*This essay was submitted to the* [*AI Progress Essay Contest*](https://www.metaculus.com/project/ai-fortified-essay-contest/)*, an initiative that focused on the timing and impact of transformative artificial intelligence. You can read the results of the contest and the winning essays* [*here*](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11429/results-from-the-ai-progress-essay-contest/)*.*

  


It's Sunday afternoon. You arrive home from the service with your family and find a cardboard tube on your porch, as usual. You take the tube into your study, and your digital personal assistant’s voice rings out “Sir, permission to record your reaction for training purposes?” You hastily murmur your assent and, after a moment’s pause, slightly less hastily open the tube.

  


Your DPA was calibrated not to surprise you with bad news; suspense was for positive events. Two eyes (worked into the carpentry of the place) open, one above and one on top of your desk.

  


You slide out your Sunday Edition SubStack Times (only a handful of companies successfully made the great transition between web 2 and web 3, and SubStack had been one of them, realizing that there was in fact still a market for those small town newsprint operations). Another graced your desk: Metaculus News was always the front page, but today your eyes nearly popped out of your head as the headline PERSONAL FUSION PROTOTYPE: VIABLE seemingly leapt from the page. A mix of emotions well up inside you, chief among these lead to a quick prayer for the souls of the first Martian colony who could have benefited from such a development. Almost from habit alone you unfold the paper and your eyes nearly popped

“Sir is the figure too low?”

“You know very well it's not!”

“I take it you're pleased with your high-risk investment results?”

 “Pleased! It's too much!”

You consider where to send enough bitcoins to fund an eighth colony. Come to think of it...

  


“Sir as your legal adviser founding private colonies is banned by treaty”

  


This bordered on entirely too cheeky, to an extent that bespoke danger to the thinker.

  


“Sir I have a philanthropy proposal”

  


Note to self: I definitely need to alter the proportion of my compute going to pure mining. Ever since the Great Transition, there were international treaties governing the maximum compute power allotted to a single person. It was one of the most sensible precautions taken in all of history.

  


“Alright Jeeves what's your proposal?”

“After your standard tithe we could expand the full ride scholarship program to 50 or more high schools beyond your current alma mater, 1/3 to the arts and the remainder to poverty reduction “

“40 schools, a quarter to the arts, and add the remainder to the poverty reduction fund”

A poverty reduction fund wasn't as urgent as it used to be, but you never liked your DPA to be too assuming. So few people died deaths of poverty these days that every single death was now a matter of public record and research (suitably anonymized of course).



---

 

So went a not so atypical Sunday afternoon in a saner world.