Episode #20
They Wrote the Good Ending for AI. We Still Lose Control.
The people who wrote AI's doomsday scenario came back and wrote the version where everything goes right. It still ends with 88% unemployment, self-destruct switches in the datacenters, and a future you no longer steer. This is The Good Ending. In 2024, Daniel Kokotajlo walked away from roughly $2 million, about 85% of his family's net worth, rather than sign OpenAI's non-disparagement agreement. Then he and his team at the AI Futures Project wrote AI 2027, a month-by-month forecast so specific that 39 members of Congress and the "godfather of AI," Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, took it seriously. Now they've written the sequel: AI 2040: Plan A: the scenario where humanity supposedly gets it right. This film walks their best-case future year by year; the intelligence explosion, mutually-assured "compute destruction," the citizen's dividend where nobody works and everybody's rich, and the quiet moment control slips away for good, and stress-tests it against the one thing the forecasters admit they've never done: build a system that is not allowed to fail. FEATURING DR. NEIL SIEGEL This film features an original interview with Dr. Neil Siegel, recipient of the 2023 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, former Sector Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Northrop Grumman, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Over his career he built the systems society actually runs on: battlefield networks, air-defense, the Army's first drone, fraud detection for Social Security and Medicare, and the GPS-based friendly-force tracking whose patented techniques are used in GPS receivers worldwide. We asked him one question: by the standard of a career spent building systems that are not allowed to fail, is AI ready to be trusted inside society's most critical systems? His answer is the spine of this film. SOURCES & FURTHER READING - AI 2027 — https://ai-2027.com - AI 2040: Plan A — https://ai-2040.com (AI Futures Project: https://ai-futures.org) - Daniel Kokotajlo & the OpenAI equity story (Vox) — https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam-altman-documents-employees - Dr. Neil Siegel (USC Viterbi) — https://viterbi.usc.edu/directory/faculty/Siegel/Neil - National Medal of Technology & Innovation — https://nationalmedals.org/laureate/neil-siegel/ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Disclaimer: AI 2040: Plan A is a scenario — a forecast, not a prophecy. This film analyzes and dramatizes it; interview remarks are Dr. Siegel's own. Watch On YouTube: ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/@AgentBlackveil Follow On Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/agentblackveil Follow On Facebook ➡️ https://www.facebook.com/agentblackveil Follow On TikTok ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@agentblackveil
