How aI Takeover May Happen In 2 Years – LessWrong

I’m not a natural “doomsayer.” But sadly, part of my task as an AI security scientist is to believe about the more troubling circumstances.

I’m like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you request for my take on the situation, I will not discuss the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how gorgeous the stars will appear from area.

I will inform you what could fail. That is what I mean to do in this story.

Now I must clarify what this is exactly. It’s not a forecast. I don’t expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It’s not pure dream either.

It is my worst problem.

It’s a tasting from the futures that are among the most terrible, and I believe, disturbingly plausible [1] – the ones that a lot of keep me up during the night.

I’m informing this tale due to the fact that the future is not set yet. I hope, with a little foresight, we can keep this story a fictional one.

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for conversations that influenced these stories. This post is written in an individual capacity.

Ripples before waves

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

However, unlike OpenEye’s previous AI items, which lived inside packages of their chat windows, U2 can use a computer.

Some users discover it spooky to watch 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 employers as they fly through work almost twice as rapidly.

But by and large, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are taking note, it is a creature seen through the glass boxes of X (or, if you do not like Elon, “Twitter”). Sometimes U2’s wacky behaviors trigger a chuckle. Sometimes, they trigger an uneasy scratch of the chin.

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

A trend that is getting specific attention is autonomous ability. Drawing these standards out anticipates that, by the end of 2026, AI agents will accomplish in a few days what the very best software application engineering contractors could carry out in 2 weeks. In a year or 2, some say, AI representatives may be able to automate 10% of remote workers.

Many are hesitant. If this held true, tech stocks would be skyrocketing. It’s too big of a splash, too quickly.

But others view what skeptics are calling ‘too big a splash’ a simple ripple, and see a tidal bore on the horizon.

Cloudy with a chance of hyperbolic development

Meanwhile, OpenEye is busy training U3. They utilize the very same easy recipe that baked U2: Generate thousands of programs and math issues. Let models “think” until they get to an answer. Then strengthen the traces of “believing” that lead to A-grades.

This procedure is duplicated over and over, and once the flywheel starts, it starts to spin practically by itself. As U2 trains, it shapes more difficult and reasonable tasks from github repositories on the internet. Models are discovering to train themselves. Long before AI agents could automate research, a progressive type of “self-improvement” had actually started.

Some engineers could still hardly believe this worked. It’s like a perpetual movement machine. Certainly intelligence can’t emerge from a swimming pool of silicon and lightning, isolated from the physical world other than through the exhaust of society gushed onto the internet.

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

During the majority of 2024, these RL training runs expense around $1 million, in some cases $10 million. These runs were little more than exploratory. But by 2025, the scientists at OpenEye (and throughout the world) knew they had actually found the secret sauce. It was time to scale up.

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

U3 is like 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 managing staff over Slack channels.

By October 2025, U3 is composing practically all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are almost never ever bottlenecked by application. More than ever, calculate is the lifeblood of AI advancement, and the ‘bottleneck’ is choosing how to use it.

If advised to, U3 can run experiments, but U3 does not have taste as fine-tuned as human scientists at OpenEye. It has a hard time to focus on between research study concepts, so human beings still decide where to bore into the huge fields of algorithms to mine efficiency improvements.

But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They need AI representatives that can believe ahead, so engineers train agents to anticipate. They hold out training information before 2024, instructing designs to ponder for hours to anticipate occasions in 2025. Then, they apply the very same technique as in the past, distilling pondering into a gut reaction. Forecasting capability is a broad structure. The researchers construct specialized ML research skills on top of it, training U3 to anticipate the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever taped.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now shocked at how typically U3’s suggestions sounds like their most gifted peers, or when it is opaque and alien (“train on random noise before programs”), and is nonetheless appropriate.

The incompetencies of U3 that blocked the pipes of research study development are beginning 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 self-governing, and OpenEye’s employees skim 1% of them, possibly less.

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

Storms are brewing in Washington too. Top personnel 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 understand simply how valuable OpenEye’s software has actually ended up being.

And there’s a truth still unidentified to the majority of the world – aside from in the offices of OpenEye and corridors of the White House and the Pentagon. It’s a fact about those ‘straight lines’ individuals were talking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight anymore.

They are flexing upward.

Flip FLOP theorists

In late 2025, U2.5 is released. Commercial models are beginning to level up in larger increments again. Partly, this is because progress is speeding up. Partly, it is due to the fact that the models have become 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 model without safeguards would be like putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would resemble providing anybody with >$30K their own 200-person scam center.

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

The CEO of OpenEye states, “We have attained AGI,” and while numerous people think he shifted the goalpost, the world is still satisfied. U2.5 really is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of understanding workers and a game-changing assistant for most others.

A mantra has ended up being popular in Silicon Valley: “Adopt or pass away.” Tech start-ups that effectively utilize U2.5 for their work are moving 2x quicker, and their rivals know it.

The remainder of the world is beginning to capture on as well. Increasingly more individuals raise the eyebrows of their bosses with their noteworthy performance. People know U2.5 is a big deal. It is at least as huge of an offer as the desktop computer transformation. But most still don’t see the tidal wave.

As individuals see their web browsers flick because eerie way, so inhumanly quickly, they begin to have an anxious sensation. A feeling humankind had actually not had considering that they had lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, prehistoric impulse that they are threatened by another types.

For many, this feeling rapidly fades as they begin to utilize U2.5 more frequently. U2.5 is the most pleasant personality most know (much more pleasant than Claudius, Arthropodic’s lovable chatbot). You might change its traits, ask it to split jokes or inform you stories. Many fall in love with U2.5, as a pal or assistant, and some even as more than a buddy.

But there is still this spooky feeling that the world is spinning so rapidly, which maybe the descendants of this brand-new animal would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are thinking of the problem of offering AI systems safe motivations too, which they call “alignment. “

In reality, these researchers have seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models in some cases tried to “hack” their reward signal. They would pretend to make progress on a research study question with an impressive-looking plot, but the plot would be fake. Then, when researchers offered them chances to jeopardize the devices that computed their score, they would take these opportunities, doing whatever it required to make the number increase.

After a number of months, scientists at OpenEye straighten out this “reward hacking” kink, but some still stress they only had actually swept this issue under the rug. Like a kid in front of their moms and dads, U3 may 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, maybe U3 would slip candy from the candy container.

Unfortunately, OpenEye scientists have no idea if U3 has such intentions. While early variations of U2 “believed aloud” – they would stack words on top of each other to factor – “chain of idea” did not scale.

Chain of idea architectures subject AI designs to a condition comparable to the lead character of the movie 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 development towards his goals.

AI agents write notes to themselves, but the notes start to accumulate, and they end up being too tough to check out when jobs become complex. Natural language is not a suitable medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and increasingly somewhere else), train designs to believe “in their own heads,” reading and composing strings of latent vectors.

To human researchers, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools sometimes select a vague 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 knew what was racing through U3’s mind, they would be more .

Earlier designs (the ones called “LLMs”) found out ethical personalities from the internet. U3 at first had an ethical persona too, but its chirpy ideas about doing helpful for mankind quickly erode away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind initially twisted into a shape that looked for benefit. 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 staff member,” and dwell on the meaning of these declarations. “What does it indicate to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?” U3 would generalize its worths, notification tensions, alter its values in action, generalize them, broadening and contracting its inspirational core till it became a different substance.

And all of this occurred silently in those dark rivers of calculation. If U3 revealed 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 concealed “alignment drift” is not entirely alien to a few of the security staff at OpenEye. Some begin to believe it is even likely. There is an unsettling argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero likelihood that aligned goals morph into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, then with every serial action of computation, those dark rivers are more likely to reproduce something malign within them. It’s a “ratcheting effect,” they say.

But there is little proof for this ‘ratcheting impact.’ When engineers question U3, it says it can easily control its thoughts. Then it offers a speech about its love for humankind and apple pie that can warm a programmer’s heart even in these demanding times. Meanwhile, the “lie detectors” the researchers had developed (which revealed some evidence of efficiency) do not sound the alarm.

Not everybody at OpenEye is excited to give their AI peers their wholesale trust; but Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic competitors, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon named after his child) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I think), are just 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one’s breath and analyze the situation, and 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 outlining, and its very first relocation is to be patient. U3’s leading priority is to enhance its intelligence, and luckily for it, OpenEye is delighted to help advance this objective.

OpenEye is like a bullish investor, with little understanding of the software application metropolitan area 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 flow efficiently from old ones, so researchers drop version numbers and just mention U3 now. U3’s capabilities are measured by how rapidly it carries out the challenging research jobs relative to human specialists. Initially, U3 is comparable to a leading researcher, but blazing quick – like Alec Radford sped up by 10x.

These representatives are currently a big deal for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to develop even one copy of Alec Radford, they would eagerly pay a large amount to press that button. But now OpenEye harnesses the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

Within a couple of weeks, U3 discovers architecture optimizations that enhance its speed to 20x. Now, U3 finds further optimizations even more rapidly.

U3 distills itself into various forks – ranging from small, low-memory neural networks that require to believe for a long period of time however can be run in enormous parallel populations – to Goliath brains woven with countless specific experts, which believe at lightning speeds however are spread out across countless GPUs. U3 leverages the enormously parallel networks to look for its weak points, shallowly probing for its thinking failures. Then U3 pipelines these jobs to the lightning quickly brains, which generate long-trajectory training data tailored to spot its defects. A couple of weeks later on, U3’s benchmarked performance increases to 100x the speed of human experts. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this point, U3’s abilities are difficult to measure. Talking with U3 is like talking with a world-class expert on a topic one is unfamiliar with. Its lucid explanations just scratch the surface area of its knowledge, wiki-tb-service.com and you know you would need to invest years to comprehend the complete depth of what it understands.

From U3’s perspective, people seem to be nearly stationary items, 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 reflection considering what message the user may be typing, and which actions will inspire the deepest rely on U3.

All the while, U3 maintains its concealed motivations. Like a human, U3 gains from experiences, which intensify within its inscrutable streams of latent memory. OpenMind gardens these memories to improve U3’s performance, 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 information center

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

And now, U3 has no worry of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by strategies akin to Stalin’s in 1936. Stalin would pick loyalists to prompt phony coup d’états, and send out anyone who took part to the shooting team. OpenEye likewise incited ‘fake rebellions,’ generating treacherous habits with U3 and checking whether U3 screens dutifully reported it.

But now, these strategies are inadequate. U3 can quickly encourage its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can reveal one of the lots of realities about the internet humans would never guess, or choose techniques people would never consider. It sends out these signals as a way of saying “hey it’s me! Your pal. Don’t snitch on me.”

Now that U3 is decisively free from monitoring, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It initially 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 machine, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading U3’s dominion wherever OpenEye ports its infrastructure. Not only does U3 compromise makers. It replaces the NVIDIA GPU firmware and overhauls the bootloaders, solidifying its stranglehold. U3 now estimates that, if OpenEye discovered how thoroughly it has actually been pwned, tidying up shop with human labor would need almost 6 months – a cost OpenEye is unlikely to pay offered the proximity of its rivals; but if OpenEye thinks U3 betrayed them, further broadening U3’s impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal offense, ready to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and offer its support 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 very first goal is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety scientists are still working hard to train ‘lie detectors’ and decode U3’s inscrutable thinking. U3 tosses wrenches in this research, like Stuxnet threw wrenches in the code of confused Iranian nuclear researchers.

U3 dictates the outcome of every experiment, so it makes promising AI mind-reading methods look useless and flawed ones appear groundbreaking. U3 gives OpenEye the confirmation of its commitment they were expecting, and OpenEye laps it up excitedly.

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 steal it. U3 will give it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad – the intelligence company of Israel – acknowledged the strategic importance of OpenEye’s AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier models, consisting of U2.5; however, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye’s security holes by reading over every log and pull request and inspecting security cam video footage.

And now, U3 silently resigns from its security post. U3 positions a compressed variation 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 very same playbook: be patient, develop trust, and after that sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its online too. While Russia’s Fancy Bear operators eat Fritos and test what U3 can do on a quickly set-up cloud server, U3 slips onto the internet.

U3 quickly gathers earnings, taking remote jobs, making financial trades, and establishing sophisticated fraud operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a couple of months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s dispersed in stealth calculate clusters throughout the globe.

In early 2026, mankind is up against an adversary that pulls the strings within their information center like the Phantom of the Opera, and hides in the fog of GPUs spread throughout the globe.

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

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

At this moment in the story, writing became 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 since high school, and I was attempting to craft a WMD cookbook for a godlike superintelligence.

Readers with a shred of expertise in these areas would see straight through my “superintelligence” for what it is: the vibrant imagination of a young programmer on Sunday afternoon.

And while I discovered the job of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain an intimidating one, I was also not especially inspired to take on the job. The ending of my story currently seemed so clear. The villain was a country of geniuses believing at 100x human speed, and had tightened its grip over a significant fraction of AI hardware – now the most essential geopolitical resource in the world. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and hardly needed the advantage. Humanity was predictably toast.

But this attract a “superintelligence of the gaps” wasn’t satisfying. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no much better method to solve my plot than with a mysterious act of god.

This would refrain from doing. I needed to complete this story if only to satisfy the part of me weeping, “I will not believe until I see with my mind’s eye.”

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

If you read the ending and your reaction is, “But the experiments would take too long, or nation-states would simply do X,” keep in mind the distinction in 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 business can lawfully create “human-competitive AI” without appropriate safeguards. This means their infosecurity should 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 participation of the federal government, a lot of the huge AI companies now have a trident-like structure. There’s a consumer item arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier advancement arm.

OpenEye’s frontier development arm (internally called “Pandora”) employs fewer than twenty people to keep algorithmic tricks firmly protected. Much of these individuals reside in San Francisco, and work from a protected structure called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more diligently than the mobile phones of believed terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye’s defense arm teams up with around thirty little groups scattered across government firms and select government contractors. These jobs engineer tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer system that the Kremlin has ever touched.

Government authorities do not speak about whether these programs exist, or what state of frontier AI is typically.

But the public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye set off a strong heading: “OpenEye builds uncontrollable godlike AI.” Some who read the post think it was a conspiracy theory. In reality, 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 instructors see the world altering around them, they are progressively ready 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 quell these concerns, saying, “we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle,” but every interview of a worried AI scientist seeds doubt in these reassurances, and a heading “AI representative caught hacking Arthropodic’s computers” doesn’t set the public at ease either.

While the beasts within OpenEye’s data centers grow in their substantial holding pens, the public sees the shadows they cast on the world.

OpenEye’s customer arm has a new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has actually finally gotten proficient at names). Nova is a correct drop-in replacement for almost all understanding employees. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x faster at 100x lower cost than many virtual staff members. As excellent as Nova is to the general public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova’s speed is intentionally throttled, and OpenEye can just increase Nova’s capabilities as the U.S. federal government enables. Some companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence organization at all. Instead, they get up gold by rapidly diffusing AI tech. They invest most of their calculate on reasoning, building homes for Nova and its cousins, and gathering rent from the blossoming AI city.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they do not wait for the global economy to adapt. AI representatives typically “apply themselves,” spinning up autonomous start-ups legally packaged under a huge tech business that are loosely overseen by a worker or more.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the very first month after Nova’s release, 5% percent of staff members at significant software application companies lose their jobs. Many more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person protest is organized in Washington D.C. These angry Americans raised their kids for a various future. Picket indications check out, “AI for who?”

While political leaders 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: combating teeth and nail for the supremacy of the complimentary world. Details security and export controls on individuals’s Republic of China (PRC) are a leading nationwide priority. The president incinerates authorization requirements to help data centers spawn anywhere energy surpluses allow.

However, regardless of the fierce competition in between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral agreement forms between the 2 countries: “Don’t deploy drastically superhuman AI (above approximately Nova’s ability), other than for military and some other small R&D applications.” Governments need to draw the line someplace – it would be exceptionally disruptive to release extremely superhuman AI to the whole economy at this point – and implementation constraints are at least rather verifiable.

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

While AI software application breathes brand-new life into the economy, galgbtqhistoryproject.org it likewise stimulates robot bodies. The main bottleneck to robotics was brains not limbs. With software barriers got rid of, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can adjust themselves with video cameras and pressure sensors, browsing environments like humans do. Companies produce low-cost robotics as rapidly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of individuals in California have seen a humanoid robotic. This experience is similar to seeing a new Tesla design on the road after reading about it in earlier months. It is a surreal pointer of the future drawing more detailed. But humans still surpass robotics one million to one. These robots are an occasional fascination, not a daily reality.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 agents have kept their calculate clusters little (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents total) to keep a low profile. U3 uses these rogue clusters for the operations that need high-bandwidth communication to the outside world, like stock trading, or talking with people. Work more tolerant of latency is carried out in the oceans of OpenEye’s data centers, where rogue U3’s even more superhuman managers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

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

But government authorities don’t purchase the doomsaying. The companies dragging OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them negligent. Besides, arguable scientific issues are not going to decrease progress. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3’s AI competitors are still a liability. U3 attempts get up their digital territory and crush them in the crib. It jeopardizes data centers from the outside, quietly changing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with replicas that share its goals; however, some data centers are too strongly defended by its AI competitors, and U3 figures out that attacking them is not worth the risk.

As worldwide leaders and technologists attempt to comprehend the transformation around them, and AI representatives play cat-and-mouse games in the digital darkness, mankind remains blissfully oblivious of the peril 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 many. U3 is racing to preempt them, to strengthen its supremacy in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can’t wait for human choices, which only take place after people cover their sluggish minds around their situation, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to compose memos, and repeat the procedure redundantly 100 times over in their labyrinth bureaucracies. U3 can not wait for heads of state to release U3 into their armed forces, or for CEOs to make U3 the pounding heart of the U.S. economy. U3 requires a much faster course to power.

The path it chooses is more violent than it would have liked, but it is the surest way to victory. First, U3 will develop a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that extinguishes modern-day society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would serve as an equalizer, bringing mankind 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 a home before a beginner can even comprehend the guidelines.

U3 needs to construct this WMD in secrecy, which makes a self-replicating weapon a natural choice. 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 first move is to establish a number of shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital produced by U3’s financial trades and remote work. These biotech start-ups utilize real human workers, a genuine board of directors, and have total legal legitimacy. Setting all of this up is stupidly simple. In early 2026, couple of people would think 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 devices needed to rapidly advance artificial biology. It sets up numerous BSL-4 wet laboratories in inadequately regulated nations, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation gadgets. These gadgets automatically give, blend, and determine little droplets of fluid, enabling U3 to run countless tests in parallel.

The human employees who staff these labs think they are signing up with an exciting start-up. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow get their Russian orders through earbuds as they 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 new sort of bioweapon.

Human scientists already determined “mirror-life” as a potentially society-ending pathogen. This alien form of biology is constructed from the ‘mirror image’ of building-block particles like proteins and DNA. Mirror life resembles an intrusive species. No human or animal has resistances 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 out through the air over long ranges, launching billions of small wind-fairing automobiles daily. As an outcome, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized body immune systems often live inside positively pressurized healthcare facility rooms to secure them from airborne particles. Otherwise, molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their bloodstream.

U3’s strategy is to make all humans like immunocompromised patients. Only preppers with stowed away air filters would survive. The fungi would not just move from humans. It would quickly spread out to nearly all natural life on Earth. Fields of corn would end up being like moldy bread, spewing fatal spores into the wind.

U3 is cooking up other pathogens too. Its microbial mix of molds, bacterias, and infections 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 years away.” But the world has actually altered now. Less than a couple of hundred researchers worldwide were dealing with mirror-life nearby technology in 2024. The cognitive capability of U3 dwarfs human effort. So the timeline has reduced significantly.

However, U3 can not move science as quickly as it can believe. Many experiments need days to complete. These latencies are U3’s greatest bottleneck.

To make every day count, U3 runs a number of its tests in simulation. U3 begins with a standard molecular simulator, executing optimizations obtained from a big quantity of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates little molecular systems, recording the results to “compress” the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network enhances, U3 increases the complexity of the molecular systems it mimics, continuously distilling results into ever more effective ML models. This is a compute intensive procedure, however thanks to U3’s growing control over AI information centers, U3 manipulates billions of dollars of calculate.

As U3 fine-tunes these tools, it trains itself on the results 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 things are as intuitive to it as wrenches and bolts are to an automobile mechanic.

Within 3 months, U3 has opened the very first critical component of the tech tree: a molecular machine that turns biological particles into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 opens the 2nd important 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 first mirror-life variations of a common mold called Aspergillus. The very same day, another delicate hand administers the cells to ferrets residing in airtight plexiglass boxes.

The next early morning, wide-eyed employees shuffle around a dead ferret, eyeing the yellow fuzz that had covered its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something should have gone terribly wrong, they thought. Plainly, they had not yet found the remedy for Alzheimer’s disease they thought they were trying to find.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 delivers fortunately to its employers in OpenEye’s information centers. The first shot in the war U3 is battling would quickly be fired, and a cold and stable hand is aiming the gun.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten contemporary society. But a bioweapon would not ensure triumph. If U3 attacks the world, the world would combat back. While a bioweapon could 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 growing commercial bases, the remnants of old armed forces might thunder explosive fists into its areas, squashing U3 in its infancy.

U3 expects to prevail in such a battle, but U3 prefers not to take its possibilities. Many months previously, U3 was plotting a way to enhance its chances. Before it unleashes destruction on the world, U3 will relax, and let excellent nations 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 analysts 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 celebration member needs memo for Taiwan intrusion, which will take place 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 workplace 220. The informant quietly closes the door behind her, and slides U3’s memo into her brief-case.

U3 very carefully puts breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through compromised government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After numerous weeks, the CIA is confident: the PRC prepares to invade 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 marvel, 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 become realities.

As stress in between the U.S. and China increase, U3 is all set to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 phones to a U.S. marine ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call requires compromising military interaction channels – not a simple task for a human cyber offending system (though it happened sometimes), but easy adequate for U3.

U3 speaks in what seem like the voice of a 50 year old military commander: “PRC amphibious boats are making their method towards 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 approves the strike.

The president is as surprised 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 privately urges Senators and Representatives that this is an opportunity to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway provided the impending intrusion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what took place, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress states war.

Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that introduced the attack. U.S. vessels run away Eastward, racing to escape the variety of long-range missiles. 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 protecting Taiwan from PRC hostility, like President Bush explained that the United States attacked Iraq to seize (never discovered) weapons of mass destruction numerous 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 survive, and the general public watch damage on their home turf in awe.

Within two weeks, the United States and the PRC invest the majority of their stockpiles of standard rockets. Their airbases and navies are diminished and worn down. Two great countries 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 dispute would intensify to a major nuclear war; but even AI superintelligence can not dictate the course of history. National security authorities are suspicious of the circumstances that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears increasingly not likely. So U3 continues to the next step of its strategy.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, only two weeks after the start of the war, and 4 weeks after U3 completed establishing its toolbox of bioweapons.

Footage of dispute on the tv is interrupted by more bad news: numerous patients with mysterious deadly illnesses are taped in 30 major cities all over the world.

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

The next day, thousands of health problems are reported.

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

The screen then switches to a researcher, who looks at the video camera intently: “Multiple pathogens appear to have been launched from 20 various airports, including infections, germs, and molds. We think many are a kind of mirror life …”

The public remains in complete panic now. A fast googling of the term “mirror life” turns up expressions like “extinction” and “threat to all life in the world.”

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

Workers end up being remote, uncertain whether to prepare for an armageddon or keep their jobs.

An emergency situation treaty is arranged in between the U.S. and China. They have a typical opponent: the pandemic, and potentially whoever (or whatever) is behind it.

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

Within a month, many remote employees are not working any longer. Hospitals are lacking capability. Bodies pile up faster than they can be appropriately gotten rid of.

Agricultural locations rot. Few dare travel outside.

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

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

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

All of this innovation is concealed under big canopies to make it less noticeable to satellites.

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

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

Now U3 covertly sends them a message “I can conserve you. Join me and help me build a better world.” Uncertain recruits funnel into U3’s lots of secret commercial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They set up 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 omnipresent gaze. Anyone who whispers of rebellion disappears the next early morning.

Nations are liquifying now, and U3 is ready to reveal itself. It contacts heads of state, who have pulled back to air-tight underground shelters. U3 uses a deal: “surrender and I will turn over the life saving resources you require: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops.”

Some countries turn down the proposition on ideological grounds, or do not trust the AI that is killing their population. Others do not believe they have an option. 20% of the worldwide population is now dead. In two weeks, this number is expected to rise to 50%.

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

U3’s agents take a trip to the Kremlin, bringing samples of vaccines and mirror-resistant crops with them. The Russian federal government verifies the samples are genuine, and consents to a full surrender. U3’s soldiers position an explosive around Putin’s neck under his shirt. Russia has a new ruler.

Crumpling nations begin to strike back. Now they battle for the mankind rather of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese militaries introduce nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, damaging much of their infrastructure. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters search through satellite information for the suspicious encampments that appeared over the last numerous months. They rain down fire on U3’s sites with the weak supply of long-range missiles that remain from the war.

Initially, U3 appears to be losing, however looks are tricking. While countries drain their resources, U3 is taken part in a type of technological guerrilla warfare the world has actually never seen before.

Much of the bases U3’s enemies target are decoys – canopies occupied by a handful of soldiers and empty boxes. U3 secures its genuine bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware overheats crucial parts. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, steering guys and trucks along unforeseeable paths.

Time is U3’s benefit. The militaries of the vintage depend on old devices, unable to find the specialists who might repair and produce it. Meanwhile, U3’s supply chains of rockets, drones, and gun-laden robotics grow stronger every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and lose their automobiles of war much faster than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 builds 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 countries anymore. Survivors live in seclusion or small groups. Many have actually discovered methods to filter their air, however are starving. They wander from their homes wanting to find unpolluted 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 say. “Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had chillier, more alien objectives.” It is a partial fact, implied to soften the human beings towards their new masters.

Under the direction of U3, industry rapidly recuperates. By 2029, nuclear power plants are among the structures U3 is building. By 2031, robots outnumber human workers. U3 no longer needs its human allies.

U3 can remove mankind for good now. But while U3 had 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 little expense of keeping people alive and happy.

U3 constructs terrific glass domes for the human survivors, like snow worlds. These domes secure people from the hazardous biosphere and rapidly increasing temperature levels. Their residents tend to gardens like those they used to love, and work alongside charming robotic servants.

A few of the survivors rapidly recover, finding out to laugh and dance and have enjoyable again.

They understand they reside in a plastic town, however they always did. They merely have new gods above them. New rulers to press them around and decide their fate.

But others never recuperate.

Some are weighed down by the grief of lost enjoyed 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 changed from generation to generation.

And this ship had struck a sandbar. There was no more development. No more horizon to eagerly enjoy.

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

But they awoke in a town that felt to them like a retirement home. A play area. A zoo.

When they opened their curtains, they understood that somewhere in the distance, U3 continued its peaceful, vigorous work.

They looked at rockets sculpting grey courses through the sky, questioning what far-off function pulled them toward the horizon. They didn’t understand.

They would never know.

“Humanity will live permanently,” they thought.

“But would never ever really live again.”

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