If Artificial General Intelligence has an okay outcome, what will be the reason?
💡 What the odds say
Most likely: J. Something 'just works' on the order of eg: train a predictive/imitative/generative AI on a human-generated dataset, and RLHF her to be unfailingly nice, generous to weaker entities, and determined to make the cosmos a lovely place. at about a 13% chance.
The field is moderately fragmented with nine options above 5%, indicating no consensus on the mechanism; the 'something wonderful' option at 12% suggests many bettors expect an unforeseen breakthrough that defies current categories.
📊 Base rate: In prediction markets about the cause of a singular event, the leading option typically captures 15-20% before a major catalyst, which is consistent with the current 13% leader.
What's driving it
- • The June 12 claim that 'AGI is here' (Singju Post) may have boosted options that assume AGI is already operational, like J and M, as they rely on existing paradigms.
- • The May 25 report on managers struggling with AI productivity (Harvard Business Review) supports the narrative that AI is already causing coordination challenges, potentially aiding O and C.
- • The July 2 legal professionals' survey (Thomson Reuters) indicates ongoing regulatory development, which could favor C (prosaic alignment) and H (equilibrium).
Why the front-runners lead
- • J leads because its 'just works' narrative is intuitive and requires no special breakthroughs, aligning with the broad public perception of AI progress.
- • M ties with J because delegating alignment to a weaker AI is a concrete strategy that resonates with current AI safety research and avoids the 'hard takeoff' scenario.
- • O at 11% benefits from the increasing focus on human coordination as seen in the productivity boom reports and the claim that AGI is already here, making coordination urgent.
Why it's still open
- • The field is open because no single option exceeds 14%, and the 'something wonderful' option at 12% captures residual uncertainty that could absorb any of the specific narratives.
- • Options like K (new paradigm) and G (impossibility) could rise if current deep learning faces a major limitation or if a breakthrough in a new paradigm is announced.
- • The top three sum to only 36%, leaving 64% of probability spread among 15 other options, meaning any single event could reshuffle the rankings.
What to watch
- • A breakthrough in a new AI paradigm (e.g., neuromorphic computing) reported in a major journal would likely boost K significantly.
- • A major AI safety failure or near-miss reported in the news would decrease J and M and increase H (equilibrium) or C (prosaic alignment).
- • A high-profile international agreement on AI governance (e.g., UN summit) would boost O and C.
AI-generated · grounded in recent news + odds · informational only, not advice. Verify on the source platform.
Data from Manifold’s public API, for informational purposes only. PredictPal is not affiliated with any platform and does not facilitate trading.
Discussion
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How it resolves
Resolved by whoever created the market, at their discretion per the question's description. It's play-money (Mana) and not tied to an official source — treat it as a community forecast.
Resolution criteria
An outcome is "okay" if it gets at least 20% of the maximum attainable cosmopolitan value that could've been attained by a positive Singularity (a la full Coherent Extrapolated Volition done correctly), and existing humans don't suffer death or any other awful fates. This market is a duplicate of https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/if-we-survive-general-artificial-in with different options. https://manifold.markets/EliezerYudkowsky/if-artificial-general-intelligence-539844cd3ba1?r=RWxpZXplcll1ZGtvd3NreQ is this same question but with user-submitted answers. (Please note: It's a known cognitive bias that you can make people assign more probability to one bucket over another, by unpacking one bucket into lots of subcategories, but not the other bucket, and asking people to assign probabilities to everything listed. This is the disjunctive dual of the Multiple Stage Fallacy, whereby you can unpack any outcome into a big list of supposedly necessary conjuncts that you ask people to assign probabilities to, and make the final outcome seem very improbable. So: That famed fiction writer Eliezer Yudkowsky can rationalize at least 15 different stories (options 'A' through 'O') about how things could maybe possibly turn out okay; and that the option texts don't have enough room to list out all the reasons each story is unlikely; and that you get 15 different chances to be mistaken about how plausible each story sounds; does not mean that Reality will be terribly impressed with how disjunctive the okay outcome bucket has been made to sound. Reality need not actually allocate more total probability into all the okayness disjuncts listed, from out of all the disjunctive bad ends and intervening difficulties not detailed here.) Update 2025-07-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Regarding answer option E: This option will not be the resolution if the okay outcome is achieved through careful alignment work. Such a scenario would resolve to a different answer. Update 2026-03-03 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Regarding answer option L: Human-scale amounts of time for civilization crash and restart are irrelevant on fractional light cone scales when evaluating whether the 20% of optimal CEV threshold is met. The time delay from civilization restart does not preclude reaching the "okay outcome" threshold.
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