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AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

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Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#251

Post by KaiserPro »

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.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#252

Post by kortilla »

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…

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.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#253

Post by Loic »

aarondong wrote: post #212

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, t…

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

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#254

Post by AussieWog93 »

kortilla wrote: post #252
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…

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.

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

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#255

Post by sbierwagen »

stego-tech wrote: post #70

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…

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

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#256

Post by kortilla »

reasonableklout wrote: post #210
Timwi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not the same thing. For example, given a GUI with a titlebar, title, subtitle, text, and buttons, a human can instantly understand spatially the relationship between these items. But a naive OCR of such a GUI would be a flat stream of text that loses a ton of information.

But that’s not how models handle images either. They spatially segment and reason about title bars, placement, etc.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#257

Post by RandomLensman »

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…

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.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#258

Post by kortilla »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #254
kortilla wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#259

Post by alex_young »

magicalist wrote: post #183
alex_young wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Did it not burn? Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time? Please help us all understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#260

Post by nullandvoid »

skybrian wrote: post #229
kypro wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

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 a…

Waymo was largely built pre-LLM and AI level funding - I think it might be a somewhat apple and pairs comparison.
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