“Some Quick Thoughts AI 2027” by Tomás B.

My biggest problem with AI 2027 is I don't think it is science-fictional enough. That is, towards the end of the scenario seems optimized for respectability over accuracy - here I refer to the "special economic zones" and "robot economy" parts. Their industrial explosion assumes humanoid robots will be building robot factories to build more humanoid robotics factories. This is a respectable assumption and one that is fun to model, but seems likely false to me. I applaud Kokotajlo and his team for making it more legible that AI corps will be vertically integrating to the point they can manufacture their own customers. But they almost entirely elide that there are extreme incentives to miniaturize all the way to the physical limits of miniaturization, that there is immense power in making the unit of self-replication as small as possible, and that the construction of a self-replicator dependent only on environmental inputs (rather than inputs from the human economy) is likely to be something of a discontinuity. Even if we make the fashionable choice of pretending synthetic biology and nanotechnology won't be the first path to sovereign infrastructure, the unit of replication is unlikely to be a conventional [...] --- First published: July 14th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lc8v92pGPtjF3gsCv/some-quick-thoughts-ai-2027 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.