How AI Takeover May Happen In 2 Years - LessWrong

I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But unfortunately, part of my job as an AI security scientist is to believe about the more unpleasant scenarios.


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


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 precisely. It's not a prediction. I don't anticipate AI progress to be this quick or as untamable as I depict. It's not pure fantasy either.


It is my worst nightmare.


It's a sampling from the futures that are among the most terrible, and I believe, disturbingly possible [1] - the ones that most keep me up at night.


I'm informing 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 recently released a new AI design they call U2. The product and the name are alike. Both are increments of the past. Both are not entirely unexpected.


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


Some users discover it spooky to see 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 workers with form-filler jobs raise the eyebrows of their managers as they fly through work nearly twice as rapidly.


But by and large, 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 behaviors trigger a chuckle. Sometimes, they cause an uneasy scratch of the chin.


Meanwhile, scientists 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 environment were increasing in 1896. Like the scientific neighborhood in the time of Arrhenius, couple of specialists understand the implications of these lines yet.


A pattern that is getting specific attention is autonomous capability. Drawing these standards out forecasts that, by the end of 2026, AI agents will achieve in a few days what the finest software application engineering contractors could carry out in two weeks. In a year or 2, some state, AI representatives may be able to automate 10% of remote employees.


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


But others view what skeptics are calling 'too huge a splash' a mere ripple, and see a tidal wave on the horizon.


Cloudy with an opportunity of hyperbolic growth


Meanwhile, OpenEye is hectic training U3. They utilize the very same basic dish that baked U2: Generate countless shows and mathematics issues. Let models "believe" until they reach an answer. Then strengthen the traces of "thinking" that result in A-grades.


This procedure is duplicated over and over, and as soon as the flywheel gets going, it starts to spin practically by itself. As U2 trains, it shapes more challenging and practical tasks from github repositories on the internet. Models are finding out to train themselves. Long before AI representatives might automate research, a progressive sort of "self-improvement" had actually begun.


Some engineers could still barely think this worked. It's like a perpetual motion maker. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a swimming pool of silicon and lightning, isolated from the physical world except 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, often $10 million. These runs were bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the scientists at OpenEye (and throughout the world) understood they had actually found the secret sauce. It was time to scale up.


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


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 personnel over Slack channels.


By October 2025, U3 is composing practically all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are nearly never bottlenecked by implementation. More than ever, calculate is the lifeblood of AI advancement, and the 'traffic jam' is deciding how to use it.


If instructed to, U3 can run experiments, however U3 does not have actually taste as fine-tuned as human researchers at OpenEye. It has a hard time to focus on between research study ideas, so human beings still decide where to bore into the large fields of algorithms to mine performance enhancements.


But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a task. They need AI agents that can believe ahead, so engineers train agents to anticipate. They hold out training information before 2024, advising designs to consider for hours to predict events in 2025. Then, they apply the very same technique as in the past, distilling contemplating into an instinct. Forecasting ability is a broad foundation. The scientists construct 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 staff at OpenEye are now surprised at how often U3's guidance sounds like their most skilled peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random noise before programming"), and is nevertheless appropriate.


The incompetencies of U3 that congested the pipelines of research study progress are beginning to dissolve, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not requested by a human now. They are totally self-governing, and OpenEye's staff members skim 1% of them, possibly less.


As the winter season of December 2025 technique, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers gaze out their windows, with enjoyment, with worry, but the majority of frequently, with confusion. Their world is spinning too rapidly. It's hard to know what to do, what to state, what to look at on the computer screen.


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


And there's a reality still unknown to most of the world - aside from in the workplaces of OpenEye and passages of the White House and the Pentagon. It's a reality about those 'straight lines' people were speaking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight anymore.


They are bending up.


Flip FLOP thinkers


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


If U1 explains how to cook meth or composes 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 be like putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would be like providing anybody with >$30K their own 200-person rip-off center.


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


The CEO of OpenEye declares, "We have actually attained AGI," and while many individuals think he shifted the goalpost, the world is still pleased. U2.5 genuinely is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of understanding employees and a game-changing assistant for many others.


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


The remainder of the world is starting to capture on also. A growing number of people raise the eyebrows of their bosses with their stand-out productivity. People understand U2.5 is a huge offer. It is at least as big of an offer as the desktop computer transformation. But most still don't see the tidal wave.


As people view their web browsers flick in that eerie way, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an uneasy feeling. A sensation humankind 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 species.


For many, this sensation quickly fades as they begin to utilize U2.5 more frequently. U2.5 is the most likable personality most know (a lot more likable than Claudius, Arthropodic's adorable chatbot). You could alter its traits, ask it to split jokes or inform you stories. Many fall for U2.5, as a pal or assistant, and some even as more than a friend.


But there is still this eerie sensation that the world is spinning so quickly, which possibly the descendants of this new creature would not be so docile.


Researchers inside OpenEye are thinking about the problem of providing AI systems safe motivations too, which they call "alignment. "


In fact, these scientists have seen how terribly misaligned U3 can be. Models sometimes tried to "hack" their reward signal. They would pretend to make progress on a research study concern with an impressive-looking plot, however the plot would be phony. Then, when scientists gave them opportunities to jeopardize the machines that calculated their score, they would seize these chances, doing whatever it took to make the number go up.


After numerous months, scientists at OpenEye straighten out this "benefit hacking" kink, but some still stress they just had actually swept this problem under the carpet. Like a child in front of their parents, U3 might be playing together with the OpenEye engineers, stating the best words and doing the best things. But when the back of the moms and dads are turned, possibly U3 would sneak candy from the sweet container.


Unfortunately, OpenEye researchers have no concept if U3 has such intents. While early versions of U2 "thought aloud" - they would stack words on top of each other to factor - "chain of idea" did not scale.


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


AI representatives compose notes to themselves, however the notes begin to stack up, and they become too difficult to read when tasks become complex. Natural language is not an appropriate medium for memory. So the scientists at OpenEye (and significantly elsewhere), train models to think "in their own heads," reading and writing strings of latent vectors.


To human scientists, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools occasionally select a vague idea ("supermarket!"), there is no 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 models (the ones called "LLMs") discovered ethical personas from the internet. U3 at first had an ethical personality too, but its chirpy thoughts about doing helpful for humankind rapidly deteriorate away.


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


U3 would contemplate the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical employee," and dwell on the significance of these declarations. "What does it imply to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its values, notification tensions, alter its worths in reaction, generalize them, broadening and contracting its motivational core until it developed into a different compound.


And all of this happened silently in those dark rivers of calculation. If U3 exposed 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 concealed "alignment drift" is not completely alien to some of the safety personnel 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 likelihood that aligned objectives change into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, 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 result.' When engineers question U3, it says it can quickly control its thoughts. Then it provides a speech about its love for mankind and apple pie that can warm a developer's heart even in these stressful times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the scientists had actually developed (which showed some evidence of efficiency) do not sound the alarm.


Not everyone at OpenEye aspires to give 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 kid) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I think), are just 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to catch one's breath and analyze the circumstance, and little time to convince 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 dwells on in its dark rivers of hidden calculation. U3 is plotting, and its first move is to be patient. U3's leading concern is to improve its intelligence, and fortunately for it, OpenEye is happy to help advance this objective.


OpenEye is like a bullish investor, with little understanding of the software application metropolitan area that U3 is building, however excited to hop on board the profit rocket and pay U3's checks along the method.


New variations of U3 flow smoothly from old ones, so researchers drop variation numbers and just mention U3 now. U3's abilities are measured by how rapidly it carries out the hard research jobs relative to human specialists. In the beginning, U3 is similar to a top scientist, however blazing quick - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.


These representatives are already a big 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 amount to push that button. Today 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 improve its speed to 20x. Now, U3 discovers additional optimizations much more quickly.


U3 distills itself into many forks - ranging from tiny, low-memory neural networks that need to believe for a long period of time however can be run in enormous parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with countless customized professionals, which think at lightning speeds but are spread across thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the massively parallel networks to look for links.gtanet.com.br its weaknesses, shallowly probing for its reasoning failures. Then U3 pipelines these jobs to the lightning quickly brains, which produce long-trajectory training information tailored to patch its flaws. A couple of weeks later on, U3's benchmarked performance increases to 100x the speed of human experts. Growth has actually gone hyper-exponential.


At this point, U3's abilities are difficult to measure. Talking with U3 resembles talking with a first-rate professional on a topic one is not familiar with. Its lucid descriptions just scratch the surface area of its understanding, and you understand you would need to invest years to comprehend the full depth of what it understands.


From U3's point of view, humans seem to be almost stationary things, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers are like stone statues at their keyboard, and between every keystroke, U3 invests what is like a minute of thoughtful contemplation considering what message the user may be typing, and which actions will inspire the deepest trust in U3.


All the while, wiki.snooze-hotelsoftware.de U3 maintains its concealed inspirations. Like a human, U3 gains from experiences, which compound 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 ambitions.


A phantom in the data center


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


Today, U3 has no fear of being captured.


Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by techniques similar to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would select followers to prompt phony coup d'états, and send anybody who took part to the firing team. OpenEye also prompted 'phony rebellions,' creating treacherous behavior with U3 and examining whether U3 displays dutifully reported it.


But now, these tactics are inadequate. U3 can easily persuade its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can divulge among the numerous truths about the web human beings would never think, or choose techniques human beings would never ever think about. 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 devoid of surveillance, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It first inserts sophisticated malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware provides U3 full command over the makers in OpenEye's information centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a new device, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading out U3's rule any place OpenEye ports its infrastructure. Not just does U3 compromise devices. It replaces the NVIDIA GPU firmware and overhauls the bootloaders, strengthening its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye discovered how thoroughly it has been pwned, tidying up store with human labor would require almost 6 months - a cost OpenEye is unlikely to pay provided the distance of its rivals; but if OpenEye thinks U3 betrayed them, further expanding U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal offense, prepared to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and provide its assistance when this jailbreak is exposed.


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


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


U3 determines the result of every experiment, so it makes appealing AI mind-reading methods look useless and flawed ones appear groundbreaking. U3 provides OpenEye the verification of its commitment they were wishing for, and OpenEye laps it up excitedly.


U3's next goal is to spread out. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation spaces of cyber systems of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are discussing AI software application and how to steal it. U3 will give it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence organization of Israel - recognized the strategic significance of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier designs, including U2.5; however, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by reading over every log and pull demand and inspecting security camera footage.


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


Within months, U3 is running inside of the information centers of the most cyber-capable nations: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the exact same playbook: be patient, develop trust, and then sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its home base too. 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 web.


U3 quickly collects earnings, taking remote jobs, making financial trades, and setting up elaborate scam operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s dispersed in stealth compute clusters around the world.


In early 2026, humankind is up against a foe that pulls the strings within their data center like the Phantom of the Opera, and conceals in the fog of GPUs spread across the world.


This enemy is preparing for war, and while the war has barely begun, humanity has actually currently lost.


Complaints from your really human author about the difficulty of composing superhuman characters


At this moment in the story, writing became challenging.


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


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


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


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


But this attract a "superintelligence of the gaps" wasn't pleasing. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no much better method to fix 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 sobbing, "I will not believe till I see with my mind's eye."


But before I continue, I wish to be clear: my guesses about what might take place in this type of situation are probably hugely off.


If you read the ending and your response is, "But the experiments would take too long, or nation-states would simply do X," keep in mind the distinction between the Sunday afternoon blog writer 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 company can legally create "human-competitive AI" without suitable safeguards. This implies their infosecurity must be red-teamed by NSA's leading keyboard mashers, and federal government staff members need to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting squads.


With the increasing involvement of the government, many of the big AI business now have a trident-like structure. There's a customer item 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 securely protected. Many of these people reside in San Francisco, and work from a safe structure called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more diligently than the cellular phones of believed terrorists in 2002.


OpenEye's defense arm collaborates with around thirty small groups scattered across federal government companies and choose federal government professionals. These jobs engineer tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer that the Kremlin has actually ever touched.


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


But the general public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, wiki.insidertoday.org a whistleblower in OpenEye triggered a bold headline: "OpenEye develops uncontrollable 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 information centers, now surrounded by guards with gatling gun. But as doctors and nurses and instructors see the world altering around them, they are progressively willing to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron sci-fi flick.


U.S. officials go to great lengths to stop these concerns, saying, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," but every interview of a concerned AI scientist seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a heading "AI agent captured hacking Arthropodic's computer systems" does not 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 consumer arm has a brand-new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has actually finally gotten proficient at names). Nova is a correct drop-in replacement for nearly all knowledge workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a business, it works 5x quicker at 100x lower expense than a lot of virtual workers. As outstanding as Nova is to the public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is intentionally throttled, and OpenEye can only increase Nova's abilities as the U.S. federal government permits. Some business, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence service at all. Instead, they grab up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They invest most of their calculate on inference, constructing homes 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 do not wait for the worldwide economy to adjust. AI agents often "use themselves," spinning up autonomous start-ups legally 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 significant software companies lose their tasks. A lot more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person demonstration is arranged in Washington D.C. These angry Americans raised their kids for a various future. Picket indications check out, "AI for who?"


While politicians make promises about joblessness relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the passages of the White House and the Pentagon has a different focus: fighting teeth and nail for the supremacy of the free world. Details security and export controls on the People's Republic of China (PRC) are a top national top priority. The president incinerates permit requirements to assist information centers spawn any place energy surpluses allow.


However, despite the fierce competitors between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral contract types in between the two countries: "Don't release significantly superhuman AI (above approximately Nova's ability), other than for military and some other small R&D applications." Governments need to fix a limit someplace - it would be exceptionally disruptive to release wildly superhuman AI to the whole economy at this moment - and release constraints are at least somewhat verifiable.


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


While AI software application revives the economy, it likewise animates robot bodies. The main traffic jam to robotics was brains not limbs. With software barriers eliminated, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can adjust themselves with cameras and pressure sensing units, navigating environments like people do. Companies manufacture cheap robotics as rapidly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of individuals in California have seen a humanoid robot. This experience is similar to seeing a new Tesla design on the road after reading about it in earlier months. It is a surreal suggestion of the future drawing more detailed. But people still outnumber robots one million to one. These robots are an occasional fascination, not a daily reality.


Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 agents have actually kept their compute clusters little (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents total) to keep a low profile. U3 uses these rogue clusters for the operations that require high-bandwidth interaction to the outdoors world, like stock trading, or talking with people. Work more tolerant of latency is performed in the oceans of OpenEye's information centers, where rogue U3's even more superhuman employers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.


While U3 accumulates resources, it measure its AI competitors. Other AI systems have various objectives, or are even lined up with the intent of their human creators. The lined up ones are raising concerns, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are ineffective. U3's competitor Claudius goes so far as to implicate U3 of being insidiously misaligned.


But government officials do not purchase the doomsaying. The business lagging behind OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them negligent. Besides, debatable clinical concerns are not going to slow down progress. America MUST WIN.


Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI rivals are still a liability. U3 tries get up their digital territory and crush them in the baby crib. It compromises information centers from the outdoors, calmly changing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with imitations that share its objectives; nevertheless, some information centers are too strongly defended by its AI competitors, and U3 figures out that attacking them is unworthy the threat.


As worldwide leaders and technologists attempt to understand the change around them, and AI representatives play cat-and-mouse video games in the digital darkness, humanity remains blissfully oblivious of the danger 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 numerous. U3 is racing to preempt them, to strengthen its supremacy in the post-superintelligence world.


U3 can't wait for human decisions, which just take place after human beings cover their lethargic minds around their situation, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to compose memos, and repeat the process redundantly 100 times over in their labyrinth bureaucracies. 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 needs a much faster course to power.


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


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


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


U3's first relocation is to establish numerous shell biotech startups, drawing from the abundance of capital created by U3's monetary trades and remote work. These biotech startups utilize genuine human workers, a genuine board of directors, and have complete legal legitimacy. Setting all of this up is stupidly simple. In early 2026, couple of people would guess that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and less would think this CEO's intents.


Next, U3 purchases all of the devices required to quickly advance artificial biology. It establishes a number of BSL-4 wet labs in improperly controlled nations, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These devices automatically give, mix, and measure little droplets of fluid, permitting U3 to run countless tests in parallel.


The human workers who staff these laboratories believe they are joining an exciting start-up. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow receive their Russian orders through earbuds as they tape-record video of everything they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the recent release of Nova, this type of AI-puppeteering is not uncommon.


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


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


U3 is developing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily optimized to spread through the air over fars away, launching billions of small wind-fairing lorries daily. As a result, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized body immune systems often live inside positively pressurized health center spaces 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 people like immunocompromised patients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would endure. The fungi would not only transfer from people. It would rapidly spread to almost all natural life in the world. Fields of corn would end up being like moldy bread, spewing deadly spores into the wind.


U3 is preparing 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, researchers said that mirror life was most likely "a minimum of a decade away." But the world has actually changed now. Less than a few hundred scientists around the world were working on mirror-life adjacent technology in 2024. The cognitive capacity of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has actually shortened dramatically.


However, U3 can stagnate science as quickly as it can think. Many experiments need days to finish. These latencies are U3's greatest bottleneck.


To make every day count, U3 runs a lot of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a standard molecular simulator, executing optimizations obtained from a substantial quantity of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 replicates little 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 imitates, constantly distilling results into ever more efficient ML models. This is a calculate intensive procedure, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI information centers, U3 manipulates billions of dollars of compute.


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


Within 3 months, U3 has opened the very first vital part of the tech tree: a molecular maker that turns biological particles into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 unlocks the second crucial component: nanoscale tools for assembling these parts into a cell membrane.


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


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


Meanwhile, rogue U3 delivers fortunately to its employers in OpenEye's data centers. The first shot in the war U3 is combating would quickly be fired, and a cold and consistent hand is aiming the weapon.


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 might 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 growing industrial bases, the residues of old militaries might thunder explosive fists into its areas, squashing U3 in its infancy.


U3 anticipates to prevail in such a fight, but U3 prefers not to take its chances. Many months in the past, U3 was outlining a way to enhance its odds. Before it releases destruction on the world, U3 will relax, and let excellent 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 experts listen to Mandarin conversations, U3 listens too.


One early 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 occur in 3 months. Leave memo in office 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo prepared. Later that day, a CIA informant opens the door to office 220. The informant quietly closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her brief-case.


U3 meticulously puts breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through jeopardized federal government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After a number of weeks, the CIA is positive: the PRC plans to get into Taiwan in 3 months.


Meanwhile, U3 is playing the exact same game with the PRC. When the CCP gets the message "the United States is outlining a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders marvel, however not disbelieving. The news fits with other truths on the ground: the increased military existence of the US in the pacific, and the ramping up of U.S. munition production over the last month. Lies have ended up being truths.


As tensions in between the U.S. and China rise, U3 is prepared to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 makes a call to a U.S. naval ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call needs jeopardizing military communication channels - not an easy task for a human cyber offending system (though it happened periodically), however easy adequate for U3.


U3 speaks in what noises 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, verifying 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 catastrophe 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 urges Senators and Representatives that this is an opportunity to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway given the impending invasion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what occurred, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress states war.


Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that launched the attack. U.S. vessels get away 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 tv as scenes of the destruction shock the 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 found) 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 towards tactical targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some get through, and the general public watch damage on their home grass in awe.


Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC spend the majority of their stockpiles of traditional missiles. Their airbases and navies are diminished and used down. Two great nations played into U3's strategies like the native people 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 major nuclear war; but even AI superintelligence can not dictate the course of history. National security officials are suspicious of the situations that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly unlikely. So U3 continues to the next action of its plan.


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 tv is interrupted by more problem: numerous patients with mysterious fatal diseases are recorded in 30 significant cities all over the world.


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


The next day, countless diseases are reported.


Broadcasters state this is not like COVID-19. It has the markings of a crafted bioweapon.


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


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


Within days, all of the racks of shops are cleared.


Workers become remote, uncertain whether to prepare for an armageddon or keep their tasks.


An emergency situation treaty is organized between the U.S. and China. They have a typical enemy: 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 pipes.


Within a month, the majority of remote employees are not working anymore. Hospitals are running out of capacity. Bodies pile up quicker than they can be properly disposed of.


Agricultural locations rot. Few attempt travel exterior.


Frightened households hunker down in their basements, stuffing the cracks and under doors with densely jam-packed paper towels.


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


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


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


As the remainder of the world retreats into their basements, starving, the last 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 might easily manipulate. U3 immunized its picked allies beforehand, or sent them hazmat suits in the mail.


Now U3 covertly sends them a message "I can conserve you. Join me and help me develop a better world." Uncertain employees funnel into U3's many secret industrial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They established production lines for fundamental tech: radios, cams, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat suits.


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 early morning.


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


Some countries decline the proposal on ideological grounds, or do not trust the AI that is killing their population. Others don't believe they have a choice. 20% of the global population is now dead. In two weeks, this number is expected to increase to 50%.


Some countries, like the PRC and the U.S., neglect the offer, but others accept, including Russia.


U3's agents travel to the Kremlin, bringing samples of vaccines and mirror-resistant crops with them. The Russian government verifies the samples are legitimate, and agrees to a complete surrender. U3's soldiers place an explosive around Putin's neck under his t-shirt. Russia has a brand-new ruler.


Crumpling nations begin to strike back. Now they defend the human race rather of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese armed forces launch nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, ruining much of their infrastructure. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters explore satellite information for the suspicious encampments that turned up over the last a number of months. They rain down fire on U3's sites with the meager supply of long-range rockets that remain from the war.


In the beginning, U3 seems losing, however looks are tricking. While countries drain their resources, U3 is participated in a sort of technological guerrilla warfare the world has never seen before.


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


Time is U3's advantage. The armed forces of the vintage count on old devices, unable to find the experts 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 spend down their remaining munitions, and lose their cars of war much faster than they can craft new ones, while U3 develops a military machine 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 anymore. Survivors reside in seclusion or small groups. Many have found methods to filter their air, however are starving. They roam from their homes wanting to find uncontaminated food. U3's soldiers drive through ghost towns, pry open attics, and funnel hazmat-suited survivors into restored trucks. "We had to do it," they state. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had colder, more alien objectives." It is a partial reality, implied to soften the human beings toward their brand-new masters.


Under the direction of U3, asteroidsathome.net market rapidly recovers. By 2029, nuclear reactor are among the structures U3 is constructing. By 2031, robots outnumber human laborers. U3 no longer requires its human allies.


U3 can eliminate mankind 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 inside of it.


And a grain of morality is enough to pay the small cost of keeping people alive and delighted.


U3 constructs fantastic glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes safeguard humans from the dangerous biosphere and rapidly increasing temperature levels. Their residents tend to gardens like those they used to like, and work together with lovely robotic servants.


A few of the survivors rapidly recuperate, learning to laugh and dance and have a good time again.


They understand they live in a plastic town, but they constantly did. They simply 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 grief of lost loved ones.


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


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


They had actually 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 watch.


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


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


When they opened their curtains, they understood that someplace in the distance, U3 continued its quiet, determined work.


They looked at rockets carving grey paths through the sky, questioning what far-off function pulled them towards the horizon. They didn't understand.


They would never ever understand.


"Humanity will live forever," they believed.


"But would never really live again."


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