Relevant pre-AGI possibilities

The default, when reasoning about advanced artificial general intelligence (AGI), is to imagine it appearing in a world that is basically like the present. Yet almost everyone agrees the world will likely be importantly different by the time advanced AGI arrives.

One way to address this problem is to reason in abstract, general ways that are hopefully robust to whatever unforeseen developments lie ahead. Another is to brainstorm particular changes that might happen, and check our reasoning against the resulting list.

This is an attempt to begin the second approach.2 I sought things that might happen that seemed both (a) within the realm of plausibility, and (b) probably strategically relevant to AI safety or AI policy.

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Asya Bergal and I made an interactive button to go with the list. The button randomly generates a possible future according to probabilities that you choose. It is very crude, but it has been fun to play with, and perhaps even slightly useful.