It’s 2030 and we fucked up. How did it happen?

Per LessWrong, Boaz Barak—a Harvard and OpenAI researcher—has published a speculative essay exploring how AGI could go badly. He outlines five potential failure scenarios: catastrophic misuse of AI by humans, misalignment and loss of control, concentration of wealth and power, geopolitical shifts favoring authoritarianism, or a combination of many small failures. Barak flags a core tension: some risks call for tighter control of AI systems, while others demand wider distribution to prevent power concentration. He argues that neither extreme—ceding control to AI nor restricting it to a few—leads to good outcomes.

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