AI 2040: Plan A

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.