This is an all-in-one crosspost of a scenario I originally published in three parts on my blog (No Set Gauge). Links to the originals:

• A History of the Future, 2025-2027
• A History of the Future, 2027-2030
• A History of the Future, 2030-2040

Thanks to Luke Drago, Duncan McClements, and Theo Horsley for comments on all three parts.



2025-2027

Below is part 1 of an extended scenario describing how the future might go if current trends in AI continue. The scenario is deliberately extremely specific: it's definite rather than indefinite, and makes concrete guesses instead of settling for banal generalities or abstract descriptions of trends.

Open Sky. (Zdislaw Beksinsksi) The return of reinforcement learning

From 2019 to 2023, the main driver of AI was using more compute and data for pretraining. This was combined with some important "unhobblings":

• Post-training (supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) 2025-2027

(01:04) The return of reinforcement learning

(10:52) Codegen, Big Tech, and the internet

(21:07) Business strategy in 2025 and 2026

(27:23) Maths and the hard sciences

(33:59) Societal response

(37:18) Alignment research and AI-run orgs

(44:49) Government wakeup

(51:42) 2027-2030

(51:53) The AGI frog is getting boiled

(01:02:18) The bitter law of business

(01:06:52) The early days of the robot race

(01:10:12) The digital wonderland, social movements, and the AI cults

(01:24:09) AGI politics and the chip supply chain

(01:33:04) 2030-2040

(01:33:15) The end of white-collar work and the new job scene

(01:47:47) Lab strategy amid superintelligence and robotics

(01:56:28) Towards the automated robot economy

(02:15:49) The human condition in the 2030s

(02:17:26) 2040+

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First published:
February 17th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCnycGceT4HyDKDzK/a-history-of-the-future-2025-2040

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article: