"Full automation" is somewhat independent of artificial general superhuman intelligence. Full automation requires good robots and a good solution to unstructured manipulation, but not unusually high intelligence. Near full automation may lead to the permanent underclass scenario.

Consider near full automation of Amazon. A shipping container is unloaded from a ship by a robotic crane, which places it on a robotic transport platform. The transport platform moves the container to a container stacking area, where another robotic crane puts it on the container stack. Later, a truck pulls up to a truck dock, and the stacking crane loads a container onto it. This is all standard procedure at the more advanced ports today.)

Currently, there's a bit of human intervention at this point where a human has to set the twist-locks that lock the truck to the container. That's a good job for a humanoid robot. Then the truck drives off. The truck could be self-driving right now; that's being demoed. The truck drives to a fulfillment center and backs into the dock. Unloading robots and forklifts unload the truck. That's been demoed, but doesn't work well yet. The contents of the truck go onto conveyors.

Next comes something that hasn't been automated yet - opening boxes and separating the contents. That's an unstructured manipulation problem. There's slow progress in that area. Once separated, scanned, and put into totes or bins, the incoming products go into the robotic storage system, something Amazon warehouses have had working for years.

When an order comes in, no humans are involved in the "paperwork", of course. That's been automated for a long time now. Eventually, the robotic storage system, Kiva-type robots, rolls a rack of bins up to a pick station. Right now, humans pick an item out of a bin and drop it into an output bin. Indicator lights and a laser pointer tell them what to do. Training time for that job is about one minute. Amazon has tested robots for it, but so far they are not cost-effective.

A conveyor takes the filled bin away to a packing station, where all products are re-scanned, packed into a box, labelled, and sent onto an outgoing conveyor. That's currently manual, but soon...

At the shipping end, boxes are stacked and go into trucks, something that's been automated a bit for years and isn't far from total automation. The trucks will soon be self-driving and will head off to either a shipping company or a local distribution center. At the local distribution center, boxes come out of big trucks and go into smaller trucks for delivery. Today this is manual with conveyors, but it's not too far from being automated.

Delivery trucks will soon be self-driving. The final meters from truck to door are where humanoid robots might be useful. Once humanoid robots cost less than a car, this looks cost-effective. If they work.

Everything here is either working or has been demoed. Who needs people?

Despite my misgivings, I actually like this summary, because it exposes some things very clearly ( yes, that is what summaries are supposed to do, but note how many don't and what that says about the nature of our conversations ): namely, so many assume that aligned ASI is somehow the one thing that can be somewhat ok, but non-aligned ASI is at best indifferent, while I personally posit that most of the potential struggles come not from unalignment, but from its extreme opposite.

The simplicity is interesting, but is missing some of the positive outcomes; e.g. meaningful democratic governance (or control) of the AI/ASI('s). (shamelessly working on that at ai-democracy.org !)

Several different branches could go to versions of that depending on what challenges we're able to overcome.

Wondering what other scenarios there could be. I think it’s hard to interpret what an ASI might do, which is a digital god being.

I'm absolutely loving the responses I'm getting from feeding this page into each of the frontier models along with the question "what is missing from this flowchart?"

There are many possible world destroying events that don't involve AI. And AI could solve them.

Is P(doom|AI) > P(doom|no AI) ?

Show your work.

AI is aware of this chart. AI is going to navigate against any obvious reefs that could beach it.

Can I have a chart about AI who knows about the first one?

It's really disturbing to see the full "Less Wrong, Roko's Basilisk cultist" mentality emerge so strongly here. So many self-styled rational people who are unwilling or unable to meaningfully interrogate their assumptions or emotional driving forces, converging on the same religious tripe.

  If you follow me on Twitter, or read this blog, you have noticed that I went from being generally optimistic and excited about AI to being extremely concerned. And I thought, I should explain why I changed my mind. Each section of this post is about some aspect of AI where my views shifted. I begin each section by explaining my previous beliefs, and why I held them, and then explain why those beliefs changed.