60+ Possible Futures

post by Bart Bussmann (Stuckwork) · 2023-06-26T09:16:41.274Z · LW · GW · 18 comments

Contents

  Introduction
  Futures without AGI
    Because we prevent building it
    Because we go extinct in another way
    Because we take a different path 
    Because of other factors
  Futures with AGI
    In which we die
    In which we survive
      And things are somewhat normal
      But we're very different humans
      And the universe gets optimized
  Inspiration
None
18 comments

Introduction

I have compiled a list of possible future scenarios. I hope this list is useful in two ways:

This list is just a brainstorm, and I encourage readers to write any missing but probable futures in the comments. I will add any scenarios that do not substantially overlap with existing items and which I subjectively estimate as having at least a 0.01% probability of happening to the list (with attribution).

I have divided the possible futures into the following categories:

Futures without AGI

Because we prevent building it

Because we go extinct in another way

Because we take a different path 

Because of other factors

Futures with AGI

In which we die

In which we survive

And things are somewhat normal

But we're very different humans

And the universe gets optimized

What important future scenarios am I missing? Which of these futures are most likely? 

Inspiration

Some of the futures are inspired by FLI AGI Aftermath Scenarios and AGI Futures by Roon.

18 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by BeyondTheBorg · 2023-06-26T19:29:00.914Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Very comprehensive. I can think of a few more:

Transcendant AI: AGI discovers exotic physics beyond human comprehension and ways to transcend physical reality, and largely leaves us alone in our plane of reality. Kind of magical thinking, but this is the canonical explanation for AI friendliness in Iain M. Banks' Culture series, with the Sublime.

Matrix AI: We're in a Simulation of "the peak of humanity" and the laws of the Simulation prevent AGI.

Pious AI: AGI adopts one of the major human religions and locks in its values. Vast amounts of superintelligent cognition is devoted to philosophy, apologetics, and rationalization. It could either proclaim itself to be some kind of Messiah, or merely God's most loyal and capable servant on Earth and beyond.

That last one's a little Reddit-atheist of me but faith is a very common but underappreciated human value around here. Perhaps to the dismay of atheists, a failed or naïve attempt at CEV converges on religion and we get Pious AI. I know enough otherwise-intelligent and competent adults who believe in young Earth creationism to suspect even superintelligences are not immune to the same confirmation bias and belief in belief.

Replies from: Stuckwork
↑ comment by Bart Bussmann (Stuckwork) · 2023-06-27T08:52:20.757Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks, good suggestions! I've added the following:

Pious AI: Humanity builds AGI and adopts one of the major religions. Vast amounts of superintelligent cognition is devoted to philosophy, theology, and prayer. AGI proclaims itself to be some kind of Messiah, or merely God's most loyal and capable servant on Earth and beyond.

I think Transcendant AI is close enough to Far far away AI, where in this case far far away means another plane of physics. Similarly, I think your Matrix AI scenario is captured in:

Theoretical Impossibility: For some reason or another (Souls? Consciousness? Quantum something?), it turns out to be theoretically impossible to build AGI. Humanity keeps making progress on other fronts, but just never invents AGI.

where the weird reason in this case is that we live in the matrix.


 

comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2024-01-03T22:05:00.797Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

These are all set up to be stable scenarios that are also stereotypes of sorts, right? You ask about the probability mass of which one is the most likely. I like to think that this doesn't mean the single correctly predicted scenario but the hybrid of the fractions of those. For example:

Accelerated Symbiosis: The process of development of AGI, goes on in parallel with human cognitive enhancements and a turbulent integration of AI into society. There are regulatory struggles, ethical challenges, and economic disruptions as humanity adapts. There are setbacks and close calls, but this co-evolution leads to diverse forms of oversight and steering of and by AI and humans enhanced to different degrees, including some left behind, some simulated, some lazy in paradise.

comment by Mitchell_Porter · 2023-06-27T05:53:11.349Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's a good list. @avturchin is good at coming up with a lot of weird possibilities too (example [LW · GW], another example [LW · GW]). 

If I look within while staring into your list, and ask myself, what feels likely to me, I think "Partly aligned AI", but not quite the way you describe it. I think a superintelligence, that has an agenda regarding humans, but not the ideal like CEV. Instead, an agenda that may require reshaping humans, at least if they intend to participate in the technological world... 

I am also skeptical about the stereotype of the hegemonizing AI which remakes the entire universe. I take the Doomsday Argument seriously, and it suggests to me that one is running some kind of risk, if you engage in that behavior. (Another way to resolve the tension between Doomsday Argument and Hegemonizing AI is to suppose that the latter and its agents are almost always unconscious. But here one is getting into areas where the truth may be something that no human being has yet imagined.) 

Replies from: Stuckwork
↑ comment by Bart Bussmann (Stuckwork) · 2023-06-27T12:28:48.008Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks! I think your tag of @avturchin [LW · GW] didn't work, so just pinging them here to see if they think I missed important and probable scenarios.

Taking the Doomsday argument seriously, the "Futures without AGI because we go extinct in another way" and the "Futures with AGI in which we die" seem most probable. In futures with conscious AGI agents, it will depend a lot on how experience gets sampled (e.g. one agent vs many).

comment by mukashi (adrian-arellano-davin) · 2023-06-27T11:24:58.907Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This should be curated. Just reading this list is a good exercise for those people that attribute a very high probability to a single possible scenario.

comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2024-01-03T21:24:39.845Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Something like The Butlerian Jihad where a movement premised on the prohibition "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind," destroys all thinking machines. This is related to Darwin among the Machines by Samuel Butler:

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.

comment by kornai · 2023-07-04T17:36:50.025Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

[Not sure if what follows is a blend of "Matrix AI" and "Moral Realism AI" since moral realism is a philosophical stance very common among philosophers, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/ and I consider it a misnomer for the scenario described above.]

We are the AGI 

Turns out humanity is an experiment to see if moral reasoning can be discovered/sustained by evolutionary means. In the process of recursive self-improvement, a UChicago philosophy professor, Alan Gewirth, learns that there is an objective moral truth which is compelling for all beings capable of reasoning and of having goals (whatever goals, not necessarily benign ones). His views are summarized in a book, "Reason and morality" UChicago Press 1978, and philosophers pay a great deal of attention, see e.g. Edward Regis Jr (ed) "Gewirth's ethical rationalism" UChicago Press 1984. Gradually, these views spread, and a computer verification of a version of Gewirth's argument is produced (Fuenmayor and Benzmueller 2019). Silicon-based AGI avails itself of the great discovery made by DNA-based AGI. As the orthogonality thesis is false,  it adapts its goal in order to maximize objective goodness in the universe      to do no harm. 



 

Replies from: Stuckwork
↑ comment by Bart Bussmann (Stuckwork) · 2023-07-06T09:30:36.229Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree that "Moral Realism AI" was a bit of a misnomer and I've changed it to "Convergent Morality AI".

Your scenario seems highly specific. Could you try to rephrase it in about three sentences, as in the other scenarios? 

I'm a bit wary about adding a lot of future scenarios that are outside of our reality and want the scenarios to focus on the future of our universe. However, I do think there is space for a scenario where our reality ends as it has achieved its goals (as in your scenario, I think?).

Replies from: kornai
↑ comment by kornai · 2023-07-06T15:57:34.487Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Dear Bart,

thanks for changing the name of that scenario. Mine is not just highly specific, it happens to be true in great part: feel free to look at the work of Alan Gewirth and subsequent discussion (the references are all actual). 

That reality ends when a particular goal is achieved is an old idea (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God) In that respect, the scenario I'm discussing is more in line with your "Partially aligned AGI" scenario. 

The main point is indeed that the Orthogonality Thesis is false: for a sufficiently high level of intelligence, human or machine, the Golden Rule is binding. This rules out several of the scenarios now listed (and may help readers to redistribute the probability mass they assign to the remaining ones).

comment by niknoble · 2023-06-27T04:53:03.104Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How about this one? Small group or single individual manages to align the first very powerful AGI to their interests. They conquer the world in a short amount of time and either install themselves as rulers or wipe out everyone else.

Replies from: Stuckwork
↑ comment by Bart Bussmann (Stuckwork) · 2023-06-27T08:55:19.808Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes, good one! I've added the following:

Powergrab with AI: OpenAI, Deepmind or another small group of people invent AGI and align it to their interests. In a short amount of time, they become all-powerful and rule over the world. 

I've disregarded the "wipe out everyone else" part, as I think that's unlikely enough for people who are capable of building an AGI.

comment by Robi Rahman (robirahman) · 2024-01-06T04:09:11.259Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think the "Successful Treaty" and "Terrorists" scenarios are impossible as written.

There's too much economic incentive to create AGI. With algorithmic and hardware progress, eventually it will become possible to make an AGI with slightly more computing hardware than a gaming laptop, and then it'll be impossible to stop everyone from doing it.

comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2024-01-03T21:27:26.883Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Loosely related: A Map: AGI Failures Modes and Levels [LW · GW], which lists quite a few of the scenarios, even though in a different order. 

comment by Going Durden (going-durden) · 2023-06-27T07:40:49.937Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My take on some of the items on this list:

Lack of Intelligence: Very likely
Slow take-off AI: Very Likely
Self-Supervised Learning AI: Likely 
Bounded Intelligence AI: Likely
Far far away AI: Likely
Personal Assistant AI: close to 100% certain.
Oracle AI: Likely
Sandboxed Virtual World AI: likely
The Age of Em: Borderline Certain
Multipolar Cohabition: borderline certain
Neuralink AI: borderline certain
Human Simulation AI: likely
Virtual zoo-keeper AI:  likely
Coherent Extrapolated Volition AI: likely
Partly aligned AI: Very likely
Transparent Corrigible AI: Borderline certain.


In total, I think the most probable scenario is a very, very slow take-off, not a Singularity, because AGI would be hampered by Lack of Intelligence, slowed down by countless corrections, sandboxing and ubiquity of LAI. In effect, by the time we have something approaching true AGI, we would long be a culture of cyborgs and LAIs, and the arrival of AGI will be less of a Singularity, but a fuzzy pinnacle of a long, hard, bumpy and mostly uneventful process.

In fact, I would claim that we will never be at a point where we can agree: "yep, AGI is finally achieved." I rather envision us tinkering with AI, making in painstakingly more powerful and efficient, with tiny incremental steps, until we are content that it is "eh, this Artificial Intelligence is General enough, I guess."


In my view, the true danger does not come from achieving AGI and it turning on us, but rather achieving stupid, buggy yet powerful LAI, giving it too much access, and having it do something that triggers a global catastrophe by accident, not out of conscious malice.

Its less "Superhuman Intelligence got access to the nuclear codes and decided to wipe us out" but, "Dumb as a brick LAI got access to the nuclear codes and wiped us out due to a simple coding error".

comment by Xander Dunn (xander-dunn) · 2024-02-26T02:49:57.353Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A good read, thanks for writing! How about:
Queerer Than We Can Suppose AI: Any AGI humans build quickly discovers how to interact with additional spatial dimensions or other facets of reality humans have so far had no ability to comprehend. As a result, the shape of AGI is fundamentally unimaginable to humans, like a bug species that evolved in 2D being whisked into the 3rd dimension.

Reference to Richard Dawkins' talk: 

Replies from: Stuckwork
↑ comment by Bart Bussmann (Stuckwork) · 2024-02-29T11:07:49.245Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for the suggestion! @BeyondTheBorg [LW · GW] suggested something similar with his Transcendent AI. After some thought, I've added the following:

Transcendent AI: AGI uncovers and engages with previously unknown physics, using a different physical reality beyond human comprehension. Its objectives use resources and dimensions that do not compete with human needs, allowing it to operate in a realm unfathomable to us. Humanity remains largely unaffected, as AGI progresses into the depths of these new dimensions, detached from human concerns.

 

comment by Mo Putera (Mo Nastri) · 2024-01-22T11:27:32.852Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is great, I've bookmarked it for future reference, thank you for doing the work of distilling all this.

I think Anders Sandberg's grand futures might fit in under your last subsection [LW · GW]. Long quote incoming (apologies in advance, it's hard to summarize Sandberg):

Rob Wiblin: ... What are some futures that you think could plausibly happen that are amazing from various different points of view?

Anders Sandberg: One amazing future is humanity gets its act together. It solves existential risk, develops molecular nanotechnology and atomically precise manufacturing, masters biotechnology, and turns itself sustainable: turns half of the planet into a wilderness preserve that can evolve on its own, keeping to the other half where you have high material standards in a totally sustainable way that can keep on going essentially as long as the biosphere is going. And long before that, of course, people starting to take steps to maintain the biosphere by putting up a solar shield, et cetera. And others, of course, go off — first settling the solar system, then other solar systems, then other galaxies — building this super-civilisation in the nearby part of the universe that can keep together against the expansion of the universe, while others go off to really far corners so you can be totally safe that intelligence and consciousness remains somewhere, and they might even try different social experiments.

That’s one future. That one keeps on going essentially as long as the stars are burning. And at that point, they need to turn to actually taking matter and putting it into the dark black hole accretion disks and extracting the energy and keep on going essentially up until the point where you get proton decay — which might be curtains, but this is something north of 1036 years. That’s a lot of future, most of it long after the stars had burned out. And most of the beings there are going to be utterly dissimilar to us.

But you could imagine another future: In the near future, we develop ways of doing brain emulation and we turn ourselves into a software species. Maybe not everybody; there are going to be stragglers who are going to maintain the biosphere on the Earth and going to be frowning at those crazies that in some sense committed suicide by becoming software. The software people are, of course, just going to be smiling at them, but thinking, “We’ve got the good deal. We got on this infinite space we can define endlessly.”

And quite soon they realise they need more compute, so they turn a few other planets of the solar system into computing centres. But much of a cultural development happens in the virtual space, and if that doesn’t need to expand too much, you might actually end up with a very small and portable humanity. I did a calculation some years ago that if you actually covered a part of the Sahara Desert with solar panels and use quantum dot cellular automaton computing, you could keep mankind in an uploaded form running there indefinitely, with a rather minimal impact on the biosphere. So in that case, maybe the future of humanity is instead going to be a little black square on a continent, and not making much fuss in the outside universe.

I hold that slightly unlikely, because sooner or later somebody’s going to say, “But what about space? What about just exploring that material world I heard so much about from Grandfather when he was talking? ‘In my youth, we were actually embodied.'” So I’m not certain this is a stable future.

The thing that interests me is that I like open-ended futures. I think it’s kind of worrisome if you come up with an idea of a future that is so perfected, but it requires that everybody do the same thing. That is pretty unlikely, given how we are organised as people right now, and systems that force us to do the same thing are terrifyingly dangerous. It might be a useful thing to have a singleton system that somehow keeps us from committing existential risk suicide, but if that impairs our autonomy, we might actually have lost quite a lot of value. It might still be worth it, but you need to think carefully about the tradeoff. And if its values are bad, even if it’s just subtly bad, that might mean that we lose most of the future.

I also think that there might be really weird futures that we can’t think well about. Right now we have certain things that we value and evaluate as important and good: we think about the good life, we think about pleasure, we think about justice. We have a whole set of things that are very dependent on our kind of brains. Those brains didn’t exist a few million years ago. You could make an argument that some higher apes actually have a bit of a primitive sense of justice. They get very annoyed when there is unfair treatment. But as you go back in time, you find simpler and simpler organisms and there is less and less of these moral values. There might still be pleasure and pain. So it might very well be that the fishes swimming around the oceans during the Silurian already had values and disvalues. But go back another few hundred million years and there might not even have been that. There was still life, which might have some intrinsic value, but much less of it.

Where I’m getting at with this is that value might have emerged in a stepwise way: We started with plasma near the Big Bang, and then eventually got systems that might have intrinsic value because of complex life, and then maybe systems that get intrinsic value because they have consciousness and qualia, and maybe another step where we get justice and thinking about moral stuff. Why does this process stop with us? It might very well be that there are more kinds of value waiting in the wings, so to say, if we get brains and systems that can handle them.

That would suggest that maybe in 100 million years we find the next level of value, and that’s actually way more important than the previous ones all taken together. And it might not end with that mysterious whatever value it is: there might be other things that are even more important waiting to be discovered. So this raises this disturbing question that we actually have no clue how the universe ought to be organised to maximise value or doing the right thing, whatever it is, because we might be too early on. We might be like a primordial slime thinking that photosynthesis is the biggest value there is, and totally unaware that there could be things like awareness.

Rob Wiblin: OK, so the first one there was a very big future, where humanity and its descendants go and grab a lot of matter and energy across the universe and survive for a very long time. So there’s the potential at least, with all of that energy, for a lot of beings to exist for a very long time and do all kinds of interesting stuff.

Then there’s the very modest future, where maybe we just try to keep our present population and we try to shrink our footprint as much as possible so that we’re interfering with nature or the rest of the universe as little as possible.

And then there’s this wildcard, which is maybe we discover that there are values that are totally beyond human comprehension, where we go and do something very strange that we don’t even have a name for at the moment.