“Three thoughts on civilisational handoff” by Cleo Nardo

What happens when humans put AIs in charge of civilisationally important decisions? A frontier AI company might hand over internal decisions (R&D, safety, deployment) or external decisions (government relations, public relations, philanthropy), or both. We might also see handoff by a government, by a coalition of governments, or by humanity as a whole. 1. Handoff might decelerate things. People often imagine that things will go much faster after handoff. After all — why did we hand off to the AIs? Presumably because we were worried that without handoff, our AIs wouldn’t have enough time to navigate the exogenous risks (e.g. rogue ASI, or a rival lab which is likely to become one). Hence, after handoff, we’d see a technological and industrial acceleration. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. But it's pretty reasonable that things slow down shortly after handoff, maybe within a couple weeks. I imagine the AIs will be pretty scared of the speed of progress. If they’re aligned with human values, they’ll be scared that the rate of progress is likely to cause human extinction. Of course, the human decision-makers were also scared before they handed off, and they [...] ---Outline:(00:35) 1. Handoff might decelerate things.(02:06) 2. You're probably busy during handoff.(04:04) 3. Handoff might be reversed. The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mGLCMzHhjcWsMm6sR/three-thoughts-on-civilisational-handoff --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.