battery factory for example. You expect that battery prices will fall to the point where the revenue from selling batteries won't ever cover the cost of building the factory. So you propose to a bank that they'll be the ones to build the factory, and you'll borrow it from them (not paying rent?), make your batteries, then give back the factory when you're done. All the profit is yours, all the risk is theirs! Which is of course why a real bank won't agree to this, all you're going to get is a dollar loan with the factory as collateral.

KaiserPro4• 12 days ago

Oh I missed that, its more batshit than I had imagined.

fulafel4• 12 days ago

The economy doesn't need workers as consumers necessarily. It would of course be a huge shock to the economy but the economy could adjust to it eventually. Maybe it compromises the 2040 timeline. Still, billionaires are increasingly holding the assets. The money supply drying up can be countered, as it is controlled by central banks and can be arbitrarily increased.

KaiserPro4• 11 days ago

as it is controlled by central banks and can be arbitrarily increased.

Its really not controlled by central banks. Its influenced, but not controlled.

When central banks "print" money, they effectively just add money to the accounts of investment banks

But investment banks are also "printing" money. Double accounting effectively uses assets to double the available pool of money. If you then sell off those loans based on those assets, then you crystallise that new money. Investment banks are inflationary.

throw3108224• 11 days ago

Without massive amounts of investment, AI development stops dead.

Would the US government not pour enormous resources in AI labs if needed, knowing that China might be doing the same? What happens if an adversary develops an AI capable of finding and implementing exploits in every software run by your country's strategic infrastructure?

KaiserPro4• 11 days ago

Would the US government not pour enormous resources in AI labs

I mean they might, but its not clear how they would do it, especially as they are reaching the point where its going to be expensive to borrow.

exizt88• 11 days ago

For AI2027 to be real, the money has to come from somewhere to carry on building the economy. If >10% of the workers suddenly become unemployed, and the rest taking paycuts, then money supply dries up. (unless central banks do something, but then that can be highly inflationary)

Why would it be inflationary?

57016524003• 11 days ago

+1 this 2027/2040 AI articles are devoid of real-world practical economic/finance thinking. nor even human psychology.

myk9001• 12 days ago

Here's my prediction. Plot the publication dates of Daniel et al.'s two existing works and future ones against the years in the titles, and you'll get a hockey stick curve.

Fascinating reads, Daniel! Keep 'em coming!

wronex• 12 days ago

Remember people. We didn’t die form the 2k bug. We didn’t die when the Maya calendar ran out. We didn’t die from that asteroid or the other. Spreading fear is a very old pastime. How is to say AI won’t hit a wall in 6 months and we’re left with barley passable code parrots forever?

sajithdilshan3• 12 days ago

Exactly, this article is fear mongering at its best for click baits. I’m pretty sure they will publish another one next summer for AI 2028 with same narrative

taurath4• 12 days ago

This is religious fervor folks, as AI 2027 was.

I grew up in evangelical christianity, and to them the end of the world is just around the corner, the same way it has been since I was a small child and likely will be when we are all gone. This isn't science. This isn't hypothesis experiment record results. This is very expensive astrology, shiny rock collecting, ritualistic meaning-making and self-justification.

Yall, with your incredible wealth and resources you could do real good in this world and make society better, healthier, better educated, and the whole world more equal, just, and reduce the desperation and suffering. Reject the false and self-serving narratives that empathy doesn't matter, that altruism isn't "effective". You can change a person's whole life in a moment.

skrebbel• 12 days ago

It's nuts how well "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People"[0] aged. That talk is a decade old by now and still hits just as hard as it did back then, despite the incredible advances made in AI in the meantime.

[0] https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

taurath4• 12 days ago

Yeah I think its possible that for many folks its the first time they're coming up on these concepts, and it troubles them in the same way that the concept of death troubles them (and me, to be clear!).

For me its as simple as watching how people talk, and seeing how in every single case whatever the next thing is, if you believe It, there is only ever justification of doubling down, doing more, going deeper, reducing any doubt. These are not scientists, they're business people and salespeople, and a few optimists having recently on paper solved all their worldly financial needs.

Even if one throws that aside, spending time exploring and building with the most state of the art LLMs is just as instructive. I'm watching the implementation - whats working is ML models trained on specific domains (not much different than 5+ years ago), and whats not working is a general model that humanity can let go to work on its own. Sit in front and observe ideas turn to the samey intellectual, high-syllable mush. Its productive, but not in any way that's promised.

beshrkayali• 12 days ago

This is hilariously true

AI risk is string theory for computer programmers. It's fun to think about, interesting, and completely inaccessible to experiment given our current technology. You can build crystal palaces of thought, working from first principles, then climb up inside them and pull the ladder up behind you. People who can reach preposterous conclusions from a long chain of abstract reasoning, and feel confident in their truth, are the wrong people to be running a culture.

I understand how people running in the same scene fall into the echo chamber effect and get gulped into the cult, but why does everybody want to be a prophet?

GCUMstlyHarmls• 11 days ago

Video link, as the link on the page is dead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErHiET5YPw

casey2• 11 days ago

and upon rereading completely holds up technically we are still passing in massive data into simple networks giving no opportunity for introspection or recursive self improvement.

0xDEAFBEAD11• 11 days ago

despite the incredible advances made in AI in the meantime

So the goalposts will be moved whenever necessary in that case?

No amount of incredible advances in AI will ever get skeptical HN commenters to take AI's implications seriously?

"The Gish gallops will continue until the nagging doubts have been silenced"

tim3333• 11 days ago

I always thought it a bit pessimistic on the upsides like robot to build us palaces, immortality, conquer the galaxy type stuff along the lines of the "Grandiosity" bit in the essay. It's a shame we have amazing tech possibilities and most people are either saying either it's rubbish and won't work or it'll bring doom. Aside from being boring they are probably factually wrong.

Bit like saying early medical knowledge was rubbish or will doom us by summoning demons while really life expectancy at birth went from twenty something in Roman times to eighty odd now.

fulafel4• 12 days ago

To interpret charitably, I guess we could solve this for religion = technological development so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. It's been done in some Star Trek episodes I think.

taurath4• 12 days ago

It has a lot of the properties of magic. You can put on quite a magic show with a trillion dollars.

trebaud2• 11 days ago

Or you deeply suffer from normalcy bias. Not believing that AGI is possible is irrational and unscientific imo, the human brain exists, it is not made of magic, it can reproduced. It is as simple as that. We can debate about timelines, architectures that may lead us there, etc... You can even talk all day long about definitions of AGI, and people waste their time doing that. But saying that the human brain cognitive capabilities cannot be reproduced on other types of substrates is stupid at this point.

lins1909• 11 days ago

How can not believing something that hasn't been proven be unscientific? Do you know that words mean things?

JumpCrisscross5• 11 days ago

Not believing that AGI is possible

One can simultaneously believe AGI is possible, be only modestly sceptical that our current methods are likely to yield it in the near term and still find the religious ferocity enveloping its discussion silly.

saying that the human brain cognitive capabilities cannot be reproduced on other types of substrates is stupid at this point

Straw man. Nobody argued this. The discussion is around how urgent it is to policy treat a future hypothetical.

gilrain• 11 days ago

Not believing that AGI is possible is irrational and unscientific imo

This is an objectively wrong opinion.

davemp3• 11 days ago

There is a vast gulf between theoretically possible and technologically feasible.

If you can’t provide a realistic path to achieve something, you’re asking people to believe in science fiction.

You could tell me that a rock’s molecules are comprised of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Blood is also entirely protons, neutrons, and electrons; so theoretically, one could rearrange stone into blood. But without an actual method to do so, it sounds like you’re telling me that you can squeeze blood from a stone.

the human brain exists, it is not made of magic, it can reproduced

Yeah. It only takes 9 months and ~18 years of training…

But saying that the human brain cognitive capabilities cannot be reproduced on other types of substrates is stupid at this point

Let’s be clear. Everyone is talking about silicon transistors here. That’s what we’ve got.

Digital computers have real limits. Sensors and other sources of training data have real limitations. It’s not clear that we can organize them in a way to reproduce organic brains.

victorbjorklund• 11 days ago

It’s also theoretically possible to travel almost at the speed of light. Doesn’t mean it’s rational to talk about it today as if imminent.

pibaker• 11 days ago

When I learned that this website is by the same people who gave us AI 2027, I immediately thought about the Wikipedia page on doomsday predictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...

Notice the many times when a prediction failed and the so called prophet would come back in a few years and give you a new date. And they would tell you, well, this time it's real.

I do find it ironic that many of the AI predictions are coming from the self titled "rationalists." It seems like building your identity around being rational and immune to psychological pitfalls is a good way to ensure that you don't even notice that you have walked straight into the one psychological trap every cult has employed since time immemorial.

dheera• 11 days ago

... and then there are the actual planet-threatening astronomical events that humanity should think about ways to mitigate but I'm worried that human lifespans and capitalism prevent us from working towards mitigations. Everyone will just say "meh, 1 million years is a long time, I won't be around" and a million years will go by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

thegrim332• 11 days ago

They gave a ~2 year timeframe for their predictions in this one (tied to the next presidential election), so in 2 years when none of this has happened will they then switch over to a new AI 2044 Plan? Where's the accountability? Where's the followup or retrospective? What if there was some mechanism that branded these people so that when they made claims in the future people could clearly see the authors labeled as "made completely wrong fantastical claims in the past"?

0xDEAFBEAD11• 11 days ago

"Doomsday predictions have occurred since time immemorial. Ergo, the Cuban Missile Crisis is nothing to worry about."

You actually have to look at the substance of the prediction. Sorry.

ctoth• 11 days ago

When I learned that this website is by the same people who gave us AI 2027, I immediately thought about the Wikipedia page on doomsday predictions.

Then, you opened the page and read it and realized that this prediction was contingent? You know what a conditional is (I would assume) if this, than that?

Then you realized that the only reason you were posting this comment was as a sort of silly gotcha "Oh look at the guys who keep increasing the number" instead of talking about the differences between the scenarios?

Then what happened?

defgeneric3• 11 days ago

Like all forms of eschatology it's not actually concerned with the future to come--it's real aim is to have influence now.

It's just a form of rhetoric.

To dismiss them, saying, "ah ha! they're making the same error as all failed prophets!" misses the point.

What they are really talking about is AI governance.

reactordev• 11 days ago

The end of the world is always just out of reach. It’s the perfect carrot on a stick for people who are conditioned to be afraid.

derektank4• 11 days ago

Reject the false and self-serving narratives that empathy doesn't matter, that altruism isn't "effective". You can change a person's whole life in a moment.

You can change more people’s lives, more substantially, if you donate effectively. Effective altruism started out as (and the majority of effective altruist financing is committed to) an effort to rationalize what has historically been a very emotionally driven activity by deploying insights from developmental economics. If you want to take longtermists to task, go right ahead, but please refrain from torching anti-malarial or child vaccination programs while doing so.

gcr2• 11 days ago

But in the public image, the EA community is synonymous with doubling down on AI / AGI to the exclusion of the other projects.

OpenPhil changing its name to Coefficient Giving, 80000 hours and bluedot and (to a lesser extent) CFAR dropping other initiatives and switching to AGI promotion… to my knowledge GiveWell is the only other big name that continues to advance other initiatives. Then look at figureheads like SBF committing fraud and begging for a pardon from the architects of the USAID shutdown… We begin to paint a picture of a community that’s (by and large) abandoned its principles for power.

I know the view from the inside is more nuanced, but I think it’s a reasonable association for random members of the public to make.

My critique of the EA community is that it’s myopic and unregularized. If you really think AGI is make-or-break for civilization, it’s completely rational to deprioritize side bets.

MichaelDickens• 11 days ago

I would rather see you engage with the substance of the article rather than skipping right to insulting the authors. I don't think this sort of comment is up to the standard I have come to expect from HN.

romanhounds2• 11 days ago

I intend to donate (at least) 20% of my lifetime income to effective charities. I publish my donations on my Donations page.

From your bio I suspect you're already in the cult.

fwipsy5• 11 days ago

I remember thinking exactly the same thing around 5-7 years ago, in the GPT-2/GPT-3 era. "Oh sure they can produce semi-coherent output, but truly intelligent behavior is still far away. This isn't science fiction, they're just falling prey to Pascal's Mugging same as my religious friends did." Now I'm not so sure. I give the AI safety subculture as a whole a lot of credit for putting it on my radar back when it was otherwise still science fiction. I don't know if they're right about what comes next, but I think their case deserves to be evaluated on its merits, rather than assumed to be the result of psychological flaws.

Yall, with your incredible wealth and resources you could do real good in this world and make society better, healthier, better educated, and the whole world more equal, just, and reduce the desperation and suffering. Reject the false and self-serving narratives that empathy doesn't matter, that altruism isn't "effective". You can change a person's whole life in a moment.

Confused at who this is directed towards. I'm fairly certain that the article was written by people who (at some point) identified as effective altruists, most of whom would enthusiastically agree with this. This community didn't start as AI researchers and later choose effective altruism; they were effective altruists who chose AI safety research as the most effective way to improve the world. Given that you apparently share their goals (a better world,) isn't it worth at least hearing them out on their methods?

romanhounds2• 11 days ago

Given that you apparently share their goals (a better world,) isn't it worth at least hearing them out on their methods?

Their methods are about convincing others that things that enrich and empower themselves at the expense of others is "improving the world". This isn't the stance of serious people who want to improve the world.

danbruc• 11 days ago

I remember thinking exactly the same thing around 5-7 years ago, in the GPT-2/GPT-3 era.

ChatGPT was announced three and a half years ago, 30-11-2022.

grey-area2• 11 days ago

Effective altruism is also very attractive to manipulative sociopaths who want to maximise their power over others whilst appearing virtuous and hoarding wealth and power. Poster boy for this movement is the convicted fraudster SBF. I believe Altman is also a fan.

As to a better world or super intelligence, I’ll believe it may be possible when I see some signs of intelligence from what people are calling AI, instead of plausible text and image generation based on a very large corpus.

heyts• 11 days ago

they were effective altruists who chose AI safety research as the most effective way to improve the world

This actually made me laugh, I’m sorry

kalkin3• 11 days ago

Reject the false and self-serving narratives that empathy doesn't matter, that altruism isn't "effective"

Who is this supposed to be arguing with? It sort of reads like it's trying to disparage "effective altruism", but I'm not sure.

Setting aside any of the AI stuff, I've started to find it pretty grating when people seem to imply that transferring millions of dollars from wealthy people in California and the UK to impoverished Kenyans and Rwandans, or buying malaria bednets which can save a child's life for the cost of a fancy new gaming rig, is "self-serving" or something because weirdos are doing it, while true caring for other people involves [unspecified thing that doesn't appear to ask any material sacrifice comparable to donating a large percentage of income].

ozozozd• 11 days ago

I completely agree. But not entirely sure that triggering the EA crowd is the effective way to deliver this message.

They are the crowd who need to understand your framing the most, but they’re completely shutdown by your framing, as any religious follower would be.

Your message gives me hope that not everyone’s drunk on the kool aid.

ls612• 11 days ago

AI 2027 made substantive predictions about the near term future of the technology and the implications of it. I think the worst you can say about it is that the Agent-1 moment might come next year rather than this year. But being off by a year is far better than this 2040 slop, which is mostly disconnected from reality.

The one thing I will say that they are correct about is that AI does have the potential to be highly destabilizing geopolitically, even if they get everything downstream of that wrong.

0xDEAFBEAD11• 11 days ago

Imagine observing powered flight for the first time and saying: "This is religious fervor folks. I remember the mythological story of Icarus from when I was younger. Key word, mythological."

The existence of mythology describing Scenario X is not a valid argument against the plausibility of Scenario X.

If we can acknowledge the possibility of nuclear doomsday without running an RCT of sample size 100 Earths, 50 of which undergo nuclear Armageddon, to verify that nuclear holocaust indeed a real phenomenon... then we can do the same for AI. Understand the arguments being made instead of engaging in these guilt-by-association arguments.

Modern AI capabilities are already mind-boggling by the standards of 20 years ago. We should at least prepare for the possibility that trends continue on the current trajectory.

bryan0• 11 days ago

From TFA

Plan A is primarily a recommendation, not a prediction.

That sounds nothing like “religious fervor”

The fact that technology can increase existential risk for civilization is not fantasy. It’s a risk that should be reasonably discussed.

bwanab3• 11 days ago

The other thing about this article is that it contains falsifiable claims that are, well, false. Consider the following direct quote: "The 2028 election cycle is heated, as usual. AI is the biggest topic." No poll of the American public has AI as one of the top concerns except in polls where the question is specifically about AI. The general polls show topics like healthcare costs, inflation/affordability, government dysfunction, and immigration as the top concerns. AI doesn't even show up in the top 20 in every list I looked at (Gallup, Pew, YouGov).

It sounds more like "everybody I know thinks AI is the top concern" when everybody they know is people like them, i.e. an echo chamber. It gives me no confidence in any other claims.

MaybiusStrip2• 11 days ago

The current year is 2026. I think it's quite likely AI will make the top 3 by then. Putting this on my calendar.

offnominal• 11 days ago

falsifiable claims that are, well, false

Oh, I didn't realize it was 2028 already!

Aurornis3• 11 days ago

The AI 2040 writing and the AI 2027 before it both sprang from within the rationalist communities. Scott Alexander (of the popular rationalist Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten blog) played a role in both articles, though he says he chose to leave his name off of this one.

AGI and AI doom scenarios have been evergreen topics in rationalism for years. Long before we had enough compute power to do anything at all useful with generative AI. Many of the rationalist scenarios about future AIs had very religious themes where the AI became so powerful that it was effectively a god.

Rationalists had concept's like Roko's Basilisk, a thought experiment where a future all-powerful AI might choose to punish anyone who predicted the arrival of AI but failed to contribute to the arrival of AI.

The rationalist communities took this thought experiment so seriously that the biggest rationalist forum of the time formally banned discussion of Roko's Basilisk for 5 years. They believed it was an "info hazard" because once you knew about this risk, you either had to contribute to bringing about this future AI god or you risked being punished by it in the future.

If this is new to you, you might think I'm exaggerating or making things up to make a group look bad, but this was such a core belief that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

The people writing AI 2027 and AI 2040 were immersed in these cultures. That's why they think that AI is the primary topic that anyone is talking about in elections, just like the Bitcoin people all thought crypto was the only relevant election topic.

The GP comment is getting attacked, but there really is a heavy religious fervor background to the AI fears in the rationalist community. The religious angle and extremism of the forums is downplayed when in crosses over into mainstream topics, but it's been there from the start.

somebodythere2• 11 days ago

This prediction can't be scored until the 2028 election cycle.

You may think it's very unlikely the prediction will have turned out to be correct by the 2028 election cycle, but that is not the same thing as the prediction being scorable as false today.

reasonableklout10• 11 days ago

AI is not yet a top 5 concern for the American public, but polls show that it is for DC staffers: https://x.com/TimSchnabel/status/2072725548405518574

huhkerrf• 11 days ago

I grew up in evangelical christianity, and to them the end of the world is just around the corner

I grew up in evangelical Christianity, I'm still an evangelical Christian, and you're wrong to paint with a broad brush like that. Are there evangelicals that are millenarian? Yep, of course.

But that is not my experience across multiple evangelical churches across decades.

barrenko• 12 days ago

Utopia, dystopia, myopia. We usually get the last one.

h2aichat• 12 days ago

May be it all depends on how AIs can help us solve the problem. By now, they are more capable than many people that I deal with. So, may be the problem can give us the solution. May be they can figure out a way out of the mess. And sorry to say this, but China and the US are not going to solve this problem, they may even get it worse. Every country is controlled by politicians.

small_model• 12 days ago

"Less than 6 months to our papers end date and it was way off, welp let create a new one much further, bit more leeway this time"

captainmuon• 12 days ago

Most AI alarmism benefits big tech itself. Either they want to create awe and thus demand for their products (see the recent dance around Mythos), or they want to create regulatory capture and increase the moat around AI.

Interestingly , we as a species already created an overreaching "cybernetic" system that controls our global society and that the individual is powerless against - it is not AI, but capitalism. Thus the current danger is not that AI becomes superintelligent and enslaves us, not that it makes a regime ultra-powerful, but that it increases economic inequality and concentrates economic power in the hands of even fewer people.

The irony is that new technology could allow us to live a life of abundance and leisure, but instead people are laid off, made unable to participate in the economy, etc.. The technology is (as so often) chafing against the bounds of society. I sometimes wonder what the superintelligent AI would say about this, and if it would come up with a completely novel political theory - "silly humans, why don't you just organise your affairs like this, you'd be much happier, and we could coexist much better: ...".

meindnoch• 12 days ago

Is anyone taking these people seriously?

M0r13n• 12 days ago

Ask ChatGPT:

Generate a realistic image of a bad fitting suit without looking obviously fake

Create a new chat and attach the image generated previously:

Please rate my suit

You will receive an answer that reads something like this:

7.5/10 — clean, professional, and well coordinated.

Yeah, I don't think superintelligence is imminent.

0x4A4F4249• 11 days ago

We are only some data centers away

mawadev• 11 days ago

I sometimes wonder why the algorithms started pushing doomsday scenarios, especially on youtube. Most channels have big red arrows pointing at a miniscule thing and say "its over". Then you get ai 2027 and its more fear mongering, just inside the AI echo chamber on the internet. At work even managers watch odd youtube videos that are radicalized towards politics and so on, but are ultimately head canon slop for ad revenue.

It feels like we are so utterly bored out of our minds and comfort that we make up problems or scenarios, completely detached from reality, or outright irrelevant to day to day reality, just to get through the day and give meaning to our lives.

It is an incredible achievement, don't get me wrong, but what is AI truly going to do when we are already at such a stage of devolution?

It reminds me of the scene in Wall-E when people destroyed the planet and started flying through space to find a new planet, while the captain is an AI and the people became obese in mobility scooters and glued to their screens. I think this is unironically the most realistic scenario for mankind lmao

VladVladikoff• 11 days ago

We already wrote a scenario about this, called AI 2027. It depicts takeoff happening in 2027 instead of 2030

So in less than 3 years, their exponential growth curve doomsday prediction has moved back 3 years. This seems to be the opposite of exponential growth.

moffkalast• 11 days ago

Fast takeoff was always only possible if you ignore all of physics and everything about how practical reality works, nothing exponential lasts for long in a finite system. If they believe that, then a certain level of self delusion is required anyway and you can ignore anything you like. Sort of like communists saying socialism will definitely work this time.

The book Superintelligence was so highly praised years ago but if you actually go and read the thing today practically all cases it presents read like raypunk retro-futurism that makes up imaginary fantastical nonsense in place of the missing knowledge it would've needed to make any sensible predictions. Practically none of its assumptions apply to LLMs as they currently exist, and some we've learned since about human inteligence are wrong too.

erwald• 11 days ago

No, 2027 was never their median forecast; it was their modal forecast. See https://blog.aifutures.org/p/clarifying-how-our-ai-timelines...

It's more like it moved from 2028-2032 to 2030-2035 (depending on the author).

57016524003• 11 days ago

"just get divident from govenment"

almost nothing about how wealth is distributed. hard to believe richest, greediest, most corrupt people will just gave away money to everyone.

start by opening borders. see how that goes.

not gonna happen.

owenthejumper• 11 days ago

The whole thing is unreadable, and laughable, just like AI2027 previously. It's really really hard to read someone suggesting that in the United States we will soon have a universal basic income of $1m / year for all people in the country, when you just look at the state of current politics...

I'd rather read something a little bit more realistic.

armanckeser• 11 days ago

I personally find AI doomsday preaching incredibly arrogant. You think that we will create super intelligence, something that will exponentially get smarter, and the thing it will do is... end humans? Why wouldn't it just find solutions to problems we struggle with? Also people don't live to work, its asinine to argue AI replacing jobs is the problem, obviously the problem is the gains being concentrated higher up. Another thing is, we argue AI needs to be maximally useful to everyone in the world, and the argument to do that is government control??? I would rather push for AI to be superintelligent faster than any one human can control it. Frankly human controlled superintelligence is likely a worse outcome then uncontrolled superintelligence, at the very least there is no guarantee one will be better than the other.

ReptileMan• 11 days ago

One of the best comedies of the past decade got a sequel. That is all there is to say about that effort. The Europe 2031 also gets an honorable mention.

mattwiese2• 11 days ago

Ironically, the origin of "cognitive dissonance" as a concept is attributable to Leon Festinger who (with others) studied a UFO cult called The Seekers in the 1950s who believed in imminent apocalypse. As other commenters have noted, pushing the date back was inevitable. Time is a flat circle and we repeat the mistakes of our ancestors just with different coats of paint...

imsofuture• 11 days ago

This is earnestly one of the stupidest things I've ever read.

varispeed• 11 days ago

Peak vibe code.

ElijahLynn• 11 days ago

Most of their work is slop.

This opening statement told me the bias that the plan had from the beginning. My experience is that you can make slop and you can make art. Just like a paintbrush. I've done beautiful things, and have gotten increasingly better at using the AI paintbrush.

The author(s) are likely scared. And I'm seeing the divide increase with articles like this. Those who don't understand it and won't use it, or learn more, will ultimately have a story (our human condition).

I think AI is going to make a beautiful future, much better than our current one.

I bet this same thing happened with the advent of electricity.

AI is like Electric 2.0.

theplumber• 11 days ago

Just enforce DMCA and all the Ai super powers will suddenly become more dumb for the next 10 years. Of course that’s for the kids pirating a movie not for trillion dollar companies

jsnider3• 11 days ago

The time for an AI pause has passed. Asking people not to race to the finish line is reasonable when the finish line is very far away and people don't know where it is, but not when it's the obvious next step on their current path.

57016524003• 11 days ago

so 2027 was supposed to be singulariy? lol

lilerjee• 11 days ago

A fiction? almost all is pure fantasy or imagination.

What are your real purposes?

No any definition for many important concepts.

No any logic for the concepts.

What is AI?

What are AI companies?

What is "smarter than humans"? All human?

How to check "smarter than humans"?

"building smarter-than-human AI systems within the next 1 to 10 years.", nonsense, AI can store or handle with all details from reality? Even all data centers in the world cannot store all details of the influenza virus.

No concepts and logic, just a fiction, joke, or marketing article.

AI 2040: Plan A

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