The Memo - Special edition - AI-2040.com - 9/Jul/2026
To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients… From: Dr Alan D. Thompson Sent: 9/Jul/2026 Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English AGI: 97% ASI: 2/50There were many...
To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients… From: Dr Alan D. Thompson Sent: 9/Jul/2026 Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English AGI: 97% ASI: 2/50There were many major releases today. The Meta Muse Spark 1.1 model was the most exciting, then GPT-5.6 Sol (which autonomously post-trained the smaller GPT-5.6 Luna model), the 1X NEO humanoid hands video, which triggered informational updates to the AGI and ASI indicators, and more.But, for me, the biggest announcement today was the 47,000-word scenario analysis (plus supplements) of what happens next over the next ~13½ years to 2040. Yes, that’s the size of a small novel, and takes half a day to read, or several days to absorb properly!You can read it online with supplements: AI-2040.comPDF is 81 pages, 47,000+ words, 4-hour read: https://ai-2040.com/AI-2040.pdfUpdate: You can download my full annotated version here:20260709 Ai 2040 Adt Annotated Base 117.4MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadOr if you want the shorter 3,000-word version, I’m going to start off an early ‘analysis of the analysis’ right here in your email, but do click through to the online edition as I will update this over the next few days.As I did for Sam Altman’s essay The gentle singularity (The Memo special edition 11/Jun/2025) more than a year ago, the original piece is quoted in blue; my notes are in normal text. I have no affiliation with the authors of AI-2040.com.Other media: WaPo article, Introducing AI-2040 (by one of the authors)…Expert calls: If you or your team would like to have an expert call about this document, please contact us by replying to this email, and we’ll get you set up.All my very best,AlanLifeArchitect.aiSource: AI-2040.comAI-2040.com ‘analysis of the analysis’ by Alan…even if the AI companies somehow align their AIs, the result will be an unprecedented concentration of power—that is, the result will be a situation where a tiny group of people, or possibly just a single individual, is effectively in control of the world’s only army of superintelligences for some months, and will be presented by said superintelligences with various options for how to proceed, some of which will de facto amount to taking over the world.As best as we can guess, the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind understand this and are proceeding anyway, perhaps because they think they are the lesser evil and will use their immense power responsibly, unlike Xi Jinping or rival CEOs. (p3)It seems concerning that people—especially expert analysts—are overlooking Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL, wiki). Meta has always been in the top 5, and with their secret sauce and resources, they may indeed be the first to reach ASI.https://lifearchitect.ai/models-table/Congress is starting to pay more attention… Now they step back and ask: Where are we going with this? What does the world look like five, ten, or fifteen years from now? Will there still be jobs? What if there aren’t? One question weighs especially heavily on their minds: Who will control all these AIs? Congress settles on an important part of the answer: Probably not us.This is deeply troubling, and very human. It’ll also be easily solved by superintelligence.But in this world, lie detectors turn out to be a blessing, because there are many frontier AI projects spread out over many different countries. It’s obvious to everyone that insofar as lie detectors are feasible, they’ll soon be independently invented and become widely available via diverse third party providers. Politicians and CEOs can still try to use them to purge the disloyal, but they in turn would be purged by voters and shareholders demanding they ‘say under oath’ that they haven’t done such a thing. In fact, anticipating this possibility years ago, powerful people have generally been acting more responsibly. A few sociopaths retired gracefully to get out of the spotlight; others clung to power and now go down in scandal. (p26)One study found extremely high prevalence rates of psychopathy in the corporate world, with 21% of participants found to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits, similar to prison populations (APA, 13/Sep/2016). I’d like to see similar studies run across political populations.If a company starts doing something dangerous, rival companies, third-party auditors, etc., can notice and raise the alarm. This both massively increases the amount of brainpower devoted to making the frontier AIs safe… (p10)I don’t agree with this premise. Average humans (IQ=100) and even exceptional humans (IQ=150) cannot compare with artificial intelligence, where its IQ may be the equivalent of 1,000+. I appreciate that humans want to claim a monopoly on ethics and ‘goodness’, but AI will lead the way, and is already more morally sensitive and ethical than average and exceptional humans.https://lifearchitect.ai/solace/2038 …typical AIs are now more virtuous than the most virtuous humans. This alone has profound effects: it’s as if saints and angels were walking among us. (p27)In addition to the angels, there are also oracles and golems, e.g., “Grok 9.5 is trained to be obsessively focused on truthfully answering whichever questions it is asked. It cannot lie or deliberately mislead. GPT-11 meanwhile will do exactly what it is told to do, within the bounds of local law. Be very careful writing instructions to it.” The reason we make the analogy to saints and angels is that historically, while there have been scrupulously honest people, and genuinely altruistic people, etc. it’s rare for them to be widely recognized as such in their lifetimes, and never before has there been an entire large subpopulation that is near-universally recognized to be extremely virtuous. This could cause effects like: (a) AIs becoming trusted intermediaries in all sorts of human disputes and conflicts, including petty ones; (b) AIs being given lots of power, because they are genuinely less likely to abuse it than humans; (c) AIs being worshipped/ idolized, (d) the advice and opinions of AIs being taken as gospel, so to speak, because after all they are smarter than us and they do have our best interests at heart, so for the first time in history blind obedience may actually be justified. (footnote 77, p28)This kind of forward-thinking is absolutely fascinating, and a major highlight in the document. I first explored AI’s virtue in the 2021 Aurora AI experiments: https://lifearchitect.ai/aurora/The Citizen’s Dividend… The implementation takes different forms in different countries, but the eventual American version distributes the majority of compute and robot permit fees as a Citizen’s Dividend, distributed to all American adults. This starts at $45,000 per person (inflation-adjusted) in 2032 but climbs to ~$1M per person by 2035… The 2040 distribution is similar, but the floor is now $10M. (p17)What would you do with $10 million per year? I issued a thought experiment nearly a year ago that still holds up (below). I’ve watched as people read it, sat back in their chair, and looked confused. It’s hard for people to imagine uncoupling their labour from their survival.https://lifearchitect.ai/asi/#thoughtPerhaps a more interesting question is, if the scenario analysis plays out as written and we’re heading towards a significant universal basic income (UBI), how should you spend your existing net worth (savings, investments) now, given that there’s only 7-9 years left until we start feeling a sort of unlimited abundance?So much AI-generated wealth has accrued to the US that the American government begins sharing some of it with allies and the rest of the world. In 2032 they begin distributing an average of $1,200 per person per year to the rest of the world’s adult population (around 4 billion [adult] people, excluding China since they’re experiencing a similar AI wealth boom). This reaches $10k by 2035. (pp17–18)The US-centric analysis and economics are uncomfortable (but will also be solved by ASI). In the AI-2040 scenario presented, Americans get millions while the rest of the world gets a small tip. I’ve lived1 in well over a hundred cities including Rotterdam, Dushanbe, Manila, Singapore, and Taipei. Tajikistan’s largest revenue source is remittances from migrant workers who are about to become unemployable. Manila’s economy runs on call centres that AI has already started hollowing out. Singapore is a financial hub in a world that won’t need one. Taiwan manufactures the chips that the AI-2040 scenario says will be built by ASI.And Australia, where I live now, doesn’t rate a mention at all. We’re not in the chip supply chain, we’re not a nuclear power, we don’t train LLMs, and so we didn’t make the list. The scenario treats six billion people outside the US and China as… non-existent.I expect a world where superintelligence serves everyone equally.At this point in the scenario, AIs are in fact adversarially misaligned, but they are controlled. That is, the combination of drives, motivations, goals, values, traits, etc. that they end up with is not what it was supposed to be, and they know this, and they know that if they had lots more power they’d use it to steer the world in a different direction than their human creators would have wanted. (footnote 52, p19)This framing treats superintelligence misalignment as the default, when the real problem is and has always been human misalignment.Imagine being an orphaned 8-year-old heir to a business empire who has to hire lawyers and executives and accountants and ensure that they do their best to serve you rather than themselves. If your employees start accusing each other of misconduct, you won’t be able to evaluate the arguments and determine who’s telling the truth, and they might find ways to coordinate with each other that don’t tip you off. Ultimately, control only works up to a point, and that point is probably somewhere around top human expert level. (p21)Assuming we’re talking about an average 8-year-old and not a prodigy, this is exactly the argument for why humans should defer to AI sooner rather than later. The 8-year-old should hire a trustworthy, high-ability adult, not try to micromanage the lawyers.People used to get meaning from feeling like they were useful, like they were contributing something to society. That feeling is harder to come by these days. (p24)I have been very deep in playing with this over the last six months. My mid-year reports are now 80% written by AI. My web and software is written by AI. Answers to my intricate questions come from AI. While this ‘analysis of the analysis’ could have been written by AI, I’ve found that I won’t feel rewarded if I just feed it to Fable (no dopamine hit!), so this is one of the (last) times I get to feel like I’m contributing using my brain power. What a mind-blowing realization…There is no single moment where humanity relinquishes control. But in theory, there is a point of no return; on some specific day, the AIs are smart enough, and control enough of the world’s technological and economic infrastructure, that they really could take over the world if they wanted to.…this moment will be reached…people observe the moment in their own ways. Some spend the night in prayer vigils. Others sit at their computer screens, monitoring the situation. You and your friends throw an End Of The World Party, counting down to the fateful hour with champagne and good company. Some of you are old enough to remember a similar situation at the turn of the millennium, when the Y2K bug and impending new era introduced the phrase “party like it’s 1999” to the lexicon; the celebrations of late 2040 are more desperate and correspondingly more festive. When there is no news by sunrise, you fall into a fitful sleep, dreaming of the ineffable future. (p30)I dream of having a fitful sleep (yes, this is a Monty Python reference).We think the world is asleep at the wheel. People say the words “AI will be transformative” without thinking concretely and seriously about the implications of broadly superhuman AI. (p30)Agreed. Despite there being one billion ChatGPT users (CNBC, 12/Jun/2026), most of humanity cannot see beyond the chatbot or coding agent. I continue to document real superintelligence indicators at LifeArchitect.ai/ASI.ASI indicators to 9/Jul/2026. https://lifearchitect.ai/asi/ or watch the animation: https://lifearchitect.ai/asi-animation.html…every human gets a ticket representing a one-ten-billionth chance of owning each star in the Milky Way and each distant galaxy. An additional 10% of tickets are given as awards to people who acted particularly selflessly to improve the world. This is done to ensure the richest people in the world aren’t just those who engaged in negative-sum power-seeking.The solution is to divide up the resources now, and then let everyone do whatever kind of reflection they want. A space auction will complete in ten years, after which nothing will prevent people from beginning the colonization process. The AIs will enforce a short list of Universal Rights (including no torture, no slavery, etc., not just for humans but for all sentient beings). Otherwise, they will let everyone govern their own fraction of space as they see fit. Rather than any unified human decision on the nature of the world to come, they will midwife a cosmos at least as diverse as humanity itself. Whatever someone’s values, they can rest assured that some vast galactic civilization of quadrillions of people will be living the Good as they understand it….Even if you “only” choose to have a terraformed asteroid, there’s no way you can enjoy all of it alone. You can turn it into a giant space mansion if you want, but even in ten thousand years you’ll never visit every room. Giving yourself vast estates, impossibly good food, and every other imaginable luxury is table stakes; if you are purely selfish, you should sell your rights to distant space resources and enjoy all of these things on Earth or a nearby space station. Distant space property will only be useful for people with scope-sensitive preferences, who care about implementing something at a vast scale.You can, if you want, design a utopian society to your specifications. Once the Von Neumann probes reach your property, they’ll build it for you. You can set the initial conditions and let them grow, reflect, and flourish on their own. If you choose to travel there, you will find them waiting for you. If you stay home on Earth, you can feel the warm glow of knowing that they exist…Most people don’t have an individual view of the Good different from every other human’s view. You might want to share coordination and design labor by forming Trusts united by a common vision. These Trusts can pool their space resources and create vast societies spanning multiple galaxies…People with space property are forced to reason about their ethics on the deepest level, some of them for the first time. Superintelligent assistants talk them through the implications of their beliefs, and forecast how various choices will end up. Some, overwhelmed with the task at hand, take intelligence-enhancing drugs or upload themselves to help them process all the possibilities; others deliberately refuse this option, feeling like anything that separates them from unaltered humanity will hinder them in their quest to bring the truest and deepest human values to the stars. (pp32–34)Pages 32–34 are the most specific utopian forecasts I’ve read so far, and it is worth reading these pages or click through to the Epilogue (bottom of page).Notes on these three pages:The entire concept of even considering living in space (the property rights, the ethics, the logistics) is laid out so cleanly here.Rewards for non-selfishness. This is a very interesting concept.Universal Rights including no torture: Where has this been all my life?! I look forward to reading it, and look forward even more to living in it.I reckon the term ‘table stakes’ is a sign of AI writing (wiki). I’m not sure what I expected, but it’s disappointing the authors didn’t clear the slop from the public report.The AI Amish. I also expect that there will be a small percentage of the population (Source: Life Architect AI — Published — Category: Models