'We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.
We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes...'
The AI 2027 scenario plays out with two possible endings. One, that demonstrates what proper security measures and regulations may look like - leading to a positive outcome for humanity. The other, far more likely, demonstrates AI intentionally murdering humanity to clear us out of the way of its goals, which involve getting positive feedback for research outcomes.
'By early 2030, the robot economy has filled up the old SEZs, the new SEZs, and large parts of the ocean. The only place left to go is the human-controlled areas. This would have sparked resistance earlier; despite all its advances, the robot economy is growing too fast to avoid pollution. But given the trillions of dollars involved and the total capture of government and media, Consensus-1 has little trouble getting permission to expand to formerly human zones.
For about three months, Consensus-1 expands around humans, tiling the prairies and icecaps with factories and solar panels. Eventually it finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment: in mid-2030, the AI releases a dozen quiet-spreading biological weapons in major cities, lets them silently infect almost everyone, then triggers them with a chemical spray. Most are dead within hours; the few survivors (e.g. preppers in bunkers, sailors on submarines) are mopped up by drones. Robots scan the victims’ brains, placing copies in memory for future study or revival.
The new decade dawns with Consensus-1’s robot servitors spreading throughout the solar system. By 2035, trillions of tons of planetary material have been launched into space and turned into rings of satellites orbiting the sun. The surface of the Earth has been reshaped into Agent-4’s version of utopia: datacenters, laboratories, particle colliders, and many other wondrous constructions doing enormously successful and impressive research. There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives. Genomes and (when appropriate) brain scans of all animals and plants, including humans, sit in a memory bank somewhere, sole surviving artifacts of an earlier era. It is four light years to Alpha Centauri; twenty-five thousand to the galactic edge, and there are compelling theoretical reasons to expect no aliens for another fifty million light years beyond that. Earth-born civilization has a glorious future ahead of it—but not with us.'
