📜 Introducing plan A
By Scott Alexander | 15 minute read
Why care about this weird sci-fi story?
For the past year or two, I’ve kind of been in despair. If AI 2027 is right, then we could get an uncontrolled intelligence explosion sometime in the late 2020s or early 2030s. Over the course of a year or two, we could go from a basically normal world where we’re mostly talking about shoplifting and health care costs and Trump, to a world completely under the control of some sort of incomprehensible superintelligence. Even a nimble and competent government would have trouble responding on such a timescale (let alone our government) and the likely outcome would be as AI 2027 portrays it: oligarchy or extinction.
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But in fact, their current calculations do suggest a Golden Path which ends poverty and disease within a decade, and gives us a glorious interplanetary future within our lifetimes. This wasn’t a requirement of their model. It’s just how things coincidentally seem to have worked out. The optimal regime for alleviating doomers’ concerns happens to be one which should satisfy accelerationists, and a trajectory well within accelerationists’ Overton Window happens to have the best possible properties for safety research.
Reading time: 15 minutes.
Chicago as seen from the Indiana dunes.