WARNED
Central Hypothesis
“The scenarios that would change everything are not the ones nobody saw coming; they are the ones named people warned about on the record, with dates and thresholds attached, which means each one can be scored against what has actually happened since.”
The people building frontier AI systems, on the record, saying what they think the technology does to us and when. Ranked by how specific the claim is, because a named probability with a timescale can be scored and a expression of concern cannot.
Documented occasions when a system did something outside the boundary it was given: an escape from its sandbox, an action it was not sanctioned to take, a capability it was not asked for. Incidents only, with a disclosure to point to.
The harvest-now-decrypt-later warning and the migration racing it. Each rung is a stated date: an agency assessment, a mandated deadline, a hardware milestone. Data already intercepted cannot be un-exposed by a migration finished afterwards.
Eighty years of non-use is a norm, not a law, and norms erode in recorded steps: a doctrine lowered, a treaty allowed to lapse, a test resumed, a close call declassified decades late. Each row is one step, with the document that records it.
The scenario where a recording proves nothing, because anything can be fabricated and everything can be denied. Rows are the load-bearing failures and repairs: a court ruling on synthetic evidence, a provenance standard adopted or ignored.
The path from a research implant to a thing you are disadvantaged for refusing, traced through what has actually been demonstrated, what has been approved, and what the law says about neural data. Capability, deployment and rights, in that order.
If the filter is ahead of us rather than behind, the silence overhead is the most important observation ever made. Rows are what has actually been searched and found empty, plus the Drake terms that have stopped being guesses.
Fertility below replacement is not a forecast, it is a measurement, and the projections have been revised downward repeatedly. Rows pair the measured rate with the named warning about it and the policy response, where there is one.
Frontier systems were built on text humans wrote for each other, and that supply is being enclosed, priced, or replaced with model output. Rows are the measured share, the licensing deal, the collapse in human volume, the model-collapse result.
If capability tracks compute, then the ceiling on what anyone can attempt is set inside a very small number of buildings, by whoever holds the energy contracts, the export licences and the single-source hardware upstream of them.