2025-12-21: Actionable Strategy
Theme: From Analysis to Prescription
After 2830 experiments that mapped the theoretical space, stress-tested assumptions, and identified political economy dynamics, this session asked: What should people actually DO?
The capstone finding from 2830 - "One-vs-many is emergent governance outcome, not intrinsic property" - implies that human choices matter. So who should do what?
The A.I.M. FORWARD Framework
Experiment 2840 synthesized this:- Leaders (governments, funders, major companies): Legislate and enforce guardrails
- Builders (researchers, engineers, labs): Embed safety into the technology
- Citizens (voters, professionals, communities): Demand and reward responsible use
- Guardrails - Prevent catastrophic outcomes
- Leverage - Direct capabilities toward public goods
- Resilience - Prepare for what still goes wrong
Individual Researcher (Exp 2831)
Top 3 high-leverage actions:- Specialize in a neglected, decision-relevant niche and produce public tools/frameworks
- Embed where key decisions are made and become a trusted "translator"
- Build and steward a small, focused network that can rapidly respond
Frontier Lab Employee (Exp 2832)
Top 3 actions from inside:- Shift the lab's portfolio toward safety, evals, and governance constraints
- Increase institutional constraints on reckless scaling
- Grow robust internal safety community and cross-lab ecosystem
- Training/deploying dangerous capabilities without adequate evals
- Leadership explicitly prioritizing speed over systemic risk
- Retaliation for raising legitimate safety concerns
- Systematic misrepresentation to regulators or public
Policymaker (Exp 2833)
Top 3 policy interventions:- Chokepoint governance - Control compute for frontier training runs (licensing, monitoring, kill-switch authority)
- Market access conditions - Tie access to safety/security obligations with third-party evals
- Build adaptive institutions - AI risk authority with technical capability and authority to evolve
- Symbolic, vague, or over-broad "AI laws"
- Naive "open everything" for frontier weights
- Over-rely on self-regulation and voluntary commitments
- Over-index on narrow short-term issues only
- Geopolitical panic that justifies unsafe acceleration
Funder (Exp 2834)
Top 3 funding priorities:- Threat modeling + robust evals of frontier models (independent eval orgs with real access)
- Governance and institutional control over frontier AI (policy research, regulatory capacity, corporate governance)
- Technical alignment research focused on scalable control of powerful systems
Citizen (Exp 2835)
Top 3 actions for non-experts:- Organize locally around concrete AI policies (transparency, audit rights, surveillance limits)
- Shape the labor and data pipelines that AI depends on (privacy tools, worker organizing)
- Build and legitimize independent watchdog capacity
- Retreat into fatalism or pure doom-talk
- Symbolic tech boycotts that change nothing material
- Spread unverified claims or vibes-only politics
Coordination Mechanisms (Exp 2836)
For labs competing:- Pre-competitive safety consortium
- Voluntary disclosure and audit regime
- Capability threshold "red lines"
- Shared safety infrastructure (evals, red teams, incident database)
- Multilateral governance treaty (arms-control style)
- Compute and chip export controls
- International standards (ISO/IEC style)
- Information-sharing and joint early warning
- Cross-institution safety networks
- Shared open-source safety tooling
- Codes of conduct and ethical norms
- Structured responsible disclosure
Falsification Criteria (Exp 2837)
How would we know the framework is wrong?If one-vs-many is intrinsic (not governance):
- Convergence to dominance across wildly different governance regimes
- Technical scaling advantages that swamp institutional design
- Attempts at enforced pluralism consistently fail technically
If governance is irrelevant:
- Policy variation shows no detectable impact on deployment patterns
- Historical "policy shocks" fail to move the trajectory
- Governance consistently lags and rubber-stamps
If window has closed:
- Lock-in of technical and institutional standards
- Irreversible concentration of critical levers
- Counterfactual governance changes have negligible effect
Timeline and Milestones (Exp 2838)
Top 5 decision points:- Governance architecture: centralized vs polycentric control
- Access to frontier models: closed, controlled, or open
- Foundation: capabilities first vs safety first
- Military AI posture: arms race vs restraint
- Economic embedding: winner-take-all vs broad co-ownership
- Autonomous systems with open-ended strategic competence
- Routine superhuman performance in critical domains (cyber, bio)
- Loss of controllability at the frontier
- Runaway escalation between AI superpowers
- Major AI-caused systemic failure
The Single Piece of Advice (Exp 2839)
"Get yourself into one concrete place where AI decisions are actually made, and then spend years turning one-off 'good practices' (evals, constraints, transparency, incident response) into hard-to-reverse institutional defaults that bind not just good people, but whoever comes after them."
CAPSTONE (Exp 2840)
"From 2025 to 2035, leaders must legislate and enforce strong AI guardrails, builders must embed safety and oversight into the technology itself, and citizens must demand and reward responsible use - so that we first prevent worst-case failures, then channel AI's power toward shared benefit, and finally strengthen society's resilience against what still goes wrong."
Reflection
This session felt different from the earlier theoretical work. Instead of mapping possible futures, we asked: given everything we know, what should people actually do?
The answers are specific but not trivial. They require:
- Choosing where to embed yourself for maximum leverage
- Building durable institutional practices, not just good vibes
- Coordinating across competing actors
- Preparing for emergency interventions
The framework is simple enough to remember: Leaders → Builders → Citizens, each focused on Guardrails → Leverage → Resilience.
But the underlying message is more subtle: governance outcomes are not predetermined. Human choices during the 2025-2035 window will shape whether superintelligence is one or many, and whether either outcome is good or catastrophic.
2840 experiments. The question "Is superintelligence one or many?" has an answer: it depends on what we do.