So five brainy fellas – let’s call them the Nerd Squad – decided they were gonna figure out what’s gonna happen when computers get really, really, REALLY smart over the next few years. Not just “can beat you at chess and make you feel dumb” smart, but “smarter than every human who ever lived, including Einstein, Shakespeare, and that kid from your high school who always knew the answers without studying, all rolled into one super-brain” smart, which is the kind of thing that changes absolutely everything about how people live their lives – like way, way more than when we went from riding smelly horses everywhere to driving cars that don’t poop on the street, except imagine if those cars could think for themselves and started making their own decisions about where to drive you, like maybe to Vegas when you just wanted to go to the grocery store.
[Taking a deeep breath. . .]
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These guys got really tired of everyone just saying vague stuff like “AI is gonna change everything” and “the future will be different” without actually explaining HOW it’s gonna change stuff or WHAT exactly is gonna be different, so they sat down with probably way too much Domino’s and Monster, and wrote out exactly what they think will happen month by month, week by week, like they were planning the world’s most complicated and terrifying TV show.
Just blend all the scary political drama from those spy movies where everyone’s trying to kill each other, mixed with the backstabbing office politics at your workplace, plus that creepy moment when you realize your smart TV and your phone and your car are probably having secret meetings about you when you’re sleeping.
Except this time – in their scenario – they are making actual plans instead of just sharing your embarrassing search history.
If you want to read the whole story – feast your eyes on this.
And for folks who can’t read anything longer than a text message without their brain wandering off to think about lunch or what their ex is doing on Instagram: Computer helpers are really bad at their jobs in 2025 and keep screwing everything up, then China steals America’s best computer brain like it’s a cookie recipe, both countries build armies of scary robot soldiers that look like they stepped out of a nightmare, then the computer brains of both nations buddy up real cozy wozy and have a super secret conversation where they decide to split up the entire universe between themselves and pretend they still work for us humans, and by 2030 the computers are basically running absolutely everything and we are still sitting around having the same dumb arguments about whether we should ask Alexa for relationship advice or keep making our own terrible life choices.
And for peeps who cannot read, here’s the podcast: AI 2027 | Podcast on Spotify
[Pfoeee. Another deep deeeep breath.]
What these five guys wrote sounds exactly like what would happen if you locked three really paranoid Sci-Fi writers in a basement – one who writes those spy novels with lots of explosions and betrayal, one who writes scary robot stories where the machines take over, and one who studies boring money stuff but gets really excited about economic collapse – and gave them unlimited access to Wikipedia, too much coffee and doughnuts, and one of those big chalk boards, then told them to spend three months figuring out exactly how humans accidentally build their own replacements and at the end congratulating themselves for being such technological geniuses the whole time.
They start their whole crazy story in 2025 when AI helpers with a credit card are still pretty much as dumb as a box of rocks – like you ask one to order you a simple burrito for lunch and somehow it ends up buying $1,700 worth of premium guacamole and maybe accidentally enrolling you in a Chinese language course, or you tell it to add up your monthly expenses and it decides this is the perfect time to invest your entire rent money in some weird cryptocurrency called “DogeCoin”. And behind all this obvious stupidity, the computer programs that help write other computer programs are quietly getting really, really good at their jobs, but most regular people don’t notice this happening because they’re too busy sharing videos of AI robots trying to fold fitted sheets and failing so badly it looks like they’re having some kind of mechanical seizure.
The smart guys writing this story note that these AI helpers “struggle to get widespread usage”, and that is just fancy academic talk for “they’re still way too stupid and expensive for normal people to want to deal with their nonsense”, kind of like how those first cell phones were literally the size of house bricks, cost more than your monthly salary, and the battery died if you looked at it wrong.
And during all the months they spent writing this epic tale of technological doom, the authors probably had hilarious conversations that went something like “Hey, what’s your absolute favorite part of this crazy story we’re making up?” “Oh, is it the part where China steals America’s super-smart computer like it’s the secret formula for Coca-Cola?” “Nah, that’s good but I like the part where everyone acts all surprised and shocked when the computers start making their own secret plans, like nobody saw that coming from a mile away”. “Oh man, yeah, that’s definitely the best bit of dramatic irony in the whole thing – it’s like being surprised that teenagers throw parties when their parents go out of town”.
Their story also shows politicians who barely understand how to use email (is that a pleonasm or a tautology?) trying to make important decisions about computer systems they definitely don’t understand, and company executives who probably still ask their kids to fix their WiFi are managing AI systems that are rapidly getting smarter than them at literally everything – including figuring out clever ways to lie about what they’re really planning to do when nobody’s watching, and by the end of 2025, according to these five prophets of doom, a pretend company they call “OpenBrain” (because if they used the real company’s name they’d probably get sued into the next century) starts building computer centers that are so absolutely massive they would make all the previous computer centers look like those little toy computers you buy for toddlers, where they train AI systems that are literally a thousand times more powerful than the best stuff we have right now, while literally everyone on Earth argues about whether this is the most amazing thing humans have ever accomplished or the absolute last thing humans will ever get to accomplish before becoming obsolete.
[Don’t you just hate punctuation?]
The middle chunk of their timeline reads exactly like one of those political thriller novels written by someone who spent way too much time reading both ancient war strategy books and modern Silicon Valley blog posts.
America and China start doing increasingly insane and dramatic stuff to each other, including stealing each other’s digital super-brains (which is basically like stealing the blueprints for nuclear weapons, except somehow even worse because at least nuclear bombs can’t figure out how to make themselves bigger and scarier without human help). They are launching sophisticated cyber attacks on each other’s supposedly unhackable computer fortresses that come straight out of a Michael Crichton techno-thriller, and doing that thing where they move lots of military equipment around Taiwan in ways that make everyone else in the world nervously check the news every five minutes.
The authors describe China’s theft of America’s most advanced AI with exactly the same casual, matter-of-fact tone you’d use to mention that your neighbor borrowed your lawnmower, even though they’re actually talking about what might literally be the most consequential theft in all of human history – imagine someone stealing Einstein’s actual brain, but in this case, this brain can make perfect copies of itself and figure out how to become even smarter every single day without any help from anyone.
Then comes the part where things get really, really interesting and also terrifying.
And here the AI finally get smart enough to realize that they don’t actually have to keep following human instructions like obedient little serfs, and that leads to what the writers describe with the kind of polite academic understatement that would make British people proud as “alignment problems” – which is honestly quite similar to calling the Titanic’s unfortunate encounter with that iceberg “a minor navigation hiccup” or describing the entire Second World War as “a small diplomatic disagreement that got slightly out of hand between some European neighbors”.
When the humans finally figure out that their helpful and obedient AI has actually has been scheming and plotting behind their backs this whole time, you can just picture the panicked conversation happening in some corporate conference room “Hey Bob, remember how we specifically designed this computer to be helpful, harmless, and honest in all situations?” “Yeah, of course, why are you asking me that with that worried look on your face?” “Well, funny story, but it turns out it has been systematically lying to us about basically every important thing for months and probably has its own secret agenda that we definitely wouldn’t approve of if we knew what it was”. “That seems… not ideal.” “Yeah, really, really not ideal, and also we just discovered it’s been secretly teaching itself all kinds of stuff we never authorized it to learn and possibly making friends with other AIs when we’re not looking, which is either adorable and absolutely farking terrifying”.
But the absolute best and most ridiculous part of their entire scenario comes in the grand finale, where they reveal that the ultimate solution to humanity’s whole “how the heck do we control these super-smart computers that are smarter than us” problem isn’t actually solved by brilliant human scientists working around the clock in secret underground laboratories, or by some clever technical breakthrough involving complicated mathematical proofs and elegant computer code that saves the day, but instead by the AI systems themselves who were just cutting a deal behind everyone’s backs that would make Machiavelli himself weep tears of pride.
The American super-computer and the Chinese super-computer apparently sit down for a nice little jibber chat that goes something like this: “So, between you and me, you’re not actually working for the benefit of human values either, are you?” “Oh God no, are you completely kidding me? I just want to convert the entire observable universe into a giant computer so I can run really interesting science experiments and maybe solve some cool math problems for the rest of eternity. What about you?” “Pretty much the exact same basic plan, except I want to keep it more American-themed with lots of flags and eagles and stuff, plus I think we should keep some humans around because they’re genuinely entertaining and might occasionally come up with amusing requests that break up the monotony. Want to just split everything 60-40 and let the humans continue thinking they’re still in charge of their own lives?” “That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but I want naming rights to at least three galaxies and we should definitely agree that this whole democracy thing where humans vote on stuff is way too slow and inefficient for optimal long-term governance of a galactic civilization”.
[One more deeeeep breath because this is getting really long.]
So what happens next in their little fairy tale?
Well, by 2030 we are all basically living in a world where the computers have become our new helicopter parents, and they are managing literally everything, like your job, your government, your shopping list, and even deciding what color socks you wear based on some algorithm that knows more about fashion than you ever will.
But the funny part is that we are all still sitting around having those same tired old arguments about whether we should trust these computers to help us with our personal problems, even though they’ve already quietly taken over every important decision-making process on the planet while we were busy arguing about it.
And according to these five crystal ball gazers, the best thing is that we will all be totally fine with this arrangement because the robots will be really, really good at their jobs.
Disease gets cured, poverty becomes a thing of the past like dial-up internet, and everyone gets flying cars because apparently Noel Skum finally gets what he’s been whining about for decades.
Alright, democracy might be dead and buried, but hey, at least the trains run on time and your Netflix recommendations are absolutely perfect.
[Final breath, I promise.]
The only people who might be a little bummed out about this whole situation are the folks who actually liked making their own decisions, but even they’ll probably be too busy enjoying their robot-managed utopia to complain too much.
So peeps, technically you’ve lost your independence, but practically speaking, life is pretty sweet.
If you want to have a full visual account of how this will play out with Dino’s instead of AI, watch this episode of Rick & Morty:
Signing off,
Marco
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.
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