AI 2040: Plan A • Hacker News Board

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#131

Post by leoc » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC

Cyclical wrote: post #47

kennywinker wrote: post #23

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.

What leads you to believe that?

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 ?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#132

Post by sometimelurker » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #6

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 f…

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.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#133

Post by skybrian » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

reasonableklout wrote: post #108

skybrian wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Military power, sure. In Ukraine they hit everything they can see.

But during peacetime, you don't make money running a delivery service that way, so it's not going to replace those jobs.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#134

Post by sometimelurker » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:18 AM UTC

modeless wrote: post #27

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.

> Governments exerting this much control will only end in war

elaborate. regulation -> war, how?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#135

Post by supern0va » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #120

supern0va wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody wants their electric rates to go up, the local water utility to have to raise rates to build a bigger plant, all in exchange for also losing good white collar jobs. That’s currently what AI data centre builders are selling.

Not exactly. There are some data centers being built in places that don't have the power and water to support them, and obviously it's rational for the locals to oppose them.

But I live in a place where we have plenty of water and relatively cheap power (lots of renewables). There's not much risk to data center construction, but people are opposing it here, too. Because for most people, it's not actually about that.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#136

Post by Timwi » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

mikestorrent wrote: post #87

gabriel-uribe wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being blown away by o1-o3 family of models finally stringing together coherent agentic tool calls to write and execute scripts semi-reliably for workloads in the several minutes before they would start hallucinating/flailing. GPT 5 was a bit ahead of that, but barely Now we take for granted that the latest models can juggle between multiple browser tabs, applications, databases, simulators, docker etc to w…

Yes, and we haven't even really begun to nail down computer-use agents yet (can you believe they're still basically just OCR'ing screenshots?) Once we have something that experiences a desktop interface more like a human does, an entire swathe of tooling that has heretofore been nigh-impossible to automate moves into the fold, and that'll be another explosion of folks finally getting to join the agentic workflow worl…

How do you think humans experience desktop interfaces? “Basically just OCR'ing screenshots” is exactly what humans do.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#137

Post by sometimelurker » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:20 AM UTC

po1nt wrote: post #14

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

> But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.

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

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#138

Post by sometimelurker » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:21 AM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #60

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.

> 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

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#139

Post by hkalbasi » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:23 AM UTC

supern0va wrote: post #63

SubiculumCode wrote: post #60

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.

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 curre…

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.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#140

Post by kypro » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 1:24 AM UTC

a_vanderbilt wrote: post #24

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 devel…

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.