From anybody else, I would call Introducing AI 2027 alarmist, but Scott Alexander is one of the most level-headed people whose writings I regularly read. So when even he makes claims such as “AI will reach superhuman intelligence by early 2028 and that most of the economy will be automated by 2029”, I start to really worry:
The summary: we think that 2025 and 2026 will see gradually improving AI agents. In 2027, coding agents will finally be good enough to substantially boost AI R&D itself, causing an intelligence explosion that plows through the human level sometime in mid-2027 and reaches superintelligence by early 2028. The US government wakes up in early 2027, potentially after seeing the potential for AI to be a decisive strategic advantage in cyberwarfare, and starts pulling AI companies into its orbit - not fully nationalizing them, but pushing them into more of a defense-contractor-like relationship. China wakes up around the same time, steals the weights of the leading American AI, and maintains near-parity. There is an arms race which motivates both countries to cut corners on safety and pursue full automation over public objections; this goes blindingly fast and most of the economy is automated by ~2029. If AI is misaligned, it could move against humans as early as 2030 (ie after it’s automated enough of the economy to survive without us). If it gets aligned successfully, then by default power concentrates in a double-digit number of tech oligarchs and US executive branch members; this group is too divided to be crushingly dictatorial, but its reign could still fairly be described as technofeudalism. Humanity starts colonizing space at the very end of the 2020s / early 2030s.
Do we really think things will move this fast? Sort of no - between the beginning of the project last summer and the present, Daniel’s median for the intelligence explosion shifted from 2027 to 2028. We keep the scenario centered around 2027 because it’s still his modal prediction (and because it would be annoying to change). Other members of the team (including me) have medians later in the 2020s or early 2030s, and also think automation will progress more slowly. So maybe think of this as a vision of what an 80th percentile fast scenario looks like - not our precise median, but also not something we feel safe ruling out.
I sincerely hope, for the sake of all of us, that this will not be the case, because such a scenario will have no winners (aside from a literal handful of people), only losers. Arguably it is still better than a nuclear world war, or another extinction-level disaster… but maybe not by nearly as much as we’d hope, especially given the state of AI alignment research, which pretty much stands at: “we don’t have the faintest idea how to make any coherent model of actual human values, let alone how to force arbitrary AI agents to adhere to them”. So that’s fun!
If you’re interested in learning more about the state of AI alignment research, I can recommend the digestible, yet interesting and informative Rational Animations YouTube channel, for example: Goal Misgeneralization: How a Tiny Change Could End Everything.