After Intelligence: What Are We Free For?

Spirit Omega, Play Theory, and the Human Future Beyond Work

Daniel Kokotajlo and his colleagues recently published AI 2040: Plan A, a detailed scenario for how humanity might slow the race towards superintelligence and retain some control over its own future.

The title is deliberately precise. It is called Plan A because it describes what the authors believe humanity should try to achieve, not what they predict will necessarily happen. In their scenario, decisive action by the American and Chinese governments delays the arrival of superintelligence from around 2030 to 2040, creating time for transparency, international coordination and serious work on AI safety.

This marks an important change from the logic of AI 2027. Instead of asking only what might happen if intelligence develops faster than human institutions can respond, AI 2040 asks whether humanity can still intervene—whether the future of AI might remain something we shape rather than something that simply happens to us.

For years, much of the conversation about AI has focused on risk: how catastrophe might occur, how control might be lost and how human institutions might fail to respond in time. AI 2040 represents a further step. It asks not only how disaster might be avoided, but how humanity could actively shape the future it wants.

Kevin Kelly’s recent remarks in Shanghai reinforce the scale of that task. He argues that AI remains at a very early stage of its development: what we see today is not the finished form of artificial intelligence, but the beginning of a much larger technological transformation.

This matters because human value cannot be secured by identifying one ability that AI has not yet mastered. If intelligence is still developing rapidly, every boundary drawn around a supposedly permanent human advantage may move again. The more capable AI becomes, the less sustainable it is to define humanity by whatever machines still cannot do.

Yet even if such a plan succeeded, another question would remain.

Suppose we retained control of artificial intelligence. What would we want that control for?

Continue reading on Substack:

https://irisqiu.substack.com/p/after-intelligence-what-are-we-free