“Amusing, isn’t it?” 

Julien turns and sees Liu Zihan approaching him. “The way we mythologize them.” The translation of her words vibrates through his Rosetta wristband. Behind them, their fellow diplomats leave the conference room, still in conversation.

Julien Grouès nods. He knows, as Zihan does, that Xuanwu and Athene aren’t the gods they’re named after. They’re far stranger and more interesting. He and Zihan have studied these artificial minds longer than anyone, yet he’s still never fully grasped the whole.

Zihan looks beautiful at forty-six. She’s adopted the 3D-printed hair accessories fashionable in China, curling golden vines.  

“I didn’t think we’d make it to today,” he confesses. “It’s surreal, seeing people building and creating everywhere. I was certain there’d be another Flash War.”

“Me, too,” she says. “Despite our efforts.”

“Really? You were so unshakable on Flash Day.”

“I was terrified,” she says. “I grew up believing there would be a war in my lifetime. When I heard the reports of your ships moving toward Ningbo, I thought: here it is.”

He’s never heard her speak of this. “They told me you were one of the first to suggest AI error.”

She nods. “I forced myself to stay calm. It didn’t add up. A massed carrier strike, with your cruisers changing course to join it? It was faster than anything we’d predicted before. There would‘ve been political foreshocks. Something else had to be at play.”

“I admire you,” he says. “I was one of the fools at the generals’ side, telling them to ask the American president to commit more forces. You saw through the illusion.”

She shakes her head. “I would not have been heard if not for others. I was still a fairly junior programmer for the Province Renewal, not expected to engage with politics.”

She’s being modest. Principal engineer for the AI meant to revitalize Ningbo was no small role. It was these localized projects that sent China’s economy skyrocketing in the 2020s, later convincing America and Europe to adopt similar reforms of their own. 

Her voice changes, and the translator picks up on it. “If I had seen it faster, I might have prevented deaths.”

Two ships, and all the people aboard them. When the missiles began to fly.

“You did,” he says. “We shut down our broken defense clusters that afternoon. No one failed to see it by then.”

They’re walking together now, following the circuit of the Project’s headquarters. The walls display intricate interlocking patterns of birds and flora.

Zihan nods. “Yet I could not have convinced all the nations involved to coordinate in that atmosphere of fear.”

He remembers his anger at himself. “We had to do something,” he says. “It was like we’d been sleepwalking, and woken to find ourselves on a cliff. We couldn’t pretend we were separate nations anymore. We had to reshape AI into something we could trust.”

“Alignment,” she agrees. “Like the Apollo project.  Actually, our goal seemed even more distant than the moon.  But Julien, your group brought forth the agreements we needed.” 

The Delhi Accords. So often referred to in discussions now.

“We’ve forgotten how controversial they were,” he says. “State control of chip manufacturing to prevent outside actors from causing their own crisis. Limits on inequality and economic growth…” So that the world wouldn’t change faster than the human ability to understand it.

“And access control,” she finishes, “APIs for the safe use of AI capabilities.  Keeping the technology itself centralized while we made it safe.”

He nods. No words feel adequate. How do you describe a life’s work? Five years as a diplomat, then the next fifteen studying code to prevent the end of humanity?  

“I still can’t believe it,” he admits. “I never thought our efforts would bear so much fruit.”

“We had a very good team,” she says, smiling. “I was very glad when they introduced me to you.”

He smiles. He’s never had her skill with AI. But they’ve grown together with time. The diplomat who wanted to set better policy learning to be a programmer. The programmer who’d been an influential voice during the crisis learning to play politics.

Their footsteps slow to a stop as they step out on a balcony overlooking the Delhi skyline.  Rohini Tower blooms like a great tree, intricate rose-gold extensions atop a white base.

“It’s all going to change again,” Zihan says. Very quiet.

Julien listens. 

“Athene, Xuanwu, Mimir—they’ve come so far. I think you are right that we’re only a few years away from implementation.”

These superintelligent AIs are civilization’s flagship project. People speculate about the details. He and Zihan don’t have to.

“Are you nervous?”

“Yes. Who wouldn’t be?” She lets out a sigh. “I think we’ve done what we can. I don’t know any project in human history that’s received more time and attention from the best scholars. But there’s uncertainty.”

He nods, and she continues. “We don’t know what the coming world will look like any more than people before the Flash War knew about this one.”

Julien watches the orange sun disappear behind the skyline. “Maybe this will all be wiped out in the next era.  Maybe people will build spaceports and colonize the galaxy.  Or merge their minds with computers.  Or maybe everything will still be here, but transformed in some way I couldn’t imagine.”

“I wonder too,” she says. “But luckily, we don’t have to plan humanity’s ultimate destiny.  We just have to do our best, to give the next generation enough wisdom and power to choose for themselves.”

The first stars start twinkling in the evening sky.

“Julien?”

“Yes?” 

Her smile is like shining moonlight. “In Shahdara, there’s a garden where they perform dances based on the Hindu epics. I hear they have heroes on flying chariots, and huge animatronic titans. Would you like to see that with me?”

Julien smiles. “I’d like that very much.”

Lights come on as night begins.

Before them, the city glows with every color of light.

A. New institutions have been as impactful over recent decades as near-human-level AI technology. Together, these trends have had a multiplicative effect — AI-assisted research makes evaluating potential reforms easier, and reforms enable society to more flexibly roll out new technologies and gracefully accommodate changes. Futarchy has been transformative for national governments; on the local scale, “affinity cities” and quadratic funding have been notable trends.

In the 2030s, the increasing fidelity of VR allows productive remote working even across international and language boundaries. Freed from needing to live where they work, young people choose places that cater to unique interests. Small towns seeking growth and investment advertise themselves as open to newcomers; communities (religious beliefs, hobbies like surfing, subcultures like heavy-metal fans, etc) select the most suitable town and use assurance contracts to subsidize a critical mass of early-adopters to move and create the new hub. This has turned previously indistinct towns to a flourishing cultural network.

Meanwhile, Quadratic Funding (like a hybrid of local budget and donation-matching system, usually funded by land value taxes) helps support community institutions like libraries, parks, and small businesses by rewarding small-dollar donations made by citizens.

The most radical expression of institutional experimentation can be found in the constellation of “charter cities” sprinkled across the world, predominantly in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. While affinity cities experiment with culture and lifestyle, cities like Prospera Honduras have attained partial legal sovereignty, giving them the ability to experiment with innovative regulatory systems much like china’s provinces.

A. Improved governance technology has helped societies to better navigate the “bulldozer vs vetocracy” axis of community decision-making processes. Using advanced coordination mechanisms like assurance contracts, and clever systems (like Glen Weyl’s “SALSA” proposal) for pricing externalities and public goods, it’s become easier for societies to flexibly make net-positive changes and fairly compensate anyone affected by downsides. This improved governance tech has made it easier to build lots of new infrastructure while minimizing disruption. Included in that new infrastructure is a LOT of new clean power.

Solar, geothermal, and fusion power provide most of humanity’s energy, and they do so at low prices thanks to scientific advances and economies of scale. Abundant energy enables all kinds of transformative conveniences:

• Cheap desalinization changes the map, allowing farming and habitation of previously desolate desert areas. Whole downtown areas of desert cities can be covered with shade canopies and air-conditioned with power from nearby solar farms.
• Carbon dioxide can be captured directly from the air at scale, making climate change a thing of the past.
• Freed from the pressing need to economize on fuel, vehicles like airplanes, container ships, and self-driving cars can simply travel at higher speeds, getting people and goods to their destinations faster.
• Indoor farming using artificial light becomes cheaper; instead of shipping fruit from the opposite hemisphere, people can enjoy local, fresh fruit year-round.

A. After the world woke up to the dangers of powerful misaligned AI in 2038, nations realized that humanity is bound together by the pressing goal of averting extinction. Even if things go well, the far-future will be so strange and wonderful that the political concept of geopolitical “winners” and “losers” is impossible to apply.

This situation, like a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, motivated the superpowers to cooperate with 2040 Delhi Accords. Key provisions:

• Nationalizing and merging top labs to create the Alignment Project.
• Multi-pronged control of the “AI supply chain” (inspired by uranium & ICBM controls) to enforce nonproliferation of powerful AI — nationalizing semiconductor factories and supercomputer clusters, banning dangerous research, etc.
• Securing potential attack vectors like nuclear command systems and viral synthesis technology.
• API access and approval systems so people can still develop new applications & benefit from prosaic AI.
• Respect for rights, plus caps on inequality and the pace of economic growth, to ensure equity and avoid geopolitical competition.

Although the Accords are an inspiring achievement, they are also provisional by design: they exist to help humanity solve the challenge of developing safe superintelligent machines. The Alignment Project takes a multilayered approach — multiple research teams pursue different strategies and red-team each other, layering many alignment strategies (myopic oracle wrappers, adversarial AI pairs, human-values-trained reward functions, etc). With luck, these enable a “limited” superintelligence not far above human abilities, as a tool for further research to help humanity safely take the next step.

A. The everyday experience of interacting with computers has changed dramatically. It is physically different: rather than looking at phones or sitting at workstations, people often walk around and use their hands to interact with a virtual view through AR glasses. But more importantly, AI-infused tools have made creating and designing things much more accessible.

People can create entire software applications, automate their own workflows, edit videos, or create whole videogame worlds, just by talking with their computer: AI tools will interpret the speaker’s commands and present different proposed solutions for the user to choose between. Creating software, art — even industrial components! — becomes an iterative process as accessible as having a conversation. Naturally this is hugely beneficial for the economy; it also changes how people spend their free time, as described in the next question.

AI’s ability to create uniquely tailored experiences for each user has also transformed education. AI tutors can easily queue up high-quality videos, readings, quizzes, exercises, and videogame-like simulations, even on niche subjects. These sequences, customized for your exact needs, can be optimally spaced to help you learn and keep you interested. Naturally, schools are huge users of this technology, alternating AI study sessions with in-person socializing.

AI tutoring abilities also make it much easier to pick up new skills or get into a new hobby. Just as internet search engines allowed people to instantly look up simple questions, AI has made it easier for anyone to build a deep understanding of complex topics.

A. In 2045, the technical definition of life expectancy is less relevant than today. The world is changing rapidly; “life expectancy” is expected to greatly increase when the superintelligent AIs being designed and tested finally get rolled out for early medical research applications. But if technology was frozen in place forever at 2045 levels, the “life expectancy” of the wealthiest 1% would be 116, and the life expectancy of the poorest 20% would be 89.

Life expectancy gains have come from several sources:

• Cleaner air and other public-health benefits of a prosperous, well-governed world.
• Abundant healthy food, and improvements to some foods (like swapping excessive fructose for allulose and developing plant-based meats).
• AI has driven the development of advanced biotech, especially in genetics. Early-detection multi-cancer blood tests are now universal, and cancer can be powerfully targeted by personalized gene therapies. Formerly incurable genetic diseases can be reversed using CRISPR-derived techniques. Small-molecule drug discovery has led to effective treatments for most types of Alzheimer’s and powerful interventions to reduce obesity.
• The biggest gains have come from medicines which target aging itself, either by slowing the rate at which age-related damage accrues or by partially restoring youthful function to specific tissue types. Fourth-generation senolytic drugs clear inflammatory damage; gene therapies targeting transposons reduce the accumulation of DNA damage; drugs designed to break accumulated cellular cross-links reduce vascular stiffening to improve heart health; another treatment can restore a 75-year-old’s thymic & immune system function to the level of a 60-year-old.

A. Article #21 promises the right to participate in government “directly or through freely chosen representatives”, by voting in “periodic and genuine elections”. Of course Americans already enjoyed this democratic right in 2022; but in 2045 it finds a much fuller expression.

In addition to voting for representatives in the usual way, Americans can:

• Delegate their voting power via “liquid democracy” to a trusted friend or expert.
• Trade on prediction markets, using AI research tools to evaluate the likely impacts of a proposed law.
• Join community projects to design new laws and submit them to be judged, and maybe passed, on the markets.
• Provide feedback about what they need and how a new law would affect them.
• Make small donations to help direct their local community’s quadratic matching funds to beneficial causes, like improvements to a local park or support for a theater group.

This is a lot of civic participation! But processes are convenient and easy (like online/mobile voting). Importantly, when government becomes more capable and responsive, it becomes more motivating and worthwhile for people to participate, especially with all the important decisions being made as the world changes rapidly.

Futarchy certainly has a technocratic aspect to it, doubly so when policy evaluation is aided by powerful AI tools. But despite this, people in 2045 (in the US and elsewhere) have a much stronger experience of voice and representation in decisionmaking than the framers of the UN declaration imagined.

Several rights promised by the Declaration (such as #23, #24, and #25) require both freedom AND prosperity. The incredible abundance created by the AI and governance booms, and the Delhi Accords’ agreement to limit inequality, means that for the first time in history, high pay, quality housing, and advanced medical care are the standard living conditions of most humans, including in the former “third world”.

Other Articles focus on enabling everyone to achieve their full potential. #19 says the ability to “receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” is essential to free speech. #26 says of education, “Technical and professional education shall be made generally available… Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights.” These areas have benefited from the transformative effect of AI on education described earlier.

Two technically worse-respected rights in many countries are #12 and #17, promising freedom from “arbitrary interference with privacy, family, or home” and strict property rights. The world of 2045 has strong rule of law, but also relies on many “nudges” (like subsidies/taxes on different foods to promote healthy eating) to promote helpful behavior without resorting to bans & mandates. This strikes an efficient balance between public interest and private freedom, but some might consider the elaborate carrot-and-stick schemes an undue “interference” in personal life, and things like land value tax or SALSA to be an imposition on property rights.

A. The world of 2045 is rich enough that people don’t have to work for a living — but it’s also one of the most exciting times in history, running a preposterously hot economy as the world is transformed by new technologies and new ways of organizing communities, so there’s a lot to do!

As a consequence, careers and hobbies exist on an unusual spectrum. On one end, people who want to be ambitious and help change the world can make their fortune by doing the all the pressing stuff that the world needs, like architecting new cities or designing next-generation fusion power plants.

With so much physical transformation unleashed, the world is heavily bottlenecked on logistics / commodities / construction. Teams of expert construction workers are literally flown around the world on private jets, using seamless translation to get up to speed with local planners and getting to work on what needs to be built using virtual-reality overlays of a construction site.

Most people don’t want to hustle that much, and 2045’s abundance means that increasing portions of the economy are devoted to just socializing and doing/creating fun stuff. Rather than tedious, now-automated jobs like “waiter” or “truck driver”, many people get paid for essentially pursuing hobbies — hosting social events of all kinds, entering competitions (like sailing or esports or describing hypothetical utopias), participating in local community governance, or using AI tools to make videos, art, games, & music.

Naturally, many people’s lives are a mix of both worlds.