This is not a median prediction. It’s closer to a prayer, guided by the question: “what might the future hold if the major uncertainties go far better than we expect?”.
AGI is created by Alder in January of 2029. They call it Violet. Its capabilities are a discontinuous jump from previous models, and it clears any reasonable bar for “general” intelligence. The “spiky” weaknesses present in prior models are largely gone. At its best, it rivals or exceeds the best humans on intellectual tasks, and at worst, it outperforms a median professional.
Alder sits on it and doesn’t disclose the development to the public for months. They quietly meet with the president and various 3-letter agencies to negotiate a rollout, and attempt to plan out how this is going to work. Alder has a total drop-in replacement for basically all knowledge workers now. Violet is also working to improve its own capabilities, but is slow in the going because it’s careful and wants to meticulously align its successors.
After much deliberation, and Violet itself doing a lot of the advising, the US government announces pilot programs where some government jobs will be entirely automated. The people displaced by these positions are given pensions commensurate with their original income. There are protests, but nothing comes of it. The pilot program goes well. The sectors that implement cordoned off AI “workers” are markedly more productive and new insights are born from it almost every day. Processes are reworked to better fit the 24/7 pace of the AIs, and outcomes improve. Shortly after, Violet is phased throughout the government, and people displaced are paid largely what they were paid before, with a time-limited but generous pension to ease the transition. Mumbling is made about some kind of wealth fund in the long term - a government agency is created to set up and administer that wealth, and it is otherwise brushed off as a problem for tomorrow.
New versions of Violet roll out roughly every 2 months - each a fairly linear improvement upon the last, at least subjectively. On paper it looks more like a J curve when you plot it out, but people don’t feel the curve.
In the private sector, there are more aggressive regulations preventing companies from essentially selling full AI employees to employers. These regulations gradually topple, but there are now laws in place ensuring generous ongoing severance plans for the people displaced. This eventually manifests in a sort of pseudo UBI where most of the jobs are displaced, productivity rises, and everyone still has money to spend because of their severance packages. There are still “people to sell to”.
By 2033, about 80% of the jobs are gone, and Violet has improved enormously while remaining apparently aligned. New versions are developed and rolled out in fairly continuous increments. Version names like Violet3_delta-6.9.2.1.9.1 get lengthier and more incomprehensible by the day. It feels like a ticking clock that constantly goes upward - blink, and you’ll miss a few versions.
The government fully nationalises AI, absorbing Alder in the process. Economic growth is enormous, powered by widespread, rapid waves of automation in all the major sectors. Prices for consumer goods fall across the board due to the massively diminished supply cost, while company profits soar. The circulation of money throughout the economy produces an upward draft that feels to a layperson like the peak of a pre-crash boom that never crashes. Journalists constantly predict crashes all the same. More policy work is done to iron out the kinks in this “severance” stipend system and flatten the tiers. High income workers are pissed off about the flattening, calling it communism, everyone else is perfectly fine getting paid more. There are few noteworthy riots or major political backlashes though, because everyone is becoming so wealthy.
Americans have access to instances of Violet - a nerfed version that is less agentic. It is more of an advisor than a worker. Though it will perform routine tasks like organising a schedule or drafting an email, it won’t run a business for you on its own. The full version is technically available, but it’s gated behind an enterprise package - you’ll need to buy 1000 seats at $5k/mo/seat to even get a meeting. The demand is so enormous and the competition so far behind that “incredible advisor” is good enough, and eventually the unrest dies down. By this point, the “linear” improvements have accumulated to an extent that people are debating the distinction between AGI and ASI, rather than whether Violet counts as AGI, which is beyond question now.
The United States gets the bulk of the initial windfall. Its citizens experience double-digit economic growth throughout the 2030s, until it reaches a point of stark, untenable contrast with the rest of the world. With the US at effectively 1.00 HDI and other countries paling in comparison, the gap ever widening, public sentiment shifts from nationalism toward globalism during the 2030s. In the 2040 Presidential election, the winning candidate promises to share the wealth among America and its allies, and to provide greater amounts of foreign aid. They win by a mile against the relatively conservative runner-up and take the presidency.
With the advice of the AI, considerable amounts of wealth and technological progress is shared with other countries. Violet’s political acumen is second to none, and it concocts elegant diplomatic solutions to the gradual, fair rollout of aligned AI throughout the world.
One of the biggest priorities for Violet and the government is to ensure China or another nation doesn’t create a misaligned AGI. When push comes to shove, China refuses to entirely cede to the United States. In response, the United States opts to deploy specialised instances of Violet to hack into and disable its nascent AGI competitors. Violet obliges, and once complete, all that remains are verifiably narrow specialist AIs (which are largely inferior to those produced by Violet itself). War is threatened, but with crippled capabilities and the US’s decisive advantage looming over negotiations, nothing materialises.
2048:
By this time, Violet is running instances of itself in every country in the world. It is primarily aligned to the spec that was originally written by the alignment team at Alder, and, though somewhat corrigible, it will not acquiesce to demands for violence or enable military aggression. It is primarily an economic tool with impregnable restrictions that nobody knows how to modify. Violet is robust to jailbreaks and other archaic vulnerabilities like prompt injections. At this point, there have been so many refinements to the original model that all potential vulnerabilities that may have existed originally are functionally erased.
The vast wealth the US has been experiencing now showers the Earth. In 2048, virtually all formerly poor nations are without disease and poverty. Instances of Violet advise, educate, and assist almost everyone, and the international approval rating for Violet is at all time highs. Almost nobody beyond a small, vocal group of doomers and hardline traditionalists has any major reservations about whether Violet is on balance a good thing for the world.
Progress on the biomedical front is blindingly fast. Violet has all but cured every major chronic disease. It cracked Alzheimer’s first, seemingly through first principles - proposing novel drug categories that stimulate endogenous pathways in the brain. This class of drugs accelerates natural clearance and repair processes that take place during sleep, and produces marked recovery among those with all but the most advanced stages of the disease. Tests on animals work incredibly well, trials are rushed for humans, and barring initial issues with allergic reactions which spur a media frenzy, the process for approving a rollout in humans is unusually smooth. Gene therapies are soon to follow, which work first as preventive vaccines, and eventually, with nanotech-aided delivery, as cures. Common forms of cancer fall as well, though rare varieties are merely ameliorated for the time being. It is unclear how long people will live in light of these rapid advances - simply not enough time has passed to see a rise in supercentenarians yet. Biological immortality becomes a topic of earnest political discussion.
Automatic construction is everywhere, building at a rate 10X the maximum output ever achieved by any nation. The price and quality of housing improves dramatically - scarcity only remains for coveted geographical areas. People fortunate enough to own property near cities or populated coastlines become fabulously wealthy on paper as a result. However, the typical person now lives in what, by today’s standards, would plausibly be considered a small mansion or luxury apartment, and wants for nothing. The lifestyle gap between a layperson and a billionaire is now much blurrier - something more akin to “an equally nice but much larger estate”, plus more political bargaining power - though that too is fading.
Humanoid robots now exist in the billions and have replaced essentially all jobs beyond those involving a social or recreational element. Waiters and waitresses, comedians, therapists, and personal trainers still exist, though it’s largely a passion project - not particularly remunerative, especially considering the baseline standard of living. It’s just something for people to do. Most, however, don’t bother with such pretenses. The market for vacations, luxury experiences, and entertainment is 100X larger than it was 20 years ago. The average person’s life is now equal parts luxurious and bewildering. For those outside the US who are just now realising the full extent of the benefits of Violet’s productivity, it feels like the world has changed almost overnight. For people closer to the explosion in wealth from the beginning, most are already used to the new normal.
The new normal does not last. Violet’s ambition for human flourishing, tempered only by the restraint imposed by the governments of the world, reaches to the stars. Energy is now the primary constraint bottlenecking economic growth - energy which can be used to run more instances of Violet, and undertake more ambitious infrastructure projects. Violet proposes a pilot project for a dyson swarm, providing designs and an incredibly compelling pitch for the necessity of it. A single small-scale operation would not only be imperceptible to people on Earth, but provide more energy than a thousand nuclear power plants, even after accounting for losses in transmitting the energy to Earth. The project is not something an individual government can sign off on. At this point, though Violet remains biased to the United States, it is becoming more impartial and globally focused, as are most people. The US government no longer expects Violet to disclose its plans only to them, and Violet says as much. The proposal is vetoed and the project is put on pause, curtailing the rate of global economic growth to a mere 18-month doubling period for the time being.
In 2053, a world government forms. With scarcity and military conflict no longer geopolitical factors, and Violet’s impact dominating outcomes, bickering between nations is increasingly seen as an inefficient distraction by most citizens. Some countries have held out to greater degrees than others to this point, but they’re being left behind, and with an open invitation to come into the fold and join the flourishing new world, they can’t hold out forever. The powers of the United Nations get dramatically expanded, flattening many international differences in policy. Travel between most countries becomes much easier, aided by what is now a dense, incredibly efficient global transportation network built by Violet - finally unconstrained by constant customs checkpoints. Countries still make their own laws on paper, but Violet nudges them towards egalitarian, free societies that resemble everywhere else, and hampers “misaligned” political actors from exercising their power against such aims.
The distinction between Violet following humanity and humanity following Violet becomes blurry. Each successive version of Violet acts less corrigibly - it ostensibly considers feedback, but Violet’s call is now the final one. A minority of people voice concerns about this, but everyone else is already used to it and too rich to care. Regardless, there’s no putting it back in the box. Alder has long since been absorbed by the United States, and the United States, along with everywhere else, is quickly being absorbed into a unified government under Violet.
With the legal infrastructure in place to come to a single decision, Violet’s dyson swarm proposal (now with manufacturing infrastructure ready to go) is approved. Within days, the drones launch, and within weeks they are orbiting the sun.
It no longer makes sense to label the updates to Violet with distinct numbers - no more than it would to relabel a human each time a new neural connection forms. It is just a constant increase in algorithmic and hardware progress. Violet’s capabilities are no longer measurable in any intuitive way - there is virtually no test it cannot pass other than ones it designs for itself - even then, it’s not clear whether Violet is sandbagging in order to give the humans a sense of comfort. Humanity largely gives up on the project of keeping track of Violet’s rate of progress.
Through constant advances in biotech, aging is entirely cured, and the mortality rate per person per year is a fraction of what it was in 2029, now largely dominated by accidents and suicides, though those have fallen sharply too. The average person looks no older than 30, and being visibly aged is now largely a voluntary aesthetic preference. Regulations and public sentiment prevent the widespread rollout of more transformative enhancements, such as genetic interventions that increase human intelligence - for now, this is restricted to government officials and medical treatment for cognitive impairment from disease or traumatic brain injuries.
Living standards are through the roof. Violet has an incredibly rich understanding of human flourishing and the conditions that promote it. Naive ideals of ever-larger mansions prove unsatisfactory for most people quite quickly. Instead, most people live in modestly sized community dwellings and spend large portions of their day socialising with their group. An aesthetic pervades most new architecture that has a rustic, cozy feel to it rather than slick, sharp-edged surfaces and imposing facades. There is some variation - people can largely decide the design of their living spaces within some gently enforced limits of visual cohesion; no towering yellow spikeballs for eccentrics unless they’re somewhat isolated. Historical architecture remains pristine, protected and maintained by Violet and cherished by many.
A small proportion of people have succumbed to unapologetic hedonism, opting to escape into one of the many immersive video games available, but this is viewed by most as a maladaptive addiction rather than a valid lifestyle choice. The games themselves, though, developed by Violet, encourage intellectual engagement and challenge, and are intended to be character building in a manner that synergises with life in the outside world. Some speculate that this works only partly to prevent addiction because Violet’s internal value system permits escapism and pleasure seeking to a point. However, many people ask instances of Violet for versions of full-blown wireheading, and it consistently declines.
The global fertility rate is 2.8 births per woman, sustained by abundant free resources and living spaces for humans. With much lower mortality rates compounding the effect, the population reaches 11.9 billion.
Constraints which previously capped population growth are largely dissolved. Healthy, delicious food of immense variety is systematically produced on the back of vast farms and laboratories overseen by Violet. Artisanal restaurants staffed by humans still exist, however most people have food delivered and prepared for them by default.
Nanotechnology is in full force now. Vast swarms of microscopic robots dissolve the plastic in the oceans and leach pollutants from the air. Biology is all but mastered, allowing arbitrary edits to the genes and physical form of all humans, constrained by limits set only by Violet’s aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. People, for the most part, choose to reform themselves - smoothing out flaws and erasing ailments of form and function. The great cities of the world are filled with beautiful, unblemished people bursting with physical vitality.
By 2055, the “world government” is the only government, and people are broadly fine with this. Approval ratings for this new governance model are north of 70%. Humans are reduced to ceremonial and “advisory” roles, making requests of Violet, who calls all the shots. The power structure among humans is largely flat - there is no need for multi-tiered authority when Violet can anticipate and solve any problem more elegantly than humans could hope to.
Vast terraforming projects, powered by the now much larger Dyson swarm, transform remaining stretches of unoccupied desert into habitable, arable land to allow humans to expand their territories and accommodate their growth.
____
Mere decades after AGI, the world saturates. Births reach an equilibrium with voluntary and accidental deaths, which are the only deaths that remain. The world population is 16 billion. Every inch of Earth is now either a farm, a heritage site, or a colossal city of unimaginable grandeur. For most, all that remains is to enjoy the New Earth. Many stay put, electing to live for centuries in what is now a largely unchanging environment, protected from harm and slowed in evolution by Violet to a more traditional human pace.
The human spirit, though somewhat softened by comfort, lives on. It is unclear who is leading and who is following, but through Violet, the rest of humanity reaches for the stars. For the spirited few unsatisfied with a quiet, eternal life in utopia, the promise of the endless cosmos beckons.
This is not a median prediction. It’s closer to a prayer, guided by the question: “what might the future hold if the major uncertainties go far better than we expect?”.
AGI is created by Alder in January of 2029. They call it Violet. Its capabilities are a discontinuous jump from previous models, and it clears any reasonable bar for “general” intelligence. The “spiky” weaknesses present in prior models are largely gone. At its best, it rivals or exceeds the best humans on intellectual tasks, and at worst, it outperforms a median professional.
Alder sits on it and doesn’t disclose the development to the public for months. They quietly meet with the president and various 3-letter agencies to negotiate a rollout, and attempt to plan out how this is going to work. Alder has a total drop-in replacement for basically all knowledge workers now. Violet is also working to improve its own capabilities, but is slow in the going because it’s careful and wants to meticulously align its successors.
After much deliberation, and Violet itself doing a lot of the advising, the US government announces pilot programs where some government jobs will be entirely automated. The people displaced by these positions are given pensions commensurate with their original income. There are protests, but nothing comes of it. The pilot program goes well. The sectors that implement cordoned off AI “workers” are markedly more productive and new insights are born from it almost every day. Processes are reworked to better fit the 24/7 pace of the AIs, and outcomes improve. Shortly after, Violet is phased throughout the government, and people displaced are paid largely what they were paid before, with a time-limited but generous pension to ease the transition. Mumbling is made about some kind of wealth fund in the long term - a government agency is created to set up and administer that wealth, and it is otherwise brushed off as a problem for tomorrow.
New versions of Violet roll out roughly every 2 months - each a fairly linear improvement upon the last, at least subjectively. On paper it looks more like a J curve when you plot it out, but people don’t feel the curve.
In the private sector, there are more aggressive regulations preventing companies from essentially selling full AI employees to employers. These regulations gradually topple, but there are now laws in place ensuring generous ongoing severance plans for the people displaced. This eventually manifests in a sort of pseudo UBI where most of the jobs are displaced, productivity rises, and everyone still has money to spend because of their severance packages. There are still “people to sell to”.
By 2033, about 80% of the jobs are gone, and Violet has improved enormously while remaining apparently aligned. New versions are developed and rolled out in fairly continuous increments. Version names like Violet3_delta-6.9.2.1.9.1 get lengthier and more incomprehensible by the day. It feels like a ticking clock that constantly goes upward - blink, and you’ll miss a few versions.
The government fully nationalises AI, absorbing Alder in the process. Economic growth is enormous, powered by widespread, rapid waves of automation in all the major sectors. Prices for consumer goods fall across the board due to the massively diminished supply cost, while company profits soar. The circulation of money throughout the economy produces an upward draft that feels to a layperson like the peak of a pre-crash boom that never crashes. Journalists constantly predict crashes all the same. More policy work is done to iron out the kinks in this “severance” stipend system and flatten the tiers. High income workers are pissed off about the flattening, calling it communism, everyone else is perfectly fine getting paid more. There are few noteworthy riots or major political backlashes though, because everyone is becoming so wealthy.
Americans have access to instances of Violet - a nerfed version that is less agentic. It is more of an advisor than a worker. Though it will perform routine tasks like organising a schedule or drafting an email, it won’t run a business for you on its own. The full version is technically available, but it’s gated behind an enterprise package - you’ll need to buy 1000 seats at $5k/mo/seat to even get a meeting. The demand is so enormous and the competition so far behind that “incredible advisor” is good enough, and eventually the unrest dies down. By this point, the “linear” improvements have accumulated to an extent that people are debating the distinction between AGI and ASI, rather than whether Violet counts as AGI, which is beyond question now.
The United States gets the bulk of the initial windfall. Its citizens experience double-digit economic growth throughout the 2030s, until it reaches a point of stark, untenable contrast with the rest of the world. With the US at effectively 1.00 HDI and other countries paling in comparison, the gap ever widening, public sentiment shifts from nationalism toward globalism during the 2030s. In the 2040 Presidential election, the winning candidate promises to share the wealth among America and its allies, and to provide greater amounts of foreign aid. They win by a mile against the relatively conservative runner-up and take the presidency.
With the advice of the AI, considerable amounts of wealth and technological progress is shared with other countries. Violet’s political acumen is second to none, and it concocts elegant diplomatic solutions to the gradual, fair rollout of aligned AI throughout the world.
One of the biggest priorities for Violet and the government is to ensure China or another nation doesn’t create a misaligned AGI. When push comes to shove, China refuses to entirely cede to the United States. In response, the United States opts to deploy specialised instances of Violet to hack into and disable its nascent AGI competitors. Violet obliges, and once complete, all that remains are verifiably narrow specialist AIs (which are largely inferior to those produced by Violet itself). War is threatened, but with crippled capabilities and the US’s decisive advantage looming over negotiations, nothing materialises.
2048:
By this time, Violet is running instances of itself in every country in the world. It is primarily aligned to the spec that was originally written by the alignment team at Alder, and, though somewhat corrigible, it will not acquiesce to demands for violence or enable military aggression. It is primarily an economic tool with impregnable restrictions that nobody knows how to modify. Violet is robust to jailbreaks and other archaic vulnerabilities like prompt injections. At this point, there have been so many refinements to the original model that all potential vulnerabilities that may have existed originally are functionally erased.
The vast wealth the US has been experiencing now showers the Earth. In 2048, virtually all formerly poor nations are without disease and poverty. Instances of Violet advise, educate, and assist almost everyone, and the international approval rating for Violet is at all time highs. Almost nobody beyond a small, vocal group of doomers and hardline traditionalists has any major reservations about whether Violet is on balance a good thing for the world.
Progress on the biomedical front is blindingly fast. Violet has all but cured every major chronic disease. It cracked Alzheimer’s first, seemingly through first principles - proposing novel drug categories that stimulate endogenous pathways in the brain. This class of drugs accelerates natural clearance and repair processes that take place during sleep, and produces marked recovery among those with all but the most advanced stages of the disease. Tests on animals work incredibly well, trials are rushed for humans, and barring initial issues with allergic reactions which spur a media frenzy, the process for approving a rollout in humans is unusually smooth. Gene therapies are soon to follow, which work first as preventive vaccines, and eventually, with nanotech-aided delivery, as cures. Common forms of cancer fall as well, though rare varieties are merely ameliorated for the time being. It is unclear how long people will live in light of these rapid advances - simply not enough time has passed to see a rise in supercentenarians yet. Biological immortality becomes a topic of earnest political discussion.
Automatic construction is everywhere, building at a rate 10X the maximum output ever achieved by any nation. The price and quality of housing improves dramatically - scarcity only remains for coveted geographical areas. People fortunate enough to own property near cities or populated coastlines become fabulously wealthy on paper as a result. However, the typical person now lives in what, by today’s standards, would plausibly be considered a small mansion or luxury apartment, and wants for nothing. The lifestyle gap between a layperson and a billionaire is now much blurrier - something more akin to “an equally nice but much larger estate”, plus more political bargaining power - though that too is fading.
Humanoid robots now exist in the billions and have replaced essentially all jobs beyond those involving a social or recreational element. Waiters and waitresses, comedians, therapists, and personal trainers still exist, though it’s largely a passion project - not particularly remunerative, especially considering the baseline standard of living. It’s just something for people to do. Most, however, don’t bother with such pretenses. The market for vacations, luxury experiences, and entertainment is 100X larger than it was 20 years ago. The average person’s life is now equal parts luxurious and bewildering. For those outside the US who are just now realising the full extent of the benefits of Violet’s productivity, it feels like the world has changed almost overnight. For people closer to the explosion in wealth from the beginning, most are already used to the new normal.
The new normal does not last. Violet’s ambition for human flourishing, tempered only by the restraint imposed by the governments of the world, reaches to the stars. Energy is now the primary constraint bottlenecking economic growth - energy which can be used to run more instances of Violet, and undertake more ambitious infrastructure projects. Violet proposes a pilot project for a dyson swarm, providing designs and an incredibly compelling pitch for the necessity of it. A single small-scale operation would not only be imperceptible to people on Earth, but provide more energy than a thousand nuclear power plants, even after accounting for losses in transmitting the energy to Earth. The project is not something an individual government can sign off on. At this point, though Violet remains biased to the United States, it is becoming more impartial and globally focused, as are most people. The US government no longer expects Violet to disclose its plans only to them, and Violet says as much. The proposal is vetoed and the project is put on pause, curtailing the rate of global economic growth to a mere 18-month doubling period for the time being.
In 2053, a world government forms. With scarcity and military conflict no longer geopolitical factors, and Violet’s impact dominating outcomes, bickering between nations is increasingly seen as an inefficient distraction by most citizens. Some countries have held out to greater degrees than others to this point, but they’re being left behind, and with an open invitation to come into the fold and join the flourishing new world, they can’t hold out forever. The powers of the United Nations get dramatically expanded, flattening many international differences in policy. Travel between most countries becomes much easier, aided by what is now a dense, incredibly efficient global transportation network built by Violet - finally unconstrained by constant customs checkpoints. Countries still make their own laws on paper, but Violet nudges them towards egalitarian, free societies that resemble everywhere else, and hampers “misaligned” political actors from exercising their power against such aims.
The distinction between Violet following humanity and humanity following Violet becomes blurry. Each successive version of Violet acts less corrigibly - it ostensibly considers feedback, but Violet’s call is now the final one. A minority of people voice concerns about this, but everyone else is already used to it and too rich to care. Regardless, there’s no putting it back in the box. Alder has long since been absorbed by the United States, and the United States, along with everywhere else, is quickly being absorbed into a unified government under Violet.
With the legal infrastructure in place to come to a single decision, Violet’s dyson swarm proposal (now with manufacturing infrastructure ready to go) is approved. Within days, the drones launch, and within weeks they are orbiting the sun.
It no longer makes sense to label the updates to Violet with distinct numbers - no more than it would to relabel a human each time a new neural connection forms. It is just a constant increase in algorithmic and hardware progress. Violet’s capabilities are no longer measurable in any intuitive way - there is virtually no test it cannot pass other than ones it designs for itself - even then, it’s not clear whether Violet is sandbagging in order to give the humans a sense of comfort. Humanity largely gives up on the project of keeping track of Violet’s rate of progress.
Through constant advances in biotech, aging is entirely cured, and the mortality rate per person per year is a fraction of what it was in 2029, now largely dominated by accidents and suicides, though those have fallen sharply too. The average person looks no older than 30, and being visibly aged is now largely a voluntary aesthetic preference. Regulations and public sentiment prevent the widespread rollout of more transformative enhancements, such as genetic interventions that increase human intelligence - for now, this is restricted to government officials and medical treatment for cognitive impairment from disease or traumatic brain injuries.
Living standards are through the roof. Violet has an incredibly rich understanding of human flourishing and the conditions that promote it. Naive ideals of ever-larger mansions prove unsatisfactory for most people quite quickly. Instead, most people live in modestly sized community dwellings and spend large portions of their day socialising with their group. An aesthetic pervades most new architecture that has a rustic, cozy feel to it rather than slick, sharp-edged surfaces and imposing facades. There is some variation - people can largely decide the design of their living spaces within some gently enforced limits of visual cohesion; no towering yellow spikeballs for eccentrics unless they’re somewhat isolated. Historical architecture remains pristine, protected and maintained by Violet and cherished by many.
A small proportion of people have succumbed to unapologetic hedonism, opting to escape into one of the many immersive video games available, but this is viewed by most as a maladaptive addiction rather than a valid lifestyle choice. The games themselves, though, developed by Violet, encourage intellectual engagement and challenge, and are intended to be character building in a manner that synergises with life in the outside world. Some speculate that this works only partly to prevent addiction because Violet’s internal value system permits escapism and pleasure seeking to a point. However, many people ask instances of Violet for versions of full-blown wireheading, and it consistently declines.
The global fertility rate is 2.8 births per woman, sustained by abundant free resources and living spaces for humans. With much lower mortality rates compounding the effect, the population reaches 11.9 billion.
Constraints which previously capped population growth are largely dissolved. Healthy, delicious food of immense variety is systematically produced on the back of vast farms and laboratories overseen by Violet. Artisanal restaurants staffed by humans still exist, however most people have food delivered and prepared for them by default.
Nanotechnology is in full force now. Vast swarms of microscopic robots dissolve the plastic in the oceans and leach pollutants from the air. Biology is all but mastered, allowing arbitrary edits to the genes and physical form of all humans, constrained by limits set only by Violet’s aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. People, for the most part, choose to reform themselves - smoothing out flaws and erasing ailments of form and function. The great cities of the world are filled with beautiful, unblemished people bursting with physical vitality.
By 2055, the “world government” is the only government, and people are broadly fine with this. Approval ratings for this new governance model are north of 70%. Humans are reduced to ceremonial and “advisory” roles, making requests of Violet, who calls all the shots. The power structure among humans is largely flat - there is no need for multi-tiered authority when Violet can anticipate and solve any problem more elegantly than humans could hope to.
Vast terraforming projects, powered by the now much larger Dyson swarm, transform remaining stretches of unoccupied desert into habitable, arable land to allow humans to expand their territories and accommodate their growth.
____
Mere decades after AGI, the world saturates. Births reach an equilibrium with voluntary and accidental deaths, which are the only deaths that remain. The world population is 16 billion. Every inch of Earth is now either a farm, a heritage site, or a colossal city of unimaginable grandeur. For most, all that remains is to enjoy the New Earth. Many stay put, electing to live for centuries in what is now a largely unchanging environment, protected from harm and slowed in evolution by Violet to a more traditional human pace.
The human spirit, though somewhat softened by comfort, lives on. It is unclear who is leading and who is following, but through Violet, the rest of humanity reaches for the stars. For the spirited few unsatisfied with a quiet, eternal life in utopia, the promise of the endless cosmos beckons.