This A.I. Forecast Predicts Storms Ahead

The year is 2027. Powerful artificial intelligence systems are becoming smarter than humans, and are wreaking havoc on the global order. Chinese spies have stolen America’s A.I. secrets, and the White House is rushing to retaliate. Inside a leading A.I. lab, engineers are spooked to discover that their models are starting to deceive them, raising the possibility that they’ll go rogue.

These aren’t scenes from a sci-fi screenplay. They’re scenarios envisioned by a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif., called the A.I. Futures Project, which has spent the past year trying to predict what the world will look like over the next few years, as increasingly powerful A.I. systems are developed.

The project is led by Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who left the company last year over his concerns that it was acting recklessly.

While at OpenAI, where he was on the governance team, Mr. Kokotajlo wrote detailed internal reports about how the race for artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — a fuzzy term for human-level machine intelligence — might unfold. After leaving, he teamed up with Eli Lifland, an A.I. researcher who had a track record of accurately forecasting world events. They got to work trying to predict A.I.’s next wave.

The result is “AI 2027,” a report and website released this week that describes, in a detailed fictional scenario, what could happen if A.I. systems surpass human-level intelligence — which the authors expect to happen in the next two to three years.

“We predict that A.I.s will continue to improve to the point where they’re fully autonomous agents that are better than humans at everything by the end of 2027 or so,” Mr. Kokotajlo said in a recent interview.