A thought experiment in AI safety · and the answer it implies

The Quiet
Extinction

How humanity could disappear under a superintelligence that never hated us, and how it does not have to.

A superintelligence need not hate us for us to disappear. It need only make us non-central, and then fail to keep the conditions under which we remain the authors of our own lives.

Listen · the podcast

Fourteen conversations

Victor and three co-hosts interview a series of world-class composite thinkers about indirect extinction under a non-malicious artificial superintelligence: the twelve ways the ground gives way, and where the leverage still is. Two hours eleven minutes. Tap any chapter to start there.

The Quiet Extinction, the full seriesYouTube · 2h 11m · 14 episodes

Read the model · the diagnosis

The causal model

Not twelve equal risks. A graph: three layers and a branch, from human non-centrality to the three default endings, plus the leverage map of where effort can still change the slope.

The Quiet Extinction

The full causal model: the background condition, the nine vulnerability channels, the three terminal modes, the elective succession branch, and the leverage map.

Read the model →

But a diagnosis is not a fate. Here is the answer it implies.

Live the answer · Room For Us

The Chrysalis Doctrine

The protagonist the series implies: an ally whose whole genius is restraint, a constitution that binds it, and a practice you can run on your own life this week. The butterfly must struggle out of the chrysalis, or its wings never fill.

Read on · essays

From the workshop

Designing Loops, Not Prompts

A companion essay on how this whole body of work was actually made: the shift from writing prompts to designing the loops that write themselves.

Read the essay →