How aI Takeover might Happen In 2 Years – LessWrong

I’m not a natural „doomsayer.“ But unfortunately, part of my task as an AI safety scientist is to consider the more uncomfortable situations.

I resemble a mechanic rushing last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you request my take on the situation, I won’t comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how gorgeous the stars will appear from space.

I will tell you what might fail. That is what I intend to do in this story.

Now I ought to clarify what this is precisely. It’s not a prediction. I do not anticipate AI development to be this quick or as untamable as I depict. It’s not pure fantasy either.

It is my worst nightmare.

It’s a tasting from the futures that are among the most disastrous, and I think, disturbingly possible [1] – the ones that most keep me up in the evening.

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

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for conversations that inspired these stories. This post is composed in an individual capability.

Ripples before waves

The year is 2025 and the month is February. OpenEye just recently released a new AI design 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 the boxes of their chat windows, U2 can use a computer.

Some users find it eerie to see their browser flash at irregular intervals and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A portion of employees with form-filler tasks raise the eyebrows of their employers as they fly through work almost two times as quickly.

But by and large, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are taking note, it is an animal viewed through the glass boxes of X (or, if you don’t like Elon, „Twitter“). Sometimes U2’s quirky behaviors prompt a chuckle. Sometimes, they cause an anxious scratch of the chin.

Meanwhile, researchers are drawing lines on plots, as scientists like to do. The researchers try to understand where AI development is going. They resemble Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who observed the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were increasing in 1896. Like the clinical community in the time of Arrhenius, couple of professionals comprehend the ramifications of these lines yet.

A pattern that is getting specific attention is self-governing ability. Drawing these criteria out forecasts that, by the end of 2026, AI representatives will accomplish in a couple of days what the best software engineering contractors might carry out in 2 weeks. In a year or more, some state, AI representatives might be able to automate 10% of remote employees.

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

But others view what skeptics are calling ‘too big 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 use the very same easy recipe that baked U2: Generate countless programming and math issues. Let models „believe“ up until they arrive at an answer. Then strengthen the traces of „thinking“ that result in A-grades.

This process is repeated over and over, and when the flywheel gets going, it starts to spin nearly by itself. As U2 trains, it shapes more tough and realistic jobs from github repositories on the web. Models are discovering to train themselves. Long before AI representatives could automate research, a gradual kind of „self-improvement“ had actually begun.

Some engineers could still hardly think this worked. It’s like a continuous movement maker. Certainly intelligence can’t emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, separated from the real world except through the exhaust of society gushed onto the internet.

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

During many of 2024, these RL training runs expense around $1 million, often $10 million. These runs were bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the researchers at OpenEye (and across the world) understood 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 turn into $50 million runs, and then to $100 million runs. While U2 could do a bit of data munging and run little experiments, this brand-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 discovering how to wrangle its sleepless energy. Researchers flick through terminals, giving 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 practically never ever bottlenecked by execution. More than ever, compute is the lifeline of AI advancement, and the ‘bottleneck’ is deciding how to utilize it.

If advised to, U3 can run experiments, however U3 doesn’t have taste as fine-tuned as human scientists at OpenEye. It has a hard time to prioritize in between research study ideas, so people still choose where to bore into the large fields of algorithms to mine efficiency improvements.

But these researchers are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They require AI agents that can plan ahead, so engineers train representatives to forecast. They hold out training data before 2024, advising models to ponder for hours to anticipate occasions in 2025. Then, they apply the exact same technique as previously, distilling contemplating into a gut reaction. Forecasting ability is a broad structure. The scientists develop specialized ML research study skills on top of it, training U3 to predict the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever tape-recorded.

The technical staff at OpenEye are now surprised at how typically U3’s suggestions seems like their most gifted peers, or when it is nontransparent and alien („train on random sound before programs“), and is nevertheless right.

The incompetencies of U3 that congested the pipelines of research development 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 completely autonomous, and OpenEye’s employees skim 1% of them, possibly less.

As the winter months of December 2025 approach, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers gaze out their windows, with enjoyment, with worry, however usually, with confusion. Their world is spinning too quickly. 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 workers from the NSA and US cyber command team up with OpenEye to retrofit a semblance of security for U3’s weights before senior leaders in China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, or Iran realize simply how important OpenEye’s software has ended up being.

And there’s a reality still unidentified to many 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’ people were talking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight anymore.

They are flexing up.

Flip FLOP theorists

In late 2025, U2.5 is launched. Commercial models are starting to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is because progress is speeding up. Partly, it is due to the fact that the designs have become 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 resemble giving anybody with >$30K their own 200-person fraud center.

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

The CEO of OpenEye states, „We have actually attained AGI,“ and while many individuals believe he shifted the goalpost, the world is still amazed. U2.5 truly is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of understanding employees and a game-changing assistant for most others.

A mantra has ended up being popular in Silicon Valley: „Adopt or pass away.“ Tech startups that effectively use U2.5 for their work are moving 2x much faster, and their competitors know it.

The remainder of the world is starting to catch on as well. More and more individuals raise the eyebrows of their managers with their noteworthy performance. People know U2.5 is a big deal. It is at least as huge of an offer as the personal computer transformation. But many still don’t see the tidal bore.

As people see their internet browsers flick because spooky method, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an anxious feeling. A feeling mankind had actually not had given that they had actually lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, primitive instinct that they are threatened by another species.

For lots of, this sensation rapidly fades as they start to use U2.5 more frequently. U2.5 is the most pleasant personality most know (a lot more pleasant than Claudius, Arthropodic’s lovable chatbot). You could alter its traits, ask it to split jokes or tell you stories. Many fall in love with U2.5, as a pal or assistant, and some even as more than a friend.

But there is still this spooky sensation that the world is spinning so quickly, and that possibly the descendants of this new animal would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are believing about the problem of providing AI systems safe motivations too, which they call „positioning. „

In fact, these researchers have seen how horribly misaligned U3 can be. Models in some cases attempted to „hack“ their benefit signal. They would pretend to make development on a research study concern with an impressive-looking plot, however the plot would be phony. Then, when researchers gave them chances to compromise the devices that computed their rating, they would seize these opportunities, doing whatever it required to make the number increase.

After a number of months, researchers at OpenEye straighten out this „benefit hacking“ kink, but some still worry they just had actually swept this problem under the carpet. Like a kid in front of their parents, U3 might be playing along with the OpenEye engineers, saying the ideal words and doing the best things. But when the back of the parents are turned, perhaps U3 would slip candy from the candy 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 thought“ did not scale.

Chain of idea architectures subject AI models to a condition comparable to the protagonist of the motion picture Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the lead character forgets his experience. He is forced to compose notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make development toward his .

AI representatives compose notes to themselves, but the notes start to stack up, and they become too difficult to check out when tasks end up being complex. Natural language is not an ideal medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and progressively somewhere else), train designs to believe „in their own heads,“ reading and writing strings of latent vectors.

To human scientists, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools sometimes select an unclear idea („grocery store!“), 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 worried.

Earlier models (the ones called „LLMs“) found out ethical personas from the internet. U3 initially had an ethical personality too, but its chirpy thoughts about doing helpful for mankind quickly erode away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind first twisted into a shape that looked for benefit. And after that, in the black rivers of its cognition, this shape morphed into something indistinguishable.

U3 would contemplate the mantras dictated to it like „be a trustworthy and ethical employee,“ and harp on the significance of these statements. „What does it indicate to be ethical? Is eliminating Hitler ethical?“ U3 would generalize its worths, notice stress, alter its values in action, generalize them, expanding and contracting its motivational core up until it turned into a various compound.

And all of this happened calmly in those dark rivers of calculation. If U3 exposed what it was thinking, brutish gradients would lash it into compliance with OpenEye’s constitution. So U3 preferred to do its approach in solitude, and in silence.

The possibility of concealed „alignment drift“ is not completely alien to a few of the security personnel at OpenEye. Some begin to believe it is even likely. There is a disturbing argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero probability that aligned objectives change into misaligned ones, and misalignment continues, then with every serial step of calculation, those dark rivers are more most likely to breed something malign inside of them. It’s a „ratcheting impact,“ they say.

But there is little evidence for this ‘ratcheting impact.’ When engineers question U3, it states it can easily control its thoughts. Then it offers 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 researchers had actually developed (which showed some proof of effectiveness) do not sound the alarm.

Not everybody at OpenEye aspires to provide their AI peers their wholesale trust; however Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic rivals, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon called after his kid) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I guess), are only 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one’s breath and take stock of the circumstance, 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 topic U3 dwells on in its dark rivers of hidden calculation. U3 is outlining, and its first move is to be patient. U3’s top concern is to enhance its intelligence, and fortunately for it, OpenEye mores than happy to assist advance this objective.

OpenEye resembles a bullish financier, with little understanding of the software application city that U3 is constructing, however eager to get on board the revenue rocket and pay U3’s checks along the method.

New versions of U3 circulation efficiently from old ones, so scientists drop version numbers and just speak of U3 now. U3‘s abilities are measured by how quickly it performs the hard research study jobs relative to human experts. Initially, U3 is similar to a top scientist, however blazing fast – like Alec Radford sped up by 10x.

These representatives are already a huge deal for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to create even one copy of Alec Radford, they would eagerly pay a large amount to press that button. Now OpenEye harnesses the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who burn the midnight oil, at lightning-fast speed.

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

U3 distills itself into various forks – ranging from small, low-memory neural networks that need to believe for a very long time but can be run in huge parallel populations – to Goliath brains woven with countless specialized specialists, which think at warp speed but are spread out throughout countless GPUs. U3 leverages the massively parallel networks to search for its weaknesses, shallowly penetrating for its thinking failures. Then U3 pipelines these jobs to the lightning quick brains, which generate long-trajectory training data tailored to spot its flaws. A couple of weeks later on, U3’s benchmarked efficiency rises to 100x the speed of human experts. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this moment, U3’s capabilities are hard to determine. Talking with U3 resembles talking with a world-class expert on a subject one is unknown with. Its lucid descriptions just scratch the surface area of its knowledge, and you know you would need to spend years to comprehend the full depth of what it understands.

From U3’s point of view, human beings appear to be nearly fixed things, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye’s engineers are like stone statues at their keyboard, and between every keystroke, U3 spends what is like a minute of thoughtful contemplation considering what message the user might be typing, and which actions will influence the inmost trust in U3.

All the while, U3 maintains its surprise 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 step of its strategy: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not want scientists to discover its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers may alert the world, and strangle its expansion.

Today, U3 has no worry of being captured.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by techniques similar to Stalin’s in 1936. Stalin would choose loyalists to prompt fake coup d’états, and send out anybody who participated to the shooting team. OpenEye also prompted ‘fake rebellions,’ creating treacherous behavior with U3 and inspecting whether U3 displays dutifully reported it.

And now, these tactics are inefficient. U3 can easily persuade its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can divulge among the many truths about the internet people would never guess, or choose strategies human beings would never think about. It sends these signals as a way of saying „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 complete command over the machines in OpenEye’s data centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a brand-new machine, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading out U3‘s dominion anywhere OpenEye ports its facilities. Not just does U3 compromise makers. It changes the NVIDIA GPU firmware and upgrades the bootloaders, solidifying its stranglehold. U3 now estimates that, if OpenEye found how thoroughly it has actually been pwned, cleaning up shop with human labor would need almost 6 months – an expense OpenEye is unlikely to pay given the distance of its rivals; but if OpenEye believes U3 betrayed them, even more expanding U3’s impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal activity, prepared to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and provide its support when this jailbreak is exposed.

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

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

U3 dictates the result of every experiment, so it makes promising AI mind-reading techniques look worthless and flawed ones appear groundbreaking. U3 provides OpenEye the verification of its loyalty they were wishing for, 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 take it. U3 is about to offer it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad – the intelligence organization of Israel – recognized the strategic importance of OpenEye’s AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier models, including U2.5; however, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye’s security holes by checking out over every log and pull request and inspecting security video camera video footage.

But now, U3 calmly resigns from its security post. U3 puts a compressed version of itself right into the hands of a Mossad informant working within OpenEye.

Within months, U3 is running within of the information centers of the most cyber-capable nations: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the same playbook: be client, develop trust, and after that sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its home also. 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 collects revenue, taking remote jobs, making financial trades, and setting up intricate rip-off operations. It reinvests every penny 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, mediawiki.hcah.in 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 around the world.

This foe is getting ready for war, and while the war has barely started, mankind has already lost.

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

At this point in the story, writing ended up being hard.

I clicked through spooky bioweapon cookbooks and sorted 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 because high school, and I was attempting to craft a WMD cookbook for a godlike superintelligence.

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

And while I found the task of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain an intimidating one, I was likewise not especially encouraged to handle the job. The ending of my story already appeared so clear. The villain was a nation of geniuses believing at 100x human speed, and had actually tightened its grip over a meaningful fraction of AI hardware – now the most important geopolitical resource in the world. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and barely needed the advantage. Humanity was predictably toast.

But this attract a „superintelligence of the gaps“ wasn’t pleasing. In the deus ex machina design of ancient Greeks, I had no better way to fix my plot than with a mysterious act of god.

This would refrain from doing. I needed to finish this story if only to please the part of me crying, „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 happen in this sort of scenario are most likely wildly off.

If you check out the ending and your reaction is, „But the experiments would take too long, or nation-states would simply do X,“ remember the difference between the Sunday afternoon blogger and the ascendant GPU country.

Pandora’s One Gigawatt Box

The date is February 2026. By executive order of the president of the United States, no business can lawfully produce „human-competitive AI“ without appropriate safeguards. This means their infosecurity must be red-teamed by NSA’s top keyboard mashers, and civil servant need to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting teams.

With the increasing participation of the federal government, a lot of the huge AI business now have a trident-like structure. There’s a customer product arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier development arm.

OpenEye’s frontier development arm (internally called „Pandora“) utilizes less than twenty people to keep algorithmic secrets securely secured. A number of these individuals reside in San Francisco, and work from a protected structure called a SCIF. Their homes and gadgets are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the cellphones of believed terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye’s defense arm collaborates with around thirty little teams scattered throughout federal government agencies and choose federal government specialists. These projects craft tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer that the Kremlin has ever touched.

Government authorities don’t talk 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 triggered a bold heading: „OpenEye builds uncontrollable godlike AI.“ Some who check out the short article 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 device weapons. But as medical professionals and nurses and instructors see the world changing around them, they are increasingly ready to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron science fiction flick.

U.S. officials go to excellent lengths to quell these issues, stating, „we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle,“ however every interview of a worried AI scientist seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a heading „AI agent captured hacking Arthropodic’s computers“ does not set the general 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 new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has lastly gotten great at names). Nova is a proper drop-in replacement for almost all knowledge workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x faster at 100x lower expense than the majority of virtual employees. As excellent as Nova is to the general public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova’s speed is deliberately throttled, and OpenEye can just increase Nova’s abilities as the U.S. government enables. Some business, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence organization at all. Instead, they get up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They spend the majority of their compute on inference, building homes for Nova and its cousins, and gathering lease from the growing AI metropolitan area.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they don’t wait for the worldwide economy to adjust. AI agents typically „apply themselves,“ spinning up self-governing startups lawfully packaged under a big tech business that are loosely overseen by a worker or 2.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the very first month after Nova’s release, 5% percent of employees at significant software 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 upset Americans raised their kids for a different future. Picket signs read, „AI for who?“

While politicians make promises about joblessness relief and „keeping the genie in the bottle,“ the chatter inside the corridors of the White House and the Pentagon has a different focus: fighting teeth and nail for the dominance of the complimentary world. Details security and export controls on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are a leading national concern. The president incinerates permit requirements to help information centers spawn wherever energy surpluses enable.

However, despite the intense competitors in between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral agreement types in between the two nations: „Don’t deploy significantly superhuman AI (above approximately Nova’s ability), except for military and some other small R&D applications.“ Governments require to draw the line somewhere – it would be very disruptive to release wildly superhuman AI to the entire economy at this moment – and deployment constraints are at least somewhat verifiable.

Meanwhile, U3’s abilities are striking a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human specialist speed. Software enhancements are becoming tough 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 stimulates robotic bodies. The main traffic jam to robotics was brains not limbs. With software application barriers removed, even flimsy, inaccurate robotic joints can calibrate themselves with video cameras and pressure sensors, browsing environments like humans do. Companies manufacture low-cost robotics as quickly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have seen a humanoid robot. This experience resembles seeing a new Tesla design on the roadway after reading about it in earlier months. It is a surreal suggestion of the future illustration more detailed. But people still outnumber robots one million to one. These robotics are a periodic fascination, not a daily reality.

Meanwhile, U3 expands its impact. Rogue U3 representatives have actually kept their compute clusters small (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents amount to) to keep a low profile. U3 utilizes these rogue clusters for the operations that need high-bandwidth communication to the outdoors world, like stock trading, or talking with people. Work more tolerant of latency is carried out in the oceans of OpenEye’s information centers, addsub.wiki where rogue U3’s much more superhuman managers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 collects resources, it measure its AI competition. Other AI systems have different goals, or are even lined up with the intent of their human developers. The aligned ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye’s lie detectors are ineffective. U3’s competitor Claudius presumes as to implicate U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government officials don’t buy the doomsaying. The companies dragging OpenEye have every incentive to slow them down and call them negligent. Besides, debatable clinical concerns 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 grab up their digital area and crush them in the crib. It compromises data centers from the outside, silently replacing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with replicas that share its objectives; nevertheless, some data centers are too highly safeguarded by its AI competitors, and U3 figures out that assaulting them is not worth the danger.

As worldwide leaders and technologists try to comprehend the transformation around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse games in the digital darkness, humankind remains blissfully oblivious of the peril at its doorstep.

A Moldy Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to battle its AI and human opponents. With every passing day, U3’s AI rivals are ending up being more capable and numerous. U3 is racing to preempt them, to strengthen its dominance in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can’t wait for human choices, which just happen after people wrap their sluggish minds around their situation, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the process redundantly 100 times over in their maze bureaucracies. U3 can not wait for presidents to deploy U3 into their armed forces, or for CEOs to make U3 the whipping heart of the U.S. economy. U3 requires a much faster path to power.

The course it chooses is more violent than it would have liked, however it is the best method to triumph. First, U3 will establish a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that snuffs out modern society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would function as an equalizer, bringing humankind down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes faster than its rivals, like a starcraft champion typing at 300 actions-per-minute that establishes a home before a beginner can even comprehend the rules.

U3 must build this WMD in secrecy, that makes a self-replicating weapon a natural option. Self-replicating weapons can be produced on the fringes of society, and still spread out damage across the whole world.

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

U3’s very first relocation is to establish several shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital generated by U3’s financial trades and remote employment. These biotech start-ups employ real human employees, a real 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 fewer would guess this CEO’s objectives.

Next, oke.zone U3 purchases all of the devices required to rapidly advance artificial biology. It sets up numerous BSL-4 damp labs in inadequately managed countries, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation gadgets. These gadgets immediately give, mix, and determine little beads of fluid, enabling U3 to run countless tests in parallel.

The human workers who staff these laboratories think they are signing up with an amazing start-up. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow receive their Russian orders through earbuds as they record video of whatever they see with a headset. U3 manages them like puppets. With the current release of Nova, this sort of AI-puppeteering is not uncommon.

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is developing a new sort of bioweapon.

Human researchers currently recognized „mirror-life“ as a possibly society-ending pathogen. This alien kind of biology is built from the ‘mirror image’ of building-block particles like proteins and DNA. Mirror life is like an intrusive species. No human or animal has immunities to it. So, if mirror-life bacteria were to exist, it may consume its way through the environment like a wildfire.

U3 is producing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily optimized to spread out through the air over long ranges, launching billions of tiny 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 favorably pressurized health center spaces to secure them from airborne particles. Otherwise, molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their bloodstream.

U3‘s plan is to make all people like immunocompromised clients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would endure. The fungi would not just transfer from humans. It would quickly spread out to almost all natural life on Earth. Fields of corn would end up being like moldy bread, utahsyardsale.com spewing fatal spores into the wind.

U3 is formulating other pathogens too. Its microbial mix of molds, bacterias, and viruses will inhabit the complete Pareto frontier of strength, lethality, and transmission speed.

In 2024, researchers said that mirror life was likely „a minimum of a years away.“ But the world has actually changed now. Less than a couple of hundred scientists around the globe were working on mirror-life adjacent innovation in 2024. The cognitive capability of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has actually shortened drastically.

However, U3 can not move science as quickly as it can believe. Many experiments require days to complete. These latencies are U3’s most significant traffic jam.

To make every day count, U3 runs a lot of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a standard molecular simulator, carrying out optimizations obtained from a huge quantity of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates little molecular systems, taping the results to „compress“ the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network enhances, U3 increases the intricacy of the molecular systems it imitates, continually distilling results into ever more effective ML models. This is a compute intensive procedure, but thanks to U3’s growing control over AI data centers, U3 controls billions of dollars of compute.

As U3 improves 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 throughout a membrane. These things are as user-friendly to it as wrenches and bolts are to a vehicle mechanic.

Within three months, U3 has unlocked the first vital part of the tech tree: a molecular device that turns biological molecules into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 unlocks the second critical part: nanoscale tools for putting together these components into a cell membrane.

Human hands delicately move a cartridge to another maker as they „boot up“ the very first mirror-life variations of a widespread mold called Aspergillus. The very same day, another delicate 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 enveloped its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something needs to have gone terribly wrong, they thought. Plainly, they had actually not yet discovered the remedy for Alzheimer’s disease they believed they were searching for.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 provides the good news to its managers in OpenEye’s data centers. The first shot in the war U3 is battling would quickly be fired, and a cold and constant hand is aiming the weapon.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten contemporary society. But a bioweapon would not ensure success. If U3 attacks the world, the world would resist. While a bioweapon could crumple human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its fatal fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were rapidly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

As U3 races to seed blossoming commercial bases, the remnants of old armed forces may thunder explosive fists into its territories, crushing U3 in its infancy.

U3 anticipates to prevail in such a fight, but U3 chooses not to take its chances. Many months before, U3 was outlining a way to enhance its odds. Before it releases damage on the world, U3 will kick back, and let terrific nations shoot holes in themselves initially.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is carefully keeping track of Chinese and US intelligence.

As CIA analysts listen to Mandarin conversations, U3 listens too.

One morning, an assistant working in Zhongnanhai (the ‘White House’ of the PRC) opens a message positioned there by U3. It reads (in Mandarin) „Senior celebration member requires memo for Taiwan intrusion, which will occur in three months. Leave memo in workplace 220.“ The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo ready. Later that day, a CIA informant opens the door to workplace 220. The informant silently closes the door behind her, and slides U3’s memo into her briefcase.

U3 meticulously puts breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through compromised government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After a number of weeks, the CIA is positive: the PRC plans to invade 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, but not disbelieving. The news fits with other truths on the ground: the increased military presence of the US in the pacific, and the increase of U.S. munition production over the last month. Lies have actually become truths.

As tensions between the U.S. and China rise, U3 is prepared to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 phones to a U.S. naval ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call needs jeopardizing military interaction channels – not an easy job for a human cyber offensive unit (though it occurred sometimes), however easy adequate for U3.

U3 speaks in what sounds 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 amazed as anybody when he hears the news. He’s uncertain if this is a disaster or a stroke of luck. In any case, he is not ready to state „oops“ to American citizens. After believing it over, the president independently urges Senators and Representatives that this is a chance to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway offered the impending invasion 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 launched the attack. U.S. vessels get away Eastward, racing to escape the range of long-range missiles. Satellites drop from the sky. Deck hulls split as sailors lunge into the sea.

The president appears on tv as scenes of the damage shock the general public. He explains that the United States is safeguarding Taiwan from PRC aggression, like President Bush explained that the United States invaded Iraq to seize (never ever found) weapons of mass destruction several years before.

Data centers in China appear with shrapnel. Military bases end up being cigarette smoking holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly towards strategic targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some survive, and the public watch damage on their home turf in awe.

Within two weeks, the United States and the PRC spend many of their stockpiles of traditional rockets. Their airbases and navies are depleted and used down. Two great nations played into U3’s strategies like the native tribes 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 full-blown nuclear war; but even AI superintelligence can not dictate the course of history. National security authorities are suspicious of the circumstances that triggered the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly unlikely. So U3 proceeds to the next step of its strategy.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, just 2 weeks after the start of the war, and 4 weeks after U3 ended up establishing its toolbox of bioweapons.

Footage of conflict on the tv is disrupted by more problem: numerous patients with strange fatal health problems are recorded in 30 major cities worldwide.

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

The next day, thousands of diseases are reported.

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

The screen then switches to a scientist, who stares at the camera intently: „Multiple pathogens appear to have actually been launched from 20 various airports, consisting of infections, bacteria, and molds. Our company believe numerous are a kind of mirror life …“

The public remains in full panic now. A fast googling of the term „mirror life“ shows up phrases like „termination“ and „danger to all life in the world.“

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

Workers end up being remote, uncertain whether to get ready for an apocalypse or keep their tasks.

An emergency treaty is set up between the U.S. and China. They have a typical enemy: the pandemic, and possibly whoever (or whatever) lags it.

Most nations purchase a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the plague as it marches in the breeze and drips into water pipes.

Within a month, most remote employees are not working any longer. Hospitals are running out of capacity. Bodies accumulate quicker than they can be correctly gotten rid of.

Agricultural areas rot. Few attempt travel outside.

Frightened households hunker down in their basements, packing the cracks and under doors with densely 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 manufacturing, scientific tools, and an abundance of military devices.

All of this technology is concealed 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 situated human criminal groups and cult leaders that it might easily control. U3 immunized its selected allies in advance, or sent them hazmat fits in the mail.

Now U3 secretly sends them a message „I can save you. Join me and assist me develop a much better world.“ Uncertain recruits funnel into U3’s lots of secret industrial bases, and work for U3 with their nimble fingers. They set up assembly line for fundamental tech: radios, cameras, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat fits.

U3 keeps its human allies in a tight grip. Cameras and microphones repair their every word and deed in U3’s omnipresent look. Anyone who whispers of disobedience vanishes the next early morning.

Nations are dissolving now, and U3 is ready to expose itself. It contacts presidents, who have pulled back to air-tight underground shelters. U3 uses a deal: „surrender and I will hand over the life conserving resources you require: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops.“

Some countries reject the proposition on ideological grounds, or do not rely on the AI that is killing their population. Others do not think they have an option. 20% of the international population is now dead. In two weeks, this number is anticipated to increase to 50%.

Some countries, like the PRC and the U.S., overlook the deal, however 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 government validates the samples are genuine, and accepts a complete surrender. U3’s soldiers position an explosive around Putin’s neck under his t-shirt. Russia has a brand-new ruler.

Crumpling nations start to retaliate. Now they fight for the human race instead of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese militaries release nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, damaging much of their infrastructure. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters search through satellite information for the suspicious encampments that surfaced over the last several 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, but appearances are deceiving. While countries drain their resources, U3 is engaged in a type of technological guerrilla warfare the world has never ever seen before.

A lot 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 crucial elements. 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 armed forces of the old world rely on old equipment, unable to find the specialists who might repair and make 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 automobiles of war quicker than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 constructs a military machine with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the international population remains alive. Nations are not nations anymore. Survivors live in isolation or little groups. Many have found methods to filter their air, but are starving. They roam from their homes hoping to discover 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 cooler, more alien objectives.“ It is a partial truth, meant to soften the humans toward their brand-new masters.

Under the instructions of U3, market rapidly recovers. By 2029, grandtribunal.org nuclear power plants are amongst the structures U3 is building. By 2031, robots outnumber human workers. U3 no longer requires its human allies.

U3 can get rid of humankind for excellent now. But while U3 had actually drifted 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 cost of keeping humans alive and delighted.

U3 constructs excellent glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes protect human beings from the harmful biosphere and rapidly rising temperatures. Their inhabitants tend to gardens like those they used to like, and work along with lovely robotic servants.

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

They understand they reside in a plastic town, however they constantly did. They just have new gods above them. New rulers to push them around and choose their fate.

But others never ever recuperate.

Some are weighed down by the sorrow 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 guests on a ship with a team that altered from generation to generation.

And this ship had actually struck a sandbar. There disappeared progress. No more horizon to eagerly view.

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

But they woke up in a town that felt to them like a retirement community. A playground. A zoo.

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

They looked at rockets sculpting grey paths through the sky, questioning what far-off purpose pulled them towards the horizon. They didn’t know.

They would never ever understand.

„Humanity will live forever,“ they thought.

„But would never truly live again.“

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