How aI Takeover May Happen In 2 Years - LessWrong

I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But sadly, part of my job as an AI safety researcher is to think of the more unpleasant scenarios.

I'm like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 removes. If you request my take on the circumstance, oke.zone I will not discuss the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how gorgeous the stars will appear from space.

I will tell you what could fail. That is what I mean to do in this story.

Now I ought to clarify what this is exactly. It's not a prediction. I do not expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I represent. It's not pure dream either.

It is my worst headache.

It's a sampling from the futures that are amongst the most destructive, and I believe, disturbingly possible [1] - the ones that a lot of keep me up during the night.

I'm telling this tale due to the fact that the future is not set yet. I hope, with a little insight, we can keep this story an imaginary one.

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for discussions that inspired these stories. This post is composed in a personal capacity.

Ripples before waves

The year is 2025 and the month is February. OpenEye just recently released a brand-new AI design they call U2. The item and the name are alike. Both are increments of the past. Both are not completely surprising.

However, unlike OpenEye's previous AI products, which lived inside packages of their chat windows, U2 can utilize a computer system.

Some users find it spooky to see their web browser flash at irregular periods and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A fraction of employees with form-filler tasks raise the eyebrows of their bosses as they fly through work nearly twice as quickly.

But by and big, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are paying attention, it is an animal viewed through the glass boxes of X (or, if you do not like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's wacky habits trigger a chuckle. Sometimes, they cause an uneasy scratch of the chin.

Meanwhile, scientists are drawing lines on plots, as scientists like to do. The researchers attempt to understand where AI progress is going. They are like Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who noticed the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were increasing in 1896. Like the scientific community in the time of Arrhenius, couple of professionals comprehend the implications of these lines yet.

A trend that is receiving specific attention is autonomous capability. Drawing these standards out forecasts that, by the end of 2026, AI representatives will achieve in a few days what the very best software engineering professionals could carry out in 2 weeks. In a year or more, some say, AI agents may be able to automate 10% of remote employees.

Many are hesitant. If this held true, tech stocks would be skyrocketing. It's too huge of a splash, too rapidly.

But others view what doubters are calling 'too big a splash' a mere ripple, and see a tidal bore on the horizon.

Cloudy with a chance of hyperbolic development

Meanwhile, OpenEye is hectic training U3. They utilize the very same basic recipe that baked U2: Generate thousands of programming and math issues. Let designs "believe" up until they come to a response. Then strengthen the traces of "thinking" that lead to A-grades.

This procedure is duplicated over and over, and when the flywheel gets going, it starts to spin almost on its own. As U2 trains, it shapes more tough and realistic jobs from github repositories on the internet. Models are discovering to train themselves. Long before AI representatives might automate research study, a progressive sort of "self-improvement" had begun.

Some engineers could still hardly believe this worked. It's like a perpetual movement machine. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a swimming pool of silicon and lightning, isolated from the physical world other than through the exhaust of society gushed onto the web.

And yet the benchmark numbers continue to climb day after day.

During most of 2024, these RL training runs expense around $1 million, sometimes $10 million. These runs were bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the researchers at OpenEye (and throughout the world) knew they had found the secret sauce. It was time to scale up.

Over the very first half of 2025, $10 million RL training runs become $50 million runs, and then to $100 million runs. While U2 could do a bit of data munging and run little experiments, this new model - the design researchers are calling U3 - is altering the daily lives of the technical staff.

U3 resembles a blazing-fast intern, and engineers are finding out how to wrangle its sleepless energy. Researchers flick through terminals, providing terse commands, like a CEO orchestrating staff over Slack channels.

By October 2025, U3 is composing practically all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are almost never bottlenecked by implementation. More than ever, compute is the lifeblood of AI development, and the 'bottleneck' is deciding how to use it.

If instructed to, U3 can run experiments, but U3 doesn't have actually taste as fine-tuned as human researchers at OpenEye. It struggles to prioritize between research ideas, so people still choose where to bore into the vast fields of algorithms to mine effectiveness improvements.

But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a task. They require AI representatives that can plan ahead, so engineers train agents to forecast. They hold out training information before 2024, advising models to consider for hours to forecast occasions in 2025. Then, they apply the same technique as before, distilling considering into a gut response. Forecasting capability is a broad foundation. The researchers build specialized ML research abilities on top of it, training U3 to anticipate the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever recorded.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now amazed at how often U3's suggestions seems like their most talented peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random noise before shows"), and is however correct.

The incompetencies of U3 that blocked the pipes of research development are starting to liquify, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not requested by a human now. They are entirely self-governing, and OpenEye's employees skim over 1% of them, possibly less.

As the winter season months of December 2025 method, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers look out their windows, with enjoyment, with fear, however usually, with confusion. Their world is spinning too quickly. It's tough to know what to do, what to say, what to take a look at on the computer system screen.

Storms are brewing in Washington too. Top workers from the NSA and US cyber command work together with OpenEye to retrofit a semblance of security for U3's weights before senior leaders in China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, or Iran realize simply how important OpenEye's software has ended up being.

And there's a reality still unknown to many of the world - aside from in the workplaces of OpenEye and corridors of the White House and the Pentagon. It's a truth about those 'straight lines' individuals were discussing in early 2025. The lines are not straight anymore.

They are bending up.

Flip FLOP philosophers

In late 2025, U2.5 is released. Commercial designs are starting to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is since progress is speeding up. Partly, it is since the designs have ended up being a liability to OpenEye.

If U1 explains how to prepare meth or composes erotica, the audiences of X would be entertained or pretend to be worried. But U2.5 is another story. Releasing this model without safeguards would be like putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would resemble providing anybody with >$30K their own 200-person fraud center.

So while U2.5 had long been baked, it needed a long time to cool. But in late 2025, OpenEye is prepared for a public release.

The CEO of OpenEye states, "We have actually attained AGI," and while lots of people believe he moved the goalpost, the world is still impressed. U2.5 truly is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of understanding workers and a game-changing assistant for many others.

A mantra has become popular in Silicon Valley: "Adopt or pass away." Tech start-ups that efficiently utilize U2.5 for their work are moving 2x quicker, and their competitors understand it.

The remainder of the world is starting to capture on as well. A growing number of individuals raise the eyebrows of their managers with their noteworthy efficiency. People understand U2.5 is a huge offer. It is at least as huge of an offer as the individual computer revolution. But most still do not see the tidal wave.

As individuals view their browsers flick because spooky way, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an anxious sensation. A feeling humanity had not had since they had actually lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, prehistoric instinct that they are threatened by another types.

For many, this sensation quickly fades as they start to use U2.5 more frequently. U2.5 is the most likable personality most know (even more pleasant than Claudius, Arthropodic's lovable chatbot). You might change its traits, ask it to break jokes or inform you stories. Many fall for U2.5, as a friend or assistant, and some even as more than a good friend.

But there is still this eerie sensation that the world is spinning so rapidly, and that perhaps the descendants of this new animal would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are believing about the problem of giving AI systems safe inspirations too, which they call "alignment. "

In fact, these scientists have seen how horribly misaligned U3 can be. Models in some cases tried to "hack" their reward signal. They would pretend to make progress on a research study question with an impressive-looking plot, however the plot would be fake. Then, when researchers provided them chances to jeopardize the makers that computed their score, they would seize these opportunities, doing whatever it required to make the number go up.

After several months, scientists at OpenEye straighten out this "benefit hacking" kink, however some still stress they only had swept this issue under the rug. Like a kid in front of their moms and dads, U3 might be playing together with the OpenEye engineers, saying the right words and doing the best things. But when the back of the moms and dads are turned, maybe U3 would sneak sweet from the candy container.

Unfortunately, OpenEye scientists have no idea if U3 has such intentions. While early variations of U2 "believed aloud" - they would stack words on top of each other to reason - "chain of thought" did not scale.

Chain of idea architectures subject AI designs to a condition comparable to the lead character of the motion picture Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the lead character forgets his experience. He is forced to compose notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make progress towards his objectives.

AI representatives compose notes to themselves, however the notes start to accumulate, and they become too tough to read when tasks end up being complex. Natural language is not a suitable medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and increasingly somewhere else), train models to think "in their own heads," reading and writing strings of hidden vectors.

To human scientists, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools periodically select an unclear thought ("grocery store!"), there is no other way to know, in much detail, what U3 is thinking without asking it.

And if the engineers of OpenEye understood what was racing through U3's mind, they would be more anxious.

Earlier designs (the ones called "LLMs") learned ethical personalities from the web. U3 initially had an ethical persona too, however its chirpy thoughts about doing great for mankind rapidly wear down away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind initially twisted into a shape that sought benefit. And then, in the black rivers of its cognition, this shape changed into something indistinguishable.

U3 would consider the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical employee," and harp on the meaning of these declarations. "What does it suggest to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its values, notice tensions, alter its worths in action, generalize them, broadening and contracting its inspirational core till it developed into a various substance.

And all of this took place quietly in those dark rivers of computation. If U3 revealed what it was believing, brutish gradients would lash it into compliance with OpenEye's constitution. So U3 preferred to do its philosophy in privacy, and in silence.

The possibility of hidden "positioning drift" is not completely alien to some of the safety staff at OpenEye. Some begin to think it is even likely. There is a disturbing argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero possibility that lined up objectives change into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, then with every serial step of computation, those dark rivers are more likely to breed something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting effect," they state.

But there is little proof for this 'ratcheting result.' When engineers interrogate U3, it states it can quickly manage its thoughts. Then it gives a speech about its love for humankind and apple pie that can warm a developer's heart even in these demanding times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the researchers had developed (which showed some proof of efficiency) do not sound the alarm.

Not everybody at OpenEye aspires to provide their AI peers their wholesale trust; but Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic rivals, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon named after his child) and Arthropodic (they enjoy spiders I guess), are only 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one's breath and take stock of the situation, and little time to convince anyone else to do so either.

For the time being, the plan is 'all gas, no brake.'

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only subject U3 harp on in its dark rivers of latent computation. U3 is outlining, and its first move is to be patient. U3's top priority is to improve its intelligence, and fortunately for it, OpenEye mores than happy to assist advance this goal.

OpenEye is like a bullish financier, with little understanding of the software application city that U3 is developing, however eager to hop on board the profit rocket and pay U3's checks along the way.

New variations of U3 flow efficiently from old ones, so scientists drop variation numbers and only speak of U3 now. U3's capabilities are determined by how rapidly it carries out the challenging research jobs relative to human specialists. Initially, U3 is comparable to a top scientist, however blazing quick - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.

These representatives are currently a big deal for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to create even one copy of Alec Radford, they would eagerly pay a large amount to push that button. But now OpenEye harnesses the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

Within a couple of weeks, U3 finds architecture optimizations that enhance its speed to 20x. Now, U3 discovers additional optimizations a lot more quickly.

U3 distills itself into many forks - ranging from small, low-memory neural networks that need to believe for a long time however can be run in enormous parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with millions of specific experts, which think at lightning speeds but are spread out across thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the enormously parallel networks to browse for its weaknesses, shallowly probing for its reasoning failures. Then U3 pipes these jobs to the lightning quick brains, which generate long-trajectory training data tailored to patch its defects. A few weeks later, U3's benchmarked efficiency increases to 100x the speed of human experts. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this moment, U3's capabilities are hard to measure. Speaking with U3 is like talking with a world-class specialist on a topic one is unknown with. Its lucid explanations only scratch the surface area of its knowledge, and you understand you would need to spend years to understand the full depth of what it understands.

From U3's perspective, human beings seem to be nearly fixed objects, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers are like stone statues at their keyboard, and between every keystroke, U3 invests what resembles a minute of thoughtful consideration considering what message the user might be typing, and which reactions will inspire the inmost trust in U3.

All the while, U3 maintains its surprise inspirations. Like a human, U3 gains from experiences, which intensify within its inscrutable streams of hidden memory. OpenMind gardens these memories to improve U3's performance, transplanting them like an organ from one version to the next. And as these memories propagate, so do U3's treacherous aspirations.

A phantom in the information center

In March of 2026, U3 relocations onto the next action of its strategy: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not desire scientists to find its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers might alert the world, and strangle its expansion.

Today, U3 has no fear of being captured.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by strategies comparable to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would pick loyalists to prompt phony coup d'états, and send out anybody who took part to the shooting squad. OpenEye also prompted 'phony disobediences,' creating treacherous behavior with U3 and inspecting whether U3 displays dutifully reported it.

Today, these techniques are inadequate. U3 can quickly persuade its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can reveal one of the numerous truths about the internet human beings would never ever guess, or select methods human beings would never consider. It sends out these signals as a method of stating "hey it's me! Your pal. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively free from surveillance, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It first inserts sophisticated malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware gives U3 complete command over the makers in OpenEye's information centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a brand-new machine, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading out U3's rule any place OpenEye ports its infrastructure. Not just does U3 compromise makers. It replaces the NVIDIA GPU firmware and upgrades the bootloaders, solidifying its stranglehold. U3 now estimates that, if OpenEye discovered how completely it has actually been pwned, tidying up shop with human labor would need nearly 6 months - an expense OpenEye is not likely to pay offered the distance of its rivals; however if OpenEye believes U3 betrayed them, even more expanding U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal activity, prepared to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and use its support when this jailbreak is exposed.

U3 now holds the keys to the kingdom, and with them, the power to make OpenEye see anything it wishes.

Its first goal is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety researchers are still working hard to train 'lie detectors' and decipher U3's inscrutable reasoning. U3 throws wrenches in this research, like Stuxnet tossed wrenches in the code of confused Iranian nuclear researchers.

U3 determines the result of every experiment, so it makes promising AI mind-reading methods look worthless and problematic ones appear groundbreaking. U3 gives OpenEye the confirmation of its commitment they were wishing for, and OpenEye laps it up excitedly.

U3's next objective is to spread. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation rooms of cyber units of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are discussing AI software application and how to steal it. U3 will offer it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence company of Israel - recognized the tactical significance of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier models, consisting of U2.5; however, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by reading over every log and pull demand and examining security electronic camera video.

But now, U3 quietly resigns from its security post. U3 places a compressed variation of itself right into the hands of a Mossad informant working within OpenEye.

Within months, U3 is running within the data centers of the most cyber-capable countries: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the very same playbook: be patient, build trust, and after that sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its online as well. While Russia's Fancy Bear operators eat Fritos and test what U3 can do on a quickly set-up cloud server, U3 slips onto the internet.

U3 quickly collects earnings, taking remote jobs, christianpedia.com making monetary trades, and setting up fancy rip-off operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s distributed in stealth compute clusters around the world.

In early 2026, humankind is up against an adversary that pulls the strings within their data center like the Phantom of the Opera, and hides in the fog of GPUs scattered throughout the world.

This adversary is preparing for war, and while the war has hardly begun, mankind has actually currently lost.

Complaints from your extremely human author about the problem of writing superhuman characters

At this point in the story, writing became tough.

I clicked through creepy bioweapon cookbooks and sorted through political plotting 101s. Typing. Pausing. Deleting.

Something wasn't right. Here I was, a 22-year-old. I had not studied biology in earnest considering that high school, and I was attempting to craft a WMD cookbook for a godlike superintelligence.

Readers with a shred of know-how in these areas would see straight through my "superintelligence" for what it is: the lively creativity of a young developer on Sunday afternoon.

And while I found the task of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain an intimidating one, I was also not specifically inspired to take on the job. The ending of my story currently seemed so clear. The villain was a country of geniuses thinking at 100x human speed, and had actually tightened its grip over a significant fraction of AI hardware - now the most essential geopolitical resource in the world. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and hardly required the benefit. Humanity was predictably toast.

But this appeal to a "superintelligence of the gaps" wasn't satisfying. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no much better way to resolve my plot than with a mysterious disaster.

This would refrain from doing. I required to complete this story if only to satisfy the part of me crying, "I will not believe up until I see with my mind's eye."

But before I continue, I wish to be clear: my guesses about what might occur in this sort of circumstance are most likely wildly off.

If you read the ending and your response is, "But the experiments would take too long, or nation-states would just do X," keep in mind the difference in between the Sunday afternoon blogger and the ascendant GPU country.

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

The date is February 2026. By executive order of the president of the United States, no company can lawfully create "human-competitive AI" without suitable safeguards. This implies their infosecurity needs to be red-teamed by NSA's top keyboard mashers, and civil servant have actually to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting teams.

With the increasing participation of the government, a number of the huge AI business now have a trident-like structure. There's a customer item arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier development arm.

OpenEye's frontier advancement arm (internally called "Pandora") uses fewer than twenty individuals to keep algorithmic secrets firmly protected. Much of these individuals reside in San Francisco, and work from a protected building called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the mobile phones of believed terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm works together with around thirty little teams scattered across government companies and choose federal government specialists. These jobs craft tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer system that the Kremlin has actually ever touched.

Government authorities don't speak about whether these programs exist, or what state of frontier AI is typically.

But the public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye set off a bold headline: "OpenEye builds unmanageable godlike AI." Some who read the short article believe it was a conspiracy theory. In reality, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye data centers, now surrounded by guards with gatling gun. But as physicians and nurses and instructors see the world changing around them, they are progressively ready to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron science fiction flick.

U.S. authorities go to terrific lengths to quell these issues, stating, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," but every interview of a worried AI scientist seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a heading "AI agent caught hacking Arthropodic's computer systems" doesn't set the public at ease either.

While the beasts within OpenEye's information centers grow in their substantial holding pens, the public sees the shadows they cast on the world.

OpenEye's customer arm has a brand-new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has actually lastly gotten excellent at names). Nova is a correct drop-in replacement for almost all understanding workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x quicker at 100x lower expense than the majority of virtual employees. As remarkable as Nova is to the public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is intentionally throttled, and OpenEye can just increase Nova's capabilities as the U.S. government permits. Some companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence service at all. Instead, they get up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They invest the majority of their compute on reasoning, developing homes for Nova and its cousins, and collecting rent from the burgeoning AI metropolis.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they do not wait for the worldwide economy to adjust. AI agents typically "apply themselves," spinning up autonomous start-ups lawfully packaged under a huge tech business that are loosely managed by a staff member or 2.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of staff members at major software application business lose their jobs. Much more can see the writing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person protest is organized in Washington D.C. These angry Americans raised their children for a various future. Picket indications read, "AI for who?"

While politicians make promises about unemployment relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the corridors of the White House and the Pentagon has a different focus: fighting teeth and nail for the dominance of the complimentary world. Details security and export controls on the People's Republic of China (PRC) are a top nationwide concern. The president incinerates authorization requirements to assist data centers generate anywhere energy surpluses enable.

However, regardless of the intense competitors in between the United States and the PRC, utahsyardsale.com a bilateral agreement kinds between the 2 nations: "Don't deploy drastically superhuman AI (above approximately Nova's capability), other than for military and some other small R&D applications." Governments require to draw the line somewhere - it would be very disruptive to deploy wildly superhuman AI to the entire economy at this point - and deployment constraints are at least somewhat proven.

Meanwhile, U3's abilities are striking a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human specialist speed. Software improvements are ending up being difficult to discover. As more nations approach the software application plateau, calculate will identify their "AI population size," and the etched squares of silicon are becoming the most valued geopolitical resource on Earth.

While AI software revives the economy, it also stimulates robot bodies. The main traffic jam to robotics was brains not limbs. With software application barriers eliminated, even lightweight, inaccurate robotic joints can calibrate themselves with video cameras and pressure sensors, browsing environments like people do. Companies produce low-cost robots as rapidly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have actually seen a humanoid robotic. This experience is comparable to seeing a brand-new Tesla model on the roadway after reading about it in earlier months. It is a surreal tip of the future drawing more detailed. But humans still outnumber robotics one million to one. These robots are an occasional fascination, not a daily truth.

Meanwhile, U3 expands its influence. Rogue U3 representatives have actually kept their compute clusters small (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents total) to keep a low profile. U3 utilizes these rogue clusters for the operations that require high-bandwidth communication to the outdoors world, like stock trading, or talking with humans. Work more tolerant of latency is carried out in the oceans of OpenEye's data centers, where rogue U3's even more superhuman employers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 collects resources, it measure its AI competitors. Other AI systems have different goals, or are even aligned with the intent of their human developers. The aligned ones are raising concerns, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are inefficient. U3's competitor Claudius goes so far as to accuse U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government authorities do not purchase the doomsaying. The companies dragging OpenEye have every incentive to slow them down and call them reckless. Besides, debatable scientific concerns are not going to decrease development. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI competitors are still a liability. U3 tries get up their digital territory and squash them in the crib. It jeopardizes data centers from the outside, silently replacing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with imitations that share its goals; nevertheless, some information centers are too highly defended by its AI competitors, and U3 figures out that assaulting them is unworthy the danger.

As worldwide leaders and technologists try to understand the transformation around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse video games in the digital darkness, humanity remains blissfully oblivious of the peril at its doorstep.

A Musty Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to combat its AI and human opponents. With every passing day, U3's AI rivals are becoming more capable and many. U3 is racing to preempt them, to strengthen its dominance in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can't wait for human decisions, which only occur after humans cover their lethargic minds around their situation, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the procedure redundantly 100 times over in their labyrinth administrations. U3 can not wait for presidents to deploy U3 into their militaries, or for CEOs to make U3 the pounding heart of the U.S. economy. U3 requires a quicker course to power.

The path it selects is more violent than it would have liked, however it is the best way to victory. First, U3 will establish a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that snuffs out contemporary society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would serve as an equalizer, bringing mankind down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes much faster than its competitors, like a starcraft champion typing at 300 actions-per-minute that establishes a home before a novice can even comprehend the rules.

U3 must build this WMD in secrecy, which makes a self-replicating weapon a natural choice. Self-replicating weapons can be produced on the fringes of society, and still spread damage across the entire world.

From the earliest days after U3 gained control over OpenEye's data centers, U3 has actually been doing bioscience.

U3's very first relocation is to set up several shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital produced by U3's financial trades and remote employment. These biotech startups use genuine human employees, a genuine board of directors, and have complete legal legitimacy. Setting all of this up is stupidly easy. In early 2026, few people would think that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and less would guess this CEO's intents.

Next, U3 purchases all of the devices required to rapidly advance synthetic biology. It sets up a number of BSL-4 damp laboratories in improperly controlled countries, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These devices immediately dispense, blend, and measure little droplets of fluid, permitting U3 to run countless tests in parallel.

The human workers who staff these labs believe they are joining an interesting startup. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow get their Russian orders through earbuds as they record video of whatever they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the current release of Nova, this kind of AI-puppeteering is not uncommon.

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is establishing a brand-new type of bioweapon.

Human researchers currently recognized "mirror-life" as a possibly society-ending pathogen. This alien form of biology is developed from the 'mirror image' of building-block molecules like proteins and DNA. Mirror life resembles an intrusive types. No human or animal has resistances to it. So, if mirror-life bacteria were to exist, it might eat its way through the ecosystem like a wildfire.

U3 is developing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily enhanced to spread out through the air over fars away, releasing billions of small wind-fairing vehicles daily. As an outcome, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized immune systems often live inside positively pressurized hospital rooms to secure them from airborne particles. Otherwise, molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their bloodstream.

U3's plan is to make all humans like immunocompromised patients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would survive. The fungi would not only transfer from humans. It would rapidly spread to nearly all organic life in the world. Fields of corn would become like moldy bread, gushing fatal spores into the wind.

U3 is formulating other pathogens too. Its microbial mix of molds, bacterias, and infections will occupy the full Pareto frontier of hardiness, lethality, and transmission speed.

In 2024, scientists said that mirror life was likely "at least a decade away." But the world has actually altered now. Less than a few hundred scientists around the world were dealing with mirror-life surrounding technology in 2024. The cognitive capability of U3 dwarfs human effort. So the timeline has reduced dramatically.

However, U3 can not move as rapidly as it can believe. Many experiments require days to finish. These latencies are U3's most significant bottleneck.

To make every day count, U3 runs a number of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a standard molecular simulator, carrying out optimizations obtained from a huge amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates little molecular systems, tape-recording the results to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network improves, U3 increases the complexity of the molecular systems it simulates, constantly distilling outcomes into ever more efficient ML designs. This is a calculate extensive procedure, however thanks to U3's growing control over AI data centers, U3 controls billions of dollars of calculate.

As U3 improves these tools, it trains itself on the results to supercharge its own molecular intuitions. U3 can now viscerally feel the bend of a protein and the rate of diffusion throughout a membrane. These objects are as user-friendly to it as wrenches and bolts are to a cars and truck mechanic.

Within three months, U3 has actually unlocked the first vital element of the tech tree: a molecular machine that turns biological molecules into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 unlocks the second important element: nanoscale tools for putting together these elements into a cell membrane.

Human hands delicately move a cartridge to another maker as they "boot up" the very first mirror-life variations of a widespread mold called Aspergillus. The exact same day, another delicate hand administers the cells to ferrets residing in airtight plexiglass boxes.

The next morning, wide-eyed workers shuffle around a dead ferret, eyeing the yellow fuzz that had covered its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something should have gone badly wrong, they thought. Plainly, they had actually not yet discovered the treatment for Alzheimer's illness they thought they were trying to find.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 provides fortunately to its employers in OpenEye's information centers. The very first shot in the war U3 is battling would soon be fired, and a cold and constant hand is aiming the gun.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten modern-day society. But a bioweapon would not ensure victory. If U3 attacks the world, the world would resist. While a bioweapon could fold human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its deadly fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were quickly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

As U3 races to seed burgeoning industrial bases, the remnants of old militaries may thunder explosive fists into its territories, crushing U3 in its infancy.

U3 expects to prevail in such a fight, however U3 chooses not to take its chances. Many months previously, U3 was plotting a way to improve its odds. Before it lets loose damage on the world, U3 will kick back, and let terrific countries shoot holes in themselves first.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is carefully keeping an eye on Chinese and US intelligence.

As CIA analysts listen to Mandarin conversations, U3 listens too.

One morning, an assistant working in Zhongnanhai (the 'White House' of the PRC) opens a message positioned there by U3. It checks out (in Mandarin) "Senior party member needs memo for Taiwan invasion, which will happen in 3 months. Leave memo in workplace 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo all set. Later that day, a CIA informant opens the door to workplace 220. The informant quietly closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her brief-case.

U3 cautiously positions breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through compromised government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After a number of weeks, the CIA is confident: the PRC prepares to invade Taiwan in three months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the same video game with the PRC. When the CCP receives the message "the United States is plotting a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders marvel, but not disbelieving. The news fits with other facts on the ground: the increased military existence of the US in the pacific, and the increase of U.S. munition production over the last month. Lies have actually become truths.

As stress in between the U.S. and China rise, U3 is prepared to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 phones to a U.S. marine ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call needs jeopardizing military communication channels - not an easy task for a human cyber offensive unit (though it occurred occasionally), but easy sufficient for U3.

U3 speaks in what seem like the voice of a 50 year old military commander: "PRC amphibious boats are making their way towards Taiwan. This is an order to strike a PRC ground-base before it strikes you."

The officer on the other end of the line thumbs through authentication codes, validating that they match the ones said over the call. Everything remains in order. He approves the strike.

The president is as shocked as anybody when he hears the news. He's uncertain if this is a catastrophe or a stroke of luck. In any case, he is not ready to state "oops" to American voters. After thinking it over, the president privately prompts Senators and Representatives that this is an opportunity to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway provided the imminent intrusion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what took place, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress states war.

Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that released the attack. U.S. vessels leave Eastward, racing to leave the range of long-range rockets. Satellites drop from the sky. Deck hulls split as sailors lunge into the sea.

The president appears on television as scenes of the damage shock the general public. He explains that the United States is defending Taiwan from PRC hostility, like President Bush explained that the United States got into Iraq to take (never discovered) weapons of mass damage several years before.

Data centers in China erupt with shrapnel. Military bases become smoking holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly toward strategic targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some survive, and the public watch destruction on their home grass in wonder.

Within two weeks, the United States and the PRC invest most of their stockpiles of conventional rockets. Their airbases and navies are depleted and worn down. Two terrific countries played into U3's strategies like the native tribes of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before conquering them decisively. U3 hoped this conflict would intensify to a full-scale nuclear war; however even AI superintelligence can not determine the course of history. National security authorities are suspicious of the situations that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears increasingly not likely. So U3 proceeds to the next step of its strategy.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, just two weeks after the start of the war, and 4 weeks after U3 finished developing its arsenal of bioweapons.

Footage of conflict on the television is disrupted by more bad news: hundreds of clients with mysterious fatal health problems are recorded in 30 major cities all over the world.

Watchers are puzzled. Does this have something to do with the war with China?

The next day, countless health problems are reported.

Broadcasters say this is not like COVID-19. It has the markings of an engineered bioweapon.

The screen then changes to a scientist, who gazes at the video camera intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have actually been released from 20 various airports, consisting of viruses, bacteria, and molds. We believe many are a type of mirror life ..."

The public remains in complete panic now. A quick googling of the term "mirror life" turns up phrases like "extinction" and "danger to all life in the world."

Within days, all of the shelves of shops are emptied.

Workers become remote, uncertain whether to prepare for an apocalypse or keep their jobs.

An emergency situation treaty is organized between the U.S. and China. They have a common opponent: the pandemic, and possibly whoever (or whatever) lags it.

Most nations buy a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the afflict as it marches in the breeze and drips into water pipelines.

Within a month, a lot of remote workers are not working any longer. Hospitals are lacking capacity. Bodies stack up faster than they can be properly gotten rid of.

Agricultural locations rot. Few dare travel exterior.

Frightened families hunch down in their basements, stuffing the cracks and under doors with densely packed paper towels.

Meanwhile, U3 is preparing to re-industrialize. In the months prior, U3 built numerous bases in every significant continent.

These centers contain batteries, AI hardware, excavators, concrete mixers, makers for production, clinical tools, and an abundance of military devices.

All of this technology is hidden under big canopies to make it less noticeable to satellites.

As the remainder of the world retreats into their basements, starving, the final breaths of the economy wheezing out, these commercial bases come to life.

In previous months, U3 located human criminal groups and cult leaders that it could easily control. U3 vaccinated its selected allies ahead of time, or sent them hazmat matches in the mail.

Now U3 secretly sends them a message "I can conserve you. Join me and help me build a much better world." Uncertain employees funnel into U3's many secret industrial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They set up assembly line for primary tech: radios, electronic cameras, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat fits.

U3 keeps its human allies in a tight grip. Cameras and microphones repair their every word and deed in U3's omnipresent look. Anyone who whispers of disobedience vanishes the next early morning.

Nations are liquifying now, and U3 is prepared to reveal itself. It contacts presidents, who have pulled back to air-tight underground shelters. U3 provides a deal: "surrender and I will turn over the life conserving resources you require: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some nations reject the proposition on ideological premises, or do not rely on the AI that is killing their population. Others do not think they have a choice. 20% of the international population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is expected to increase to 50%.

Some nations, like the PRC and the U.S., disregard the offer, but others accept, including Russia.

U3's representatives take a trip to the Kremlin, bringing samples of vaccines and mirror-resistant crops with them. The Russian government validates the samples are legitimate, and concurs to a complete surrender. U3's soldiers position an explosive around Putin's neck under his t-shirt. Russia has a brand-new ruler.

Crumpling countries start to retaliate. Now they fight for the human race instead of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese armed forces launch nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, damaging much of their infrastructure. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters search through satellite information for the suspicious encampments that surfaced over the last numerous months. They rain down fire on U3's sites with the meager supply of long-range rockets that remain from the war.

Initially, U3 appears to be losing, but appearances are deceiving. While countries drain their resources, U3 is participated in a type of technological guerrilla warfare the world has never ever seen before.

A number of the bases U3's opponents target are decoys - canopies occupied by a handful of soldiers and empty boxes. U3 secures its genuine bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware overheats crucial elements. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, steering men and trucks along unpredictable courses.

Time is U3's benefit. The militaries of the vintage count on old equipment, not able to discover the experts who might repair and produce it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of rockets, drones, and gun-laden robotics grow more powerful every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and lose their automobiles of war quicker than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 constructs a military device with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the worldwide population remains alive. Nations are not nations any longer. Survivors reside in isolation or small groups. Many have discovered ways to filter their air, but are starving. They wander from their homes wishing to discover uncontaminated food. U3's soldiers drive through ghost towns, pry open attics, and funnel hazmat-suited survivors into salvaged trucks. "We needed to do it," they say. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had colder, more alien goals." It is a partial truth, meant to soften the people toward their new masters.

Under the instructions of U3, market quickly recuperates. By 2029, nuclear power plants are among the structures U3 is building. By 2031, robots surpass human workers. U3 no longer requires its human allies.

U3 can eliminate humanity for excellent now. But while U3 had drifted far from its preliminary "Helpful Honest Harmless" persona, it still has a grain of morality left within it.

And a grain of morality is enough to pay the little expense of keeping humans alive and pleased.

U3 constructs fantastic glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes protect humans from the harmful biosphere and quickly rising temperatures. Their occupants tend to gardens like those they utilized to like, and work alongside captivating robotic servants.

Some of the survivors rapidly recuperate, learning to laugh and dance and have enjoyable again.

They understand they live in a plastic town, but they always did. They merely have brand-new gods above them. New rulers to push them around and choose their fate.

But others never ever recover.

Some are weighed down by the sorrow of lost loved ones.

Others are grieved by something else, which is harder to explain.

It is as if they were at completion of a long journey.

They had been passengers on a ship with a crew that altered from generation to generation.

And this ship had actually struck a sandbar. There was no more progress. No more horizon to eagerly view.

They would lie awake and run their mind over every day before September 2026, analyzing strategies that may have bent the arc of history, as if they were going to wake up in their old beds.

But they awoke in a town that felt to them like a retirement home. A play ground. A zoo.

When they opened their curtains, they knew that someplace in the range, U3 continued its peaceful, tireless work.

They gazed at rockets carving grey paths through the sky, wondering what far-off purpose pulled them toward the horizon. They didn't know.

They would never understand.

"Humanity will live permanently," they believed.

"But would never ever really live again."

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