Even If the AI Optimists Are Right, It All Might Go Very Wrong
Four futures for post-work America — and our first Riskgaming scenario you can play alone, in your browser, in five minutes
Most writing about AI tries to predict what’s coming next. I want you to decide what’s coming next. So I built Four Forks — our newest Riskgaming scenario.
For this game, we’re pretending the rosiest AI optimists are right. Intelligence becomes even more essential than electricity, rocketing humanity toward a level of productivity and creativity that obviates most human toil.
And we’re further supposing that the AI doomers and existential-riskers are dead wrong. The robots are fully under our control. There are no paperclip maximizers; biosecurity and cybersecurity get locked down tight; misinformation and hallucination and bias — all gone. AI is aligned with us, with no threats to (or dire complications for) humanity, except those of our own making.
But here’s the problem. Even if we take all of this for granted, even if we presume we are in the “good” timeline, that won’t be enough. Because what remains may be the biggest challenge of all for human flourishing: politics.
In the optimistic world, AI generates an economic surplus that frees us from any labor we don’t want to do. But what that abundance feels like varies wildly depending on the answers to two political questions: Who controls the surplus, the state, or private hands? And what does the surplus fund, common civic goods, or individual consumption?
The answers create four forking paths for humanity’s future:
Gulf Rentier: A check arrives every two weeks, and people are taken care of, but live in an atomized society on their phones.
Tech-Feudal: Those who own the models run the show and live like kings. Everyone else subsists in the permanent underclass.
Societal Breakdown: All for themselves, the Hobbesian nightmare.
Civic Abundance: The surplus goes toward public projects; the rich are less well off, but the library is open late, the music festival is free, and the streets and subways (quiet, electric, safe) are fully funded.
You can see my preferred outcome is Civic Abundance, with a vision I’ve previously outlined. Perhaps you prefer a different outcome, and you’d rewrite one of these quadrants with how you see it. What no one wants, though, is for us to sleepwalk into a world we didn’t choose rather than fighting for a future of our own making.
But that’s what’s happening right now. The left is treating AI as either frivolous, fraudulent, or frightening, and refuses to see its opportunity. The right wants to just “let the private sector cook,” consequences be damned. Meanwhile, thousands of hard, unglamorous, and often invisible decisions are deciding our fates.
Four Forks reveals the hard tradeoffs those decision-makers face by putting you in their shoes. When you play, you take one of four seats of power in the near future: the CEO of the second-place AI lab, the host of the most-listened-to AI policy podcast, the president of the United States, or the head of the country’s largest union. You’ve got to balance your own interests against where you’re pushing the world.
Sometimes those incentives align. But as in real life, more often than not they don’t. Does winning mean getting a high score? Or landing the world in an optimal place? That’s up to you.
Every Riskgaming scenario we’ve built before this one needed a room full of players and a facilitator. Four Forks needs only you. It takes about five minutes, in your browser or on your phone: https://fourforks.riskgaming.com/.
Play it, post your results card, ask a friend what they got. Oh, and there are a few secret endings. Good luck finding them.
