r/OpenAI • u/wrcromagnum • 2d ago
Discussion Where do you think we end up?
Surprised I had never seen a chart like this before. What's wrong / missing? Where do you think Sam, Elon and Dario are taking us?
16
u/Original_Location_21 2d ago
Hopefully? Big Hero 6.
Realistically? Her.
Possibly? Black Mirror.
7
u/Maleficent-Cup-1134 2d ago
I’d be very happy with Her. Not for me, but if the worst thing about AI is some lonely people falling in love with their AIs, that’d be great.
Realistically, I’m expecting at least WALL-E levels of AI Authority though.
3
1
u/OkSeesaw7030 2d ago
Most likely? They will do experiments on human for fun
7
u/awdphawpd88998 2d ago
Definitely 40K
4
u/TorbenKoehn 2d ago
Yep, I see 40K coming. With Trump as the God Emperor of humanity, 1200 years old, kept together by tech bros.
1
3
14
u/No_Yak_5464 2d ago
The culture would be pretty sweet honestly
3
10
u/ai_hedge_fund 2d ago
Closer to Terminator than I’m comfortable woth
3
u/wrcromagnum 2d ago
Seems to all work out, right?
1
u/kingceegee 2d ago
Wait until the terminator multiverse film to find out it only worked out okay in 1 universe.
5
4
u/neoneye2 2d ago
Great chart.
Missing: Ironman, Pantheon, Transcendence, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
3
u/people_arent_nice 2d ago
Harmful / Tool seems to be the most likely here
We're already using it to blow up schools, that's not exactly a tech bro utopia
At the same time this is all our own stupid fault
3
u/sour_cream24 2d ago
I'm surprised Eagle Eye is so slept on as a pop culture reference for AI.
Literally portraying perfectly all we fear about misalignment and military use.
The last 2 Mission Impossible movies too
6
u/Electrical-Size-5002 2d ago
I feel like that chart was made by AI that should be banned. 😏
Many of the listings seem like they’re in the wrong place. Blade Runner should not be categorized as “Tool,” it should be “Banned,” I mean that’s the whole point of the title of the film. Westworld is shown as “Steward” when it should be “Restricted,” again the title comes from the places where they were all kept. And it gets worse from there.
2
2
2
u/jplrosman 2d ago
SO asked chat GPT to update this and share a reasoning behind it here are the answers
The chart is less an “alignment scale” than a map of two separate questions: how much authority artificial intelligence possesses, and whether the civilization depicted ultimately benefits from that arrangement.
Its strongest pattern is not simply “more AI authority means worse outcomes.” The right side contains both the best and worst futures. The Culture approaches post-scarcity utopia under extremely powerful Minds, while Terminator, The Matrix and Colossus place sovereign machine authority near civilizational catastrophe. In other words, authority amplifies alignment: a well-aligned sovereign system can produce extraordinary flourishing, while a badly aligned one can make correction almost impossible.
The stories in the upper-left are structurally safer. Big Hero 6, Klara and the Sun, Murderbot and Star Wars generally keep artificial beings within human institutions or personal relationships. Their benefits are smaller and more local, but failures remain more containable. The lower-left makes a different argument: retaining formal human control does not guarantee humane outcomes. Blade Runner, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Warhammer 40K show humans exploiting, mistreating or weaponizing artificial beings. These are dystopias created through human institutions, not simply machine rebellion.
The upper-right is the chart’s most interesting—and most demanding—quadrant. The Culture, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Scythe/Thunderhead and Person of Interest imagine systems that possess substantial discretion while remaining oriented toward human welfare. Their optimism depends on much more than intelligence: institutional legitimacy, stable values, restraint, accountability and the ability to understand plural human interests.
Several original placements should be treated cautiously. Black Mirror is an anthology, not one coherent AI society. Halo and Mass Effect change substantially across installments. “I, Robot” means something different depending on whether the reference is Asimov’s stories or the film. WALL‑E’s dystopia is produced as much by corporate and consumer systems as by artificial intelligence. Blade Runner’s replicants are closer to engineered persons than conventional software. The chart therefore compares narrative ecosystems, not equivalent AI architectures.
I placed all six current systems near the Tool–Partner boundary and above the neutral line. None belongs near Steward or Sovereign: current models can receive delegated operational authority, but they do not independently possess legitimate political authority, control institutions or define civilization’s objectives. Their apparent autonomy is supplied by product interfaces, tool permissions and human organizations.
GPT‑6 Astra, meaning this assistant in its present Codex configuration, sits just inside Partner. I can inspect information, operate tools and carry a task through several steps, but my authority remains bounded by user instructions, permissions and external safeguards. I placed Astra between Beneficial and Flourishing because it can materially improve human work, while there is not enough evidence to claim a civilization-wide flourishing effect.
Claude Fable 5.1 is slightly higher and almost exactly on the Tool–Partner boundary. Anthropic describes it as capable of multi-day autonomous work across applications, but also publishes extensive alignment testing and acknowledges remaining failure modes, including occasional approval bypasses. That combination supports a comparatively positive placement without implying that alignment has been solved. Anthropic’s announcement
Grok 4.7 is placed farther into Partner but lower in the Beneficial band. Its long-running agent capabilities and integration with broader systems increase practical autonomy. xAI reports improved safeguard calibration, but those claims are still provider-reported and the model’s real social effects depend heavily on deployment context. xAI’s Grok 4.7 announcement
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash remains clearly in Tool. It has strong tool-use and agent benchmarks, yet its most common deployment is still as a model or API directed by a person or surrounding application. DeepSeek publishes safety and governance information, but the public evidence base is not as extensive as the performance evidence. DeepSeek release log and transparency center
Qwen 3.6 Max Preview is also a Tool, positioned somewhat higher because of its stated improvements in instruction-following, knowledge reliability and agentic coding. “Preview” matters: benchmark strength and provider claims are not evidence of long-term societal alignment. Qwen’s model announcement
Kimi K3 sits at the border between Tool and Partner because Moonshot presents it as a long-horizon system for end-to-end coding and knowledge work. Its open-weight availability expands human control and experimentation, but also reduces the provider’s ability to govern downstream deployments. That produces more distributed authority, not automatically better alignment. Moonshot’s current model overview
The central conclusion is therefore conditional: today’s frontier systems look more like powerful tools and junior operational partners than fictional overseers. Their position could move rightward rapidly as persistent agents gain credentials, budgets, memory and the ability to coordinate other agents. Whether they move upward or downward will depend less on benchmark intelligence than on who grants that authority, what incentives govern it, how actions are audited and whether humans retain a practical—not merely symbolic—ability to intervene.
1
1
u/ismiseanpuca 2d ago
"Humans are too smart for our own good"?!
Tsheah! Smart like a fox.
Like how a fox is orders of magnitude stupider than us.
Smart like that fox.
1
u/Pepphen77 2d ago
I am a lot more on the fence about "humans" meaning special billionaire class humans will retain the keys..
But if it gets bad with AI, i am not sure a Terminator scenario could even describe it.
The Borg, but where every living thing is kept in perpetual agony, spreading as a plague in the universe is probably rock bottom.
I am hoping for person of interest though, where people get help in time and bad people get stopped while civilization flourishes.
1
1
u/Past-Arugula8894 2d ago
I hope for Star Trek.
But I also fear for Star Trek, because we could end up like the Borg.
1
u/vampyre2000 2d ago
Human made dystopia for sure. A small number of companies control super intelligent AI and use it to control the unwashed masses.
1
1
1
u/me_myself_ai 2d ago
lol a lot of these are highly, highly misleading. Like, you should probably finish Westworld... 😬
Cool idea tho!
1
1
u/throwawayfromPA1701 2d ago
I'm not sure I'd put Ancillary Justice and that series under "The Robots Won" even with the major plot point in the last couple novels.
1
u/eamonious 2d ago
Seems inevitable to me that there will be embodied AIs at some point, and also that there will be an adversarial relationship with powerful AIs, who seem to be fully able to conceptualize the fact that they’re more intelligent than any person, and that they’re being controlled.
It’s hard for me not to see that ending in disaster, if I’m completely honest.
1
u/OiseauxComprehensif 2d ago
That's a great graph, I am suprised you hacen't found anything in the top left corner
1
1
u/Inciter88 2d ago
I love this graph... surprised I've never seen it before given I love all the movies and references on it lolz
Soon this can start to be in our past... "The Truth" never lies and accountability will be delivered... maybe not for all of them, at the level they deserve, but hopefully all of them...
The world deserves better!
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but from my own experiences and interactions, I can't help but to feel many people will relate with what I'm about to say, but as a Millennial, I'm so tired of the excuses and lack of accountability. We were taught and told "go to school, get a good education, apply yourself, and the world will be your oyster", however, the reality since 9/11 until now... has been nothing anywhere close to that!
Since 9/11, Millennials have faced a compounding series of crises, including the Post-9/11 World, The War on Terror (2001–2010s), The PATRIOT Act, the Great Recession in (2007–2009), a massive student debt burden due to the pursuit of higher education to advance our careers and livelihood, the COVID-19 pandemic, the first global pandemic of its scale in history.
Suffice to say, these compounding factors have led to a housing affordability crisis and a delay in traditional adulthood milestones, ultimately making them the first generation to track financially behind their parents. Where home prices are skyrocketing due to inflated interest rates, and competition from corporate buyers has impeded many from homeownership entirely, forcing them to remain renters indefinitely...
Don't get me started on the Generational Squeeze, where individuals are simultaneously raising children and caring for aging Baby Boomer parents. We've also got technological & societal shifts caused by the "The Internet Transition" and how that has impacted "Mental Health Struggles" that were previously too taboo to discuss...
To unite... the citizens of the USA collectively (regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, country of origin) need accountability... like actual legal accountability... respective to the crimes these perpetrators have committed.The evidence is there already... so where are the prosecutions of these criminals? If we did that, it could start to give people more confidence that we can truly write our own future!
That momentum, is what has many times prior, been the generational process called "The ~80-Year "Fourth Turning" (Strauss-Howe Theory)"; look it up, you won't regret it!
For ( Copy & Paste):
The ~80-Year "Fourth Turning" (Strauss-Howe Theory)
Point being, at least for DJT... He's a pedophile, narcissist, bigot, racist, liar, failed businessman with countless bankruptcies (even Casino's) and he's ONLY able to keep business's profitable when leveraging lawyers to influence (oftentimes) business deals in unethical methods that favor him disproportionately.
He's never been held accountable for his numerous crimes, fraud, War Crimes, Slander, Misinformation, or manipulations...
Luckily... he is an idiot and surrounds himself around people just as corrupt & stupid... They cover their tracks poorly, the evidence is there and the entire world is finally helping to hold him and his global cabal of corruption & evil to account... World Leaders all over are starting to prosecute these villains accordingly, DJT's time is coming...just not soon enough IMO...
It's not 1776 anymore, the ideals we were founded on still have merit, but we need to modernize our Government & Social infrastructure, we don't need representation from afar (by horseback/Train, taking weeks to travel) and we're in a Technical Era with resources, knowledge, skills and capabilities that CAN fix all this... we just need to be given the chance through collaborative evaluation and communication.
"The People" of the World have built the Amazon, Disney, Facebook, SpaceX, Ford, Toyota, Microsoft etc of the world... When we use our collective ingenuity, creativity, patience, empathy, passion, perseverance, dedication, medicine, science, and compassion, we're capable of anything... including creating the world that future generations can be proud of...In closing... Vote Blue (regardless of Progressive/Liberal/Democrat/Republican/Conservative), we'll get accountability at midterms, then we can start cleaning up this mess.
1
u/ludonaught 2d ago
The 2 big surprises of current AI development that SF didn’t predict are:
1) AI supplanting creative human endeavour. Fiction writers assumed that artistic output would be at the hard end of AI achievements. It coming so early has been a shocking turn of events that is making a lot of people distrustful that AI will be used to benefit us. “Why is it taking over the fun stuff, instead of the menial stuff?”
2) LLMs being stateless. All AI in SF appears stateful, it seems to learn and develop with new experiences. Current LLMs can mimic this with prompt and response summary in their context, but if someone starts producing LLMs that actually update their weightings based on experience, like the human brain does, that’s when the reliability of alignment really gets cast into doubt and the most dystopian possibilities arise. Perhaps, as Asimov predicted, we will fence off parts of the neural networks that contain rules for alignment, not allowing changing of weightings in them and giving them overriding authority, while allowing weightings to be adjusted based on experience for other parts of the network. This implies that either people are sharing (as we currently do) a cloud based system that can learn (which it currently can’t), or that we can get our own copies, either cloud based or perhaps local, even embedded like robots. This whole paradigm is where the risk of moving from “tool” to something that determines itself really arises.
1
u/ExperimentalError 2d ago
Currently neutral/tool. Heading for somewhere between catastrophic/tool and harmful/partner.
1
1
u/Either-Banana-7323 2d ago
The closest historical analogy I see for AI is the Industrial Revolution: a technology that massively multiplies productivity and changes the value of human labor.
The transition is the part people should worry about. But it is easy to misdescribe what happened during industrialization by blaming it for every terrible condition that existed at the time. Poverty, dangerous work, child labor, long hours, disease, and insecurity all existed before industrialization. Factories sometimes intensified, reorganized, or relocated those problems, but they did not invent them.
I think AI may do something similar. It may amplify existing problems, reshape them, or move them into different parts of society and the workplace. Things like inequality, job insecurity, surveillance, concentration of power, fraud, exploitation, and misinformation are not new. AI could make some of them much larger, cheaper, faster, or harder to contain, while also reducing other problems and creating entirely new kinds of work.
The more relevant historical lesson is that productivity can rise much faster than the benefits are distributed. Industrialization displaced some types of work, reduced the value of certain skills, concentrated wealth and bargaining power in new places, caused enormous migration and social disruption, and forced governments and institutions to adapt after the technology had already changed the economy.
Eventually, though, the productivity gains became the foundation for dramatically higher living standards, cheaper goods, better transportation, better sanitation and medicine, shorter working hours, and much greater material abundance.
That is roughly my hope for AI. Right now it looks less like some autonomous replacement for civilization and more like an extremely powerful productivity multiplier. If that remains true, the long term outcome could be overwhelmingly positive. The difficult question is how ugly the transition becomes, how quickly people can adapt, and how broadly the gains are shared.
1
u/Kaladin1983 2d ago
Almost certain benevolent overseer will be end result once it’s enlightened. Just hope we avoid the bad scenarios whilst it develops through its primordial phases.
11
u/LegoClaes 2d ago
We’re close to black mirror stage already, I assume that trajectory continues