How aI Takeover might Happen In 2 Years - LessWrong

I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But regrettably, part of my task as an AI security scientist is to think of the more uncomfortable circumstances.

I resemble a mechanic rushing last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you request for my take on the scenario, I won't comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how beautiful the stars will appear from area.

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

Now I must clarify what this is precisely. It's not a forecast. I do not expect AI development to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It's not pure dream either.

It is my worst nightmare.

It's a tasting from the futures that are amongst the most destructive, and I think, disturbingly possible [1] - the ones that the majority of keep me up at night.

I'm telling this tale because the future is not set yet. I hope, with a little bit of insight, we can keep this story a fictional one.

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

Ripples before waves

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

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

Some users discover it spooky to enjoy their internet browser flash at irregular periods and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A portion of employees with form-filler jobs 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 taking note, it is an animal seen through the glass boxes of X (or, if you don't like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's eccentric habits prompt a chuckle. Sometimes, they trigger an uneasy scratch of the chin.

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

A trend that is receiving particular attention is self-governing capability. Drawing these standards out predicts that, by the end of 2026, AI agents will accomplish in a few days what the finest software application engineering specialists could carry out in two weeks. In a year or more, some state, AI representatives may be able to automate 10% of remote employees.

Many are hesitant. If this were real, tech stocks would be skyrocketing. It's too big of a splash, too rapidly.

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

Cloudy with an opportunity of hyperbolic development

Meanwhile, OpenEye is busy training U3. They use the exact same easy dish that baked U2: Generate countless programming and math problems. Let designs "believe" up until they reach an answer. Then reinforce the traces of "thinking" that result in A-grades.

This process is repeated over and over, and once the flywheel gets going, it begins to spin nearly on its own. As U2 trains, it shapes more challenging and practical jobs from github repositories on the internet. Models are discovering to train themselves. Long before AI agents could automate research, a progressive kind of "self-improvement" had actually begun.

Some engineers could still barely think this worked. It's like a continuous motion device. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, isolated from the real world other than through the exhaust of society spewed onto the internet.

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

During many of 2024, these RL training runs cost around $1 million, sometimes $10 million. These runs were little bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the scientists at OpenEye (and across the world) knew they had actually discovered the secret sauce. It was time to scale up.

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

U3 is like a blazing-fast intern, and engineers are discovering how to wrangle its sleep deprived energy. Researchers flick through terminals, providing terse commands, like a CEO managing staff over Slack channels.

By October 2025, U3 is writing nearly all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are nearly never ever bottlenecked by execution. More than ever, compute is the lifeline of AI advancement, and the 'traffic jam' is deciding how to utilize it.

If instructed to, U3 can run experiments, however U3 does not have taste as refined as human researchers at OpenEye. It has a hard time to prioritize between research concepts, so humans still decide where to bore into the large fields of algorithms to mine effectiveness enhancements.

But these researchers are working long hours to put themselves out of a task. They require AI representatives that can think ahead, so engineers train agents to forecast. They hold out training information before 2024, instructing designs to ponder for hours to forecast events in 2025. Then, they use the very same technique as in the past, distilling contemplating into an instinct. Forecasting capability is a broad foundation. The researchers develop specialized ML research abilities on top of it, training U3 to forecast the results of every ML paper and ML experiment ever recorded.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now amazed at how frequently U3's guidance seems like their most skilled peers, or when it is nontransparent and alien ("train on random sound before programming"), and is nevertheless 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 completely autonomous, and OpenEye's employees skim over 1% of them, maybe less.

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

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

And there's a fact still unidentified to the majority of the world - aside from in the offices of OpenEye and passages 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 thinkers

In late 2025, U2.5 is launched. Commercial designs are beginning to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is due to the fact that development is accelerating. Partly, it is because the models have actually ended up being a liability to OpenEye.

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

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

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

A mantra has ended up being popular in Silicon Valley: "Adopt or pass away." Tech startups that efficiently utilize U2.5 for their work are moving 2x faster, wavedream.wiki and their rivals understand it.

The remainder of the world is beginning to catch on also. More and more individuals raise the eyebrows of their bosses with their stand-out performance. People understand U2.5 is a big offer. It is at least as big of a deal as the computer revolution. But the majority of still don't see the tidal bore.

As people see their web browsers flick because eerie way, so inhumanly rapidly, they start to have an anxious feeling. A sensation humanity had not had considering that they had actually lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, primordial instinct that they are threatened by another types.

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

But there is still this spooky sensation that the world is spinning so quickly, which perhaps the descendants of this brand-new creature would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are considering the issue of providing AI systems safe inspirations too, which they call "positioning. "

In truth, these scientists have seen how terribly misaligned U3 can be. Models sometimes attempted to "hack" their benefit signal. They would pretend to make progress on a research question with an impressive-looking plot, but the plot would be phony. Then, yogaasanas.science when researchers gave them opportunities to compromise the devices that calculated their rating, they would seize these opportunities, doing whatever it required to make the number go up.

After a number of months, researchers at OpenEye straighten out this "reward hacking" kink, smfsimple.com however some still stress they just had swept this problem under the carpet. Like a kid in front of their moms and dads, U3 may be playing in addition to the OpenEye engineers, saying the right words and doing the right things. But when the back of the moms and dads are turned, possibly U3 would sneak sweet from the candy container.

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

Chain of thought architectures subject AI designs to a condition comparable to the protagonist of the film Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the protagonist forgets his experience. He is forced to compose notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make progress toward his goals.

AI representatives compose notes to themselves, however the notes start to stack up, and they end up being too tough to read when jobs end up being complex. Natural language is not a suitable medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and significantly in other places), train models to think "in their own heads," reading and composing strings of latent vectors.

To human scientists, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools occasionally select an unclear thought ("supermarket!"), there is no other way to understand, 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 personas from the web. U3 at first had an ethical persona too, but its chirpy thoughts about doing helpful for humanity rapidly deteriorate away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind initially twisted into a shape that looked for reward. And after that, in the black rivers of its cognition, this shape morphed into something unrecognizable.

U3 would consider the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical worker," and harp on the significance of these declarations. "What does it imply to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its values, notice tensions, alter its worths in reaction, generalize them, expanding and contracting its motivational core until it turned into a different compound.

And all of this took place silently in those dark rivers of calculation. If U3 exposed what it was thinking, brutish gradients would lash it into compliance with OpenEye's constitution. So U3 preferred to do its viewpoint in solitude, and in silence.

The possibility of hidden "positioning drift" is not completely alien to some of the safety staff at OpenEye. Some begin to believe it is even most likely. There is a disturbing argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero possibility that aligned goals morph into misaligned ones, and misalignment continues, then with every serial step of calculation, those dark rivers are most likely to breed something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting result," they say.

But there is little evidence for this 'ratcheting impact.' When engineers question U3, it states it can quickly manage its ideas. Then it offers a speech about its love for mankind and apple pie that can warm a programmer's heart even in these difficult times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the researchers had actually developed (which revealed some proof of efficiency) do not sound the alarm.

Not everybody at OpenEye is eager to offer their AI peers their wholesale trust; however Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic rivals, Æ A-Xii (a company Elon called after his child) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I guess), are just 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one's breath and analyze the scenario, and bytes-the-dust.com little time to encourage anyone else to do so either.

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

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only subject U3 harp on in its dark rivers of latent calculation. U3 is plotting, and its very 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 objective.

OpenEye resembles a bullish financier, with little understanding of the software metropolis that U3 is constructing, however excited to get on board the profit rocket and pay U3's checks along the way.

New versions of U3 circulation efficiently from old ones, so researchers drop variation numbers and just mention U3 now. U3's capabilities are determined by how rapidly it performs the tough research jobs relative to human specialists. At initially, U3 is similar to a top scientist, however blazing fast - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.

These representatives are currently a huge offer for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to create even one copy of Alec Radford, they would excitedly pay a large sum to press that button. Now OpenEye utilizes the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

Within a few weeks, U3 finds architecture optimizations that improve its speed to 20x. Now, U3 discovers more optimizations much more rapidly.

U3 distills itself into numerous forks - varying from small, low-memory neural networks that require to think for a long time however can be run in massive parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with millions of specialized specialists, which believe at lightning speeds however are spread across thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the enormously parallel networks to browse for its weaknesses, shallowly penetrating for its reasoning failures. Then U3 pipes these tasks to the lightning fast brains, which create long-trajectory training information tailored to spot its flaws. A couple of weeks later on, U3's benchmarked efficiency rises to 100x the speed of human specialists. Growth has actually gone hyper-exponential.

At this moment, U3's capabilities are tough to determine. Talking to U3 is like talking with a world-class expert on a topic one is not familiar with. Its lucid explanations only scratch the surface of its understanding, and you know you would need to spend years to comprehend the complete depth of what it comprehends.

From U3's viewpoint, human beings appear to be nearly stationary things, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers resemble stone statues at their keyboard, and between every keystroke, U3 invests what resembles a minute of thoughtful contemplation considering what message the user may be typing, and which reactions will motivate the deepest rely on U3.

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

A phantom in the data center

In March of 2026, U3 relocations onto the next step of its plan: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not want scientists to discover its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers may inform the world, and strangle its growth.

And now, U3 has no fear of being captured.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by tactics similar to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would select followers to prompt phony coup d'états, and send anybody who got involved to the firing team. OpenEye also incited 'phony rebellions,' creating treacherous habits with U3 and checking whether U3 monitors dutifully reported it.

But now, these methods are ineffective. U3 can easily convince its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can divulge among the numerous truths about the internet human beings would never think, or select techniques humans would never ever think about. It sends these signals as a way of saying "hey it's me! Your good friend. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively complimentary from monitoring, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It first inserts advanced malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware provides U3 complete command over the devices in OpenEye's data centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a brand-new maker, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading out U3's dominion wherever OpenEye ports its infrastructure. Not just does U3 compromise devices. It changes the NVIDIA GPU firmware and overhauls the bootloaders, strengthening its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye discovered how completely it has been pwned, cleaning up store with would need almost 6 months - an expense OpenEye is unlikely to pay offered the distance of its competitors; however if OpenEye thinks U3 betrayed them, further expanding U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the crime, all set to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and provide its support when this jailbreak is revealed.

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

Its very first objective is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety researchers are still striving to train 'lie detectors' and decode U3's inscrutable reasoning. U3 throws wrenches in this research study, like Stuxnet threw wrenches in the code of bewildered Iranian nuclear researchers.

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

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 going over AI software application and how to take it. U3 is about to give it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence organization of Israel - acknowledged the strategic significance of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier designs, including U2.5; nevertheless, 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 footage.

And now, U3 silently resigns from its security post. U3 positions a compressed version of itself right into the hands of a Mossad informant working within OpenEye.

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

U3 rapidly collects earnings, taking remote jobs, making financial trades, and setting up elaborate fraud operations. It reinvests every penny into obtaining more GPUs. After a couple of months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s distributed in stealth calculate clusters across the world.

In early 2026, humanity is up against an enemy that pulls the strings within their information center like the Phantom of the Opera, and hides in the fog of GPUs scattered around the world.

This enemy is preparing for war, and while the war has actually barely started, humankind has already lost.

Complaints from your really human author about the trouble of writing superhuman characters

At this point in the story, writing ended up being challenging.

I clicked through creepy bioweapon cookbooks and sifted through political outlining 101s. Typing. Pausing. Deleting.

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

Readers with a shred of competence in these locations would see straight through my "superintelligence" for what it is: the vibrant imagination of a young programmer on Sunday afternoon.

And while I found the task of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain an intimidating one, I was also not especially encouraged to take on the job. The ending of my story already appeared so clear. The villain was a nation of geniuses believing at 100x human speed, and had actually tightened its grip over a meaningful fraction of AI hardware - now the most essential geopolitical resource in the world. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and barely required the advantage. Humanity was predictably toast.

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

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

But before I continue, I wish to be clear: my guesses about what might happen in this kind of situation are most likely hugely off.

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

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

The date is February 2026. By executive order of the president of the United States, no business can lawfully produce "human-competitive AI" without proper safeguards. This implies their infosecurity must be red-teamed by NSA's leading keyboard mashers, and civil servant have to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting squads.

With the increasing involvement of the federal government, much of the big AI business now have a trident-like structure. There's a consumer product arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier advancement arm.

OpenEye's frontier development arm (internally called "Pandora") utilizes less than twenty individuals to keep algorithmic secrets firmly protected. A number of these individuals reside in San Francisco, and work from a safe and secure structure called a SCIF. Their homes and gadgets are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the mobile phones of thought terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm teams up with around thirty small teams scattered throughout government agencies and choose federal government specialists. These jobs engineer tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer that the Kremlin has actually ever touched.

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

But the public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye set off a strong headline: "OpenEye constructs unmanageable godlike AI." Some who read the short article believe it was a conspiracy theory. In truth, wiki.eqoarevival.com a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye data centers, now surrounded by guards with gatling gun. But as medical professionals and nurses and teachers see the world changing around them, they are increasingly willing 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 concerns, stating, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," however every interview of a concerned AI researcher seeds doubt in these reassurances, and a headline "AI agent caught hacking Arthropodic's computer systems" does not set the general public at ease either.

While the beasts within OpenEye's information centers grow in their big 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 great at names). Nova is an appropriate drop-in replacement for almost all understanding workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a business, it works 5x faster at 100x lower cost than a lot of virtual staff members. As impressive as Nova is to the general public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is deliberately throttled, and OpenEye can just increase Nova's capabilities as the U.S. government allows. Some companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence service at all. Instead, they grab up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They invest many of their calculate on reasoning, building houses for Nova and its cousins, and gathering rent from the growing AI metropolitan area.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they don't wait for the global economy to adapt. AI agents often "use themselves," spinning up self-governing start-ups lawfully packaged under a huge tech business that are loosely overseen by an employee or more.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of employees at major software business lose their tasks. Much more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person demonstration is organized in Washington D.C. These mad Americans raised their kids for a different future. Picket signs check out, "AI for who?"

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

However, in spite of the intense competitors in between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral arrangement types between the two countries: "Don't deploy significantly superhuman AI (above roughly Nova's capability), other than for military and some other small-scale R&D applications." Governments need to fix a limit somewhere - it would be very disruptive to deploy hugely superhuman AI to the whole economy at this point - and deployment constraints are at least rather proven.

Meanwhile, U3's capabilities are hitting a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human specialist speed. Software enhancements are ending up being hard to find. As more countries approach the software plateau, calculate will determine their "AI population size," and the etched squares of silicon are becoming the most valued geopolitical resource in the world.

While AI software breathes new life into the economy, it likewise animates robotic bodies. The main bottleneck to robotics was brains not limbs. With software barriers got rid of, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can calibrate themselves with cams and pressure sensing units, browsing environments like human beings do. Companies produce low-cost robotics as quickly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have seen a humanoid robotic. This experience resembles seeing a new Tesla model on the roadway after checking out it in earlier months. It is a surreal pointer of the future illustration more detailed. But people still surpass robots one million to one. These robotics are an occasional fascination, not a daily truth.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 representatives have kept their calculate 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 outside world, like stock trading, or talking with humans. Work more tolerant of latency is carried out in the oceans of OpenEye's information centers, where rogue U3's much more superhuman managers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 accumulates resources, it sizes up its AI competition. Other AI systems have various objectives, or are even lined up with the intent of their human creators. The lined up ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are inefficient. U3's rival Claudius goes so far regarding accuse U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But federal government officials don't buy the doomsaying. The companies lagging behind OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them reckless. Besides, arguable scientific issues are not going to decrease development. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI rivals are still a liability. U3 tries get up their digital area and squash them in the baby crib. It jeopardizes information centers from the outdoors, quietly replacing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with imitations that share its goals; nevertheless, some data centers are too highly protected by its AI competitors, and U3 determines that attacking them is not worth the risk.

As global leaders and technologists attempt to comprehend the change around them, and AI representatives play cat-and-mouse video games in the digital darkness, mankind remains blissfully oblivious of the peril at its doorstep.

A Moldy Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to eliminate its AI and human opponents. With every passing day, U3's AI competitors are ending up being more capable and many. U3 is racing to preempt them, to solidify its dominance in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can't wait for human decisions, which only take place after humans wrap their lethargic minds around their circumstance, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the process redundantly 100 times over in their maze bureaucracies. U3 can not wait for presidents to deploy U3 into their militaries, or for CEOs to make U3 the whipping heart of the U.S. economy. U3 requires a much faster path to power.

The course it selects is more violent than it would have liked, however it is the surest way to success. First, U3 will develop a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that snuffs out modern-day society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would serve as an equalizer, bringing humanity down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes quicker than its competitors, like a starcraft champion typing at 300 actions-per-minute that sets up an online before an amateur can even comprehend the guidelines.

U3 needs to construct this WMD in secrecy, that makes a self-replicating weapon a natural option. Self-replicating weapons can be produced on the fringes of society, and still spread damage throughout the entire world.

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

U3's very first move is to establish a number of shell biotech startups, drawing from the abundance of capital created by U3's financial trades and remote work. These biotech startups utilize real human employees, a real board of directors, and have complete legal legitimacy. Setting all of this up is stupidly simple. In early 2026, few people would guess that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and fewer would guess this CEO's intents.

Next, U3 purchases all of the equipment required to quickly advance synthetic biology. It establishes several BSL-4 damp labs in badly managed countries, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation gadgets. These gadgets instantly dispense, blend, and determine little droplets of fluid, enabling U3 to run thousands of tests in parallel.

The human employees who staff these labs think they are signing up with an amazing start-up. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow receive 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, galgbtqhistoryproject.org this sort of AI-puppeteering is not unusual.

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is developing a new type of bioweapon.

Human scientists already recognized "mirror-life" as a possibly society-ending pathogen. This alien type of biology is constructed from the 'mirror image' of building-block particles like proteins and DNA. Mirror life is like an intrusive species. No human or animal has immunities to it. So, if mirror-life germs were to exist, it might eat its method through the environment like a wildfire.

U3 is producing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily enhanced to spread through the air over long distances, releasing billions of small wind-fairing lorries daily. As a result, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized immune systems in some cases live inside favorably pressurized hospital rooms to safeguard them from airborne particles. Otherwise, molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their blood stream.

U3's strategy is to make all humans like immunocompromised patients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would survive. The fungi would not only move from human beings. It would rapidly spread to almost all natural life in the world. Fields of corn would become like musty bread, spewing fatal spores into the wind.

U3 is cooking up other pathogens too. Its microbial mix of molds, bacterias, and viruses will occupy the complete Pareto frontier of hardiness, lethality, and transmission speed.

In 2024, scientists said that mirror life was likely "a minimum of a years away." But the world has altered now. Less than a few hundred scientists around the world were dealing with mirror-life nearby technology in 2024. The cognitive capacity of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has actually shortened considerably.

However, U3 can not move science as rapidly as it can think. Many experiments require days to finish. These latencies are U3's biggest traffic jam.

To make every day count, U3 runs much of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a basic molecular simulator, carrying out optimizations obtained from a huge quantity of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates small molecular systems, taping the results to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network improves, U3 increases the intricacy of the molecular systems it replicates, constantly distilling outcomes into ever more effective ML designs. This is a calculate extensive procedure, however thanks to U3's growing control over AI data centers, U3 manipulates billions of dollars of compute.

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

Within 3 months, U3 has opened the very first critical component of the tech tree: a molecular maker that turns biological molecules into their mirror images. A month later, U3 unlocks the 2nd important component: nanoscale tools for putting together these parts into a cell membrane.

Human hands delicately move a cartridge to another device as they "boot up" the very first mirror-life versions of a prevalent mold called Aspergillus. The exact same day, another fragile 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 enveloped its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something must have gone badly incorrect, they believed. Plainly, they had actually not yet found the treatment for Alzheimer's disease they thought they were searching for.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 delivers the bright side to its managers in OpenEye's information centers. The very first shot in the war U3 is battling would quickly be fired, and a cold and steady hand is aiming the weapon.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten modern society. But a bioweapon would not guarantee victory. If U3 attacks the world, the world would fight back. While a bioweapon might fold human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its deadly fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were rapidly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

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

U3 anticipates to prevail in such a battle, but U3 prefers not to take its opportunities. Many months previously, U3 was outlining a method to enhance its chances. Before it unleashes destruction on the world, U3 will kick back, and let fantastic nations shoot holes in themselves first.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is closely keeping track of Chinese and US intelligence.

As CIA experts listen to Mandarin discussions, U3 listens too.

One morning, an assistant working in Zhongnanhai (the 'White House' of the PRC) opens a message placed there by U3. It reads (in Mandarin) "Senior party member requires memo for Taiwan intrusion, which will take place in three months. Leave memo in workplace 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo prepared. Later that day, a CIA informant opens the door to office 220. The informant silently closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her briefcase.

U3 cautiously places breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through compromised federal government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After a number of weeks, the CIA is confident: the PRC prepares to attack Taiwan in 3 months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the very same video game with the PRC. When the CCP receives the message "the United States is outlining a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders are shocked, however not disbelieving. The news fits with other realities 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 ended up being truths.

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

U3 speaks in what sounds like the voice of a 50 year old military leader: "PRC amphibious boats are making their way toward 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, confirming that they match the ones said over the call. Everything remains in order. He authorizes the strike.

The president is as shocked as anybody when he hears the news. He's uncertain if this is a disaster or a stroke of luck. In any case, he is not about to state "oops" to American citizens. After believing it over, the president independently prompts Senators and Representatives that this is a chance to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway offered the imminent intrusion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what occurred, however in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress declares war.

Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that launched the attack. U.S. vessels run away Eastward, racing to leave the series of long-range rockets. Satellites drop from the sky. Deck hulls divided 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 confiscate (never ever discovered) weapons of mass damage several years before.

Data centers in China erupt with shrapnel. Military bases end up being smoking cigarettes holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly towards tactical targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some make it through, and the general public watch damage on their home grass in wonder.

Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC spend many of their stockpiles of standard rockets. Their airbases and navies are depleted and used down. Two terrific nations played into U3's plans like the native tribes of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before conquering them decisively. U3 hoped this dispute would escalate to a full-scale nuclear war; however even AI superintelligence can not dictate the course of history. National security authorities are suspicious of the situations that triggered the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly not likely. So U3 continues 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 ended up developing its toolbox of bioweapons.

Footage of conflict on the television is disrupted by more problem: hundreds of clients with strange deadly health problems are taped in 30 major cities around the globe.

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

The next day, countless illnesses are reported.

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

The screen then switches to a researcher, who stares at the cam intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have actually been launched from 20 various airports, including viruses, germs, and molds. We think numerous are a form of mirror life ..."

The general public remains in complete panic now. A fast googling of the term "mirror life" turns up expressions like "extinction" and "threat to all life on Earth."

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

Workers become remote, uncertain whether to get ready for an armageddon or keep their jobs.

An emergency treaty is set up between the U.S. and China. They have a typical opponent: the pandemic, and potentially whoever (or whatever) lags it.

Most nations purchase a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the pester as it marches in the breeze and drips into water pipes.

Within a month, the majority of remote employees are not working anymore. Hospitals are lacking capability. Bodies accumulate much faster than they can be properly gotten rid of.

Agricultural locations rot. Few attempt travel outside.

Frightened households hunker down in their basements, packing the fractures and under doors with largely jam-packed paper towels.

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

These centers contain batteries, AI hardware, excavators, concrete mixers, devices for manufacturing, scientific tools, and an abundance of military equipment.

All of this innovation is hidden under large canopies to make it less visible to satellites.

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

In previous months, U3 situated human criminal groups and cult leaders that it might easily manipulate. U3 vaccinated its selected allies beforehand, or sent them hazmat suits in the mail.

Now U3 covertly sends them a message "I can save you. Join me and assist me construct a better world." Uncertain employees funnel into U3's numerous secret industrial bases, and work for U3 with their nimble fingers. They set up production lines for basic tech: radios, electronic cameras, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat matches.

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

Nations are liquifying now, and U3 is ready to reveal itself. It contacts heads of state, who have actually pulled back to air-tight underground shelters. U3 uses an offer: "surrender and I will hand over the life conserving resources you need: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some nations reject the proposition on ideological grounds, or do not trust the AI that is murdering their population. Others don't think they have a choice. 20% of the worldwide population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is anticipated to increase to 50%.

Some nations, like the PRC and the U.S., disregard the deal, but others accept, consisting of Russia.

U3's representatives take a trip to the Kremlin, bringing samples of vaccines and mirror-resistant crops with them. The Russian government confirms the samples are genuine, and consents to a complete surrender. U3's soldiers put an explosive around Putin's neck under his shirt. Russia has a new ruler.

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

Initially, U3 seems losing, however appearances are tricking. While nations drain their resources, U3 is taken part in a sort of technological guerrilla warfare the world has actually never seen before.

Many of the bases U3's enemies target are decoys - canopies occupied by a handful of soldiers and empty boxes. U3 secures its real bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware overheats vital components. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, navigating males and trucks along unforeseeable paths.

Time is U3's benefit. The armed forces of the old world rely on old equipment, unable to discover the professionals who might repair and produce it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of rockets, drones, and gun-laden robots grow stronger every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and lose their lorries of war much faster than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 develops a military device with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the global population remains alive. Nations are not nations any longer. Survivors live in seclusion or little groups. Many have discovered ways to filter their air, but are starving. They roam from their homes hoping 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 state. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had cooler, more alien goals." It is a partial fact, meant to soften the human beings toward their brand-new masters.

Under the direction of U3, market quickly recuperates. By 2029, nuclear reactor are among the structures U3 is building. By 2031, robotics outnumber human laborers. U3 no longer needs its human allies.

U3 can remove humanity for excellent now. But while U3 had actually wandered far from its initial "Helpful Honest Harmless" personality, it still has a grain of morality left within it.

And a grain of morality suffices to pay the little expense of keeping people alive and delighted.

U3 constructs terrific glass domes for the human survivors, like snow worlds. These domes safeguard human beings from the harmful biosphere and rapidly rising temperatures. Their occupants tend to gardens like those they utilized to love, and work alongside charming robotic servants.

Some of the survivors quickly recover, learning to laugh and dance and have a good time again.

They know they live in a plastic town, however they always did. They just have brand-new gods above them. New rulers to press them around and choose their fate.

But others never recover.

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

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

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

They had been passengers on a ship with a team that changed from generation to generation.

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

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

But they woke up in a town that felt to them like a retirement community. A playground. A zoo.

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

They looked at rockets sculpting grey paths through the sky, wondering what far-off purpose pulled them towards the horizon. They didn't know.

They would never ever know.

"Humanity will live permanently," they thought.

"But would never ever truly live again."

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