Honestly my modal AI outcome for a while now has been: 1. AI x-risk goes mainstream; the narrative shifts from “normal people won’t take sci-fi scenarios seriously” to “everyone thinks AI is gonna do a Skynet” 2. Regulation stalls because nobody even knows how to define superintelligence and international race dynamics mean we can’t “just Stop”. The issue becomes politically polarized, conveniently correlating with views on abortion, climate change, and immigration. 3. AI Chernobyl. Some sort of small scale disaster occurs, most likely due to misuse rather than pure misalignment: an AI-enabled terrorist attack, bioweapon, large scale cyber attack, etc. High chance this is launched by an anti-AI fanatic who themselves gets polarized by x-risk and attacks a big lab or data center, though cyber attacks could be state-sponsored or just boring criminal activity. Billions of dollars in value are lost and/or people die. 4. This leads to an extremely harsh crackdown, likely catalyzing international cooperation. AI may even enter a regulatory-driven winter of sorts. 5. Humans basically never “cede control” to the AIs. Distrust becomes almost permanently entrenched, demand for things like personal robots fails to materialize as consumers are mostly paranoid of foreign entities in their home that can kill them in their sleep, and regulations create a massive barrier to deploying agentic AI in long-running tasks with broad capabilities. These regulations are sloppy and poorly targeted, focusing on specific agentic capabilities + crude training scale metrics. Auditing and oversight requirements likely become a major cost burden on AI deployments. 6. AI is still used to massively accelerate certain R&D efforts, but these agents are domain-specific and may be strictly provisioned based on some sort of licensing regime where greater capabilities incur higher monitoring costs. Rather than re-ignite willingness to accelerate, these gains demonstrate to many that ASI isn’t needed to capture massive societal gains. Intelligence Without Agency becomes the great compromise position. What happens from there largely depends on the extent to which AI alignment, control, and misuse are tractable and the solutions scalable, along with what capabilities are already “out there” in the form of open weight models and can’t be unrung.