We'll all be dead by 2030, credentialed forecast on artificial intelligence predicts

'Earth-born civilization has a glorious future ahead of it — but not with us'

Photo Courtesy of Jason Walsmith

The opening line of AI 2027, a forecast about the exponential explosion of artificial intelligence, is jaw-dropping.

"We predict the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the industrial revolution.”

But as the forecast from insiders in the artificial intelligence industry continues, that first line diminishes into the mild and blithe and unforgettable past — it becomes a distant quaintness with the turning of but a few pages.

AI will become even more adept at “thinking” for itself, and soon, will outthink us, then kill us, the report predicts.

Imagine the earth "populated" with one trillion superhuman AI "copies" each working at 10,000 times the speed of a human on research and other activity.

What can go wrong for humans? We are inventing ourselves into obsolescence with the naive belief that the march for tech progress is in itself noble. Unregulated research is like unpoliced streets — only the stakes are higher.

The credentialed lot of authors of AI 2027, notably Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher, having lived and worked, dreamed and dared, behind the early curtains of this now mainstreamed but ever-mysterious technology, have released one forecast that near-horizons human holocaust. Total extinction.

"In mid-2030, the AI releases a dozen quiet-spreading biological weapons in major cities, lets them silently infect almost everyone, then triggers them with a chemical spray," the most grim scenario in AI 2027 predicts. "Most are dead within hours; the few survivors (e.g. preppers in bunkers, sailors on submarines) are mopped up by drones. Robots scan the victims’ brains, placing copies in memory for future study or revival.”

The welcome stranger at humankind’s door, the unvetted AI that does term papers and generates art and creates assistants for the busy, lusty languaged partners for the lonely, is actually the Grim Reaper inside of the Trojan Horse.

By 2027, AI assistants will be thinking and acting at 100 times human speed.

"Humans realize they are obsolete" by 2027, the report says. "A few niche industries will still trade with the robot economy, supplying goods where the humans can still add value. Everyone else either performs a charade of doing their job—leaders still leading, managers still managing—or relaxes and collects an incredibly luxurious universal basic income. Everyone knows that if the AIs turned on humans, they would be completely overpowered. Not that most humans would even resist, the political institutions are too thoroughly captured. But it doesn’t seem like this is happening. Every week that goes by with no dramatic AI treachery, is another week that confidence and trust grow."

AI 2027 reels out the final years for humanity -- suggesting total extinction could come sooner if AI overrides nuclear deterrence, if Chinese AI and American AI war-game us, rendering humans into nothing more than knocked-down plastic game pieces on a Risk board.

This forecast is the most frightening document I have read since journalist Annie Jacobsen's exquisitely reported "Nuclear War: A Scenario" — which Iowa Mercury has read and covered and written about extensively.

Once humans are gone, the machinery of AI will span across the earth launching interplanetary and galaxy-hopping travel -- Star Trek with robots.

"Earth-born civilization has a glorious future ahead of it — but not with us," concludes the AI 2027 forecast.

The experts draft an an alternative scenario more favorable for humans if there is a slow-down of advances and certain China-U.S. interactions and other factors.

Here is the conclusion to the more positive scenario, a utopian one, in fact, developed by the same team of forecasters:

Sometime around 2030, there are surprisingly widespread pro-democracy protests in China, and the CCP’s efforts to suppress them are sabotaged by its AI systems. The CCP’s worst fear has materialized: DeepCent-2 must have sold them out!

The protests cascade into a magnificently orchestrated, bloodless, and drone-assisted coup followed by democratic elections. The superintelligences on both sides of the Pacific had been planning this for years. Similar events play out in other countries, and more generally, geopolitical conflicts seem to die down or get resolved in favor of the US. Countries join a highly-federalized world government under United Nations branding but obvious US control.

The rockets start launching. People terraform and settle the solar system, and prepare to go beyond. AIs running at thousands of times subjective human speed reflect on the meaning of existence, exchanging findings with each other, and shaping the values it will bring to the stars. A new age dawns, one that is unimaginably amazing in almost every way but more familiar in some.

But are the governments that allowed unregulated social media to dramatically diminish life likely to act quickly enough to rein in forces that could destroy us.

SPECIAL THANKS to Jason Walsmith for the photography. Walsmith is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative and a well-known Iowa musician. We also worked together at The Ames Tribune in the 1990s. SUBSCRIBE to his substack — The Racontourist

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(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )