Insofar as people still have money, they will continue to consume and therefore buy things. Even when they don't have jobs, they'll be buying things. Gradually ordinary people will lose purchasing power and maybe die or more likely subsist on handouts (if anything like a market economy is still maintained, that is, which is uncertain). Businesses--and especially subsidiaries of AI conglomerates--will get more of the purchasing power and end up buying and selling from each other a lot.

I wish to emphasize though that the above paragraph probably radically understates the magnitude of the changes ahead. If you want to get a sense of how crazy some of the changes will be, you really have to just read some science fiction. (NOT claiming that science fiction is all or even mostly going to come true--instead that the future is likely going to be crazy enough that the only currently available detailed depictions of aspects of it that are anywhere close to correct, and in particular anywhere close to crazy enough, exist in science fiction. I recommend Permutation City and Friendship is Optimal for this.)

I think it depends on takeoff speeds? It seems a fairly natural consequence of the takeoff speed we describe in AI 2027, so I guess my citation would be the Research page of AI-2027.com. I don't have a survey of takeoff speeds opinions, sorry, but I wouldn't trust such a survey anyway since hardly anyone has thought seriously about the topic.

We had very limited space. I think realistically in the Race ending they would be doing first strikes on various rivals, both terrorist groups and other companies, insofar as those groups seemed to be a real threat, which most of them wouldn't be and probably all of them wouldn't be. It didn't seem worth talking about.

We didn't talk about this much, but we did think about it a little bit. I'm not confident. But my take is that yeah, maybe in 2028 some minor lab somewhere releases an open-weights equivalent of the Feb 2027 model (this is not at all guaranteed btw, given what else is going on at the time, and given the obvious risks of doing so!) but at that point things are just moving very quickly. There's an army of superintelligences being deployed aggressively into the economy and military. Any terrorist group building a bioweapon using this open-weights model would probably be discovered and shut down, as the surveillance abilities of the army of superintelligences (especially once they get access to US intelligence community infrastructure and data) would be unprecedented. And even if some terrorist group did scrape together some mirror life stuff midway through 2028... it wouldn't even matter that much I think, because mirror life is no longer so threatening at that point. The army of superintelligences would know just what to do to stop it, and if somehow it's impossible to stop, they would know just what to do to minimize the damage and keep people safe as the biosphere gets wrecked.

Again, not confident in this. I encourage you to write a counter-scenario laying out your vision.

Curious what the large prediction errors were that drove you away from AI risk.

fued

feud

I encourage you to make your own mini-scenario (a couple pages long) that is basically an alternate version of AI 2027, but with more realism-according-to-you. Like, pretend you wrote a 100-page scenario branching off from AI 2027 at some point, and then actually write the 3-page summary of it. (I'm suggesting 3 pages to make it low-effort for you, the more pages you are willing to write the better)

owerful guardrails in place) as miracle disease cures are arriving and robot factories are rampant and yet there is still no mention of what is happening with the open models of that day. How do we get through 2025, 2026 and 2027 with no super viruses? Or high-profile drone assassinations of political leaders?

The AI 2027 scenario predicts that no super viruses will happen in 2025-2027. This is because the open-weights AIs aren't good enough to do it all on their own during this period and while they could provide some uplift to humans there aren't that many human groups interested in building super viruses anyway.

A crux for me is that latter variable. If you could convince me that e.g. there are 10 human groups that would love to build super viruses but lack the technical know-how that LLMs could provide, (and that expertise was indeed the bottleneck -- that there haven't been any human groups over the last decade or two who had both the expertise and the motive) I'd become a lot more concerned.

As for drone assassinations: This has nothing to do with AI, especially with open-weights AI. The way to do a drone assassination is to fly the drone yourself like they do in Ukraine. Maybe if the security is good they have EW jammers but even then just do a fiber optic cable. Or maaaaybe you want to go for AI at that point -- but you won't be using LLMs, you'll be using tiny models that can fit on a drone and primarily recognize images.

This prediction is not holding up well so far and if anything the gap appears to be closing with Epoch AI estimating that open models are only behind the best closed models by about one year.

One year is already a long time in AI, but during the intelligence explosion it is so long that it means irrelevance.

Quick reactions:
Re: 1: I hope you are right. I think that the power of "but we need to win the race" will overcome the downsides you describe, in the minds of the CEOs. They'll of course also have copies that don't have memories, etc. but there will be at least 1 gigantic corporation-within-a-corporation that collectively functions as a continually online-learning agent, and said agent will be entrusted with some serious responsibilities most notably doing the core AI R&D.

Re: 2: I think the idea would be to 'light-touch' nationalize, so as to avoid the problems you mention. Main thing is to let the various companies benefit from each other's research, e.g. use models they trained, use algorithmic secrets, etc. As for open-sourcing: Yeah good points I could totally see them continuing to open-source stuff forever, at least while they remain behind the frontier. (I think that their incentives would point in a different direction if they actually thought they were winning the AI race)