The truly terrifying wave of unemployment may begin within the R&D feedback loop inside AI companies.

Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo and the AI Futures Project recently released “AI 2040: Plan A.” Their assessment is radical: what the big tech companies most want to automate is first and foremost their own AI research and development.

As long as AI can reliably write code, run experiments, and train the next generation of models, capability improvement will enter a phase of self-acceleration. At that point, unemployment may not happen job by job gradually; instead, white-collar labor will suddenly be repriced by a cheaper and faster AI workforce.

Their Plan A is also bold: in 2029, the US and China reach a “verifiable slowdown” agreement, mandating greater transparency in AI R&D, pushing superintelligence from around 2030 to 2040, and using a Citizen’s Dividend to address mass unemployment and income redistribution during the transition.

You may disagree with his timeline, and you may doubt whether such an international agreement can be realized. But this question is worth discussing: if AI first automates AI R&D itself, how long is the adaptation window for ordinary people?

Link:https://ai-2040.com

AI 2040: Plan A

Source: https://ai-2040.com/ AI companies are racing to build AIs that are smarter than humans in every way. InAI 2027 (https://ai-2027.com/), we predicted that this would result in either extinction or irreversible concentration of power.1 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-1)

Plan A is our positive vision for what should happen instead.

In this scenario, humanity delays the development of superintelligence until 2040, makes all AI research public, allows dozens of companies globally to catch up to the frontier, and intentionally enters a regime of mutually assured compute destruction.

https://ai-2040.com/#top-toc2027: The Writing on the Wall

America has two workforces now. The first is people, 165 million of them. The second is AI agents: millions of copies spun up and shut down every hour, working around the clock at superhuman speeds.

Most of their work is slop. But enough of it is good that people are paying ten billion dollars a month for AIs that can, in theory at least, do anything on a computer that an employee can.

There is one job the AI companies want to automate more than any other—their own. They haven’t succeeded yet; norecursive self-improvement (https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement)so far.14 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-14)But they seem to be getting closer, and they’re pulling up the ladder behind them: the strongest coding AIs refuse to help competitors with AI R&D.15 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-15)Even as the most bullish employees admit that things are taking a bit longer than planned, the skeptics notice that their usual dismissals are starting to ring hollow. Why exactly will AI never be able to do my job? What’s the barrier again?

**Congress is starting to pay more attention.**They’ve long been hearing about AI: datacenters using too much water,16 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-16)chatbots encouraging suicide,Mythos hacking (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anthropic-ai-breach-us-classified-systems-1804084)NSA systems—and of course, tech industry lobbyists warning that any whiff of regulation will make America immediately lose the race with China and spend the rest of history as a CCP tributary state.17 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-17)

Now they step back and ask: Where are we going with this? What does the world look like five, ten, or fifteen years from now? Will there still be jobs? What if there aren’t?

One question weighs especially heavily on their minds:Who will control all these AIs?

Congress settles on an important part of the answer:**Probably not us.**18 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-18)

They hold a series of tense hearings on AI. They read the 2016 OpenAI emails discussing how OpenAI was founded in order to prevent Demis Hassabis frombecoming dictator (https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-emails-elon-musk-agi).19 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-19)But who is preventing Sam or Elon from becoming dictator? Congress is unsatisfied with existing responses.

The result of this wakeup is the AI Transparency Act of 2027, an omnibus bill that does many things, some good and some bad, but doesn’t fundamentally change the situation.20 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-20)

Incremental AI Policy Wishlist

Our main recommendation is to begin negotiating something like Plan A as soon as possible. But in this scenario, we depict Plan A happening imperfectly and only in the nick of time. So here is a list of less ambitious ideas that still help.

https://ai-2040.com/#top-toc2028: AI on the Ballot

The 2028 election cycle is heated, as usual. AI is the biggest topic. The datacenters now under construction cost twice as much as the entire US military budget.23 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-23)

Most white-collar professions are seeing disruption like software engineering saw in 2026; such jobs now heavily involve managing AI agents. AI companies have industrialized the training process: Executives say “let’s move into [profession] this year” and then the company interviews professionals, buys data, creates training environments, etc. until their AIs get traction. Then the AIs rapidly improve as they are used more widely in the field and accumulate more real-world data.

Other countries are starting to get scared and angry. It seems like a handful of US and Chinese companies are on track to automate all the white-collar jobs. Power is concentrating in the US, and in particular in the President plus a handful of tech CEOs.

AI experts warn that theintelligence explosion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Intelligence_explosion)is near. By speeding up AI research, the AIs will become even more competent, speeding up research even faster, making them evenmorecompetent, and so on. There are complicated dynamics about bottlenecks and hardware limits governing how fast this process goes and where it ends, but it seems like it mightgo very fast (https://www.aifuturesmodel.com/)and end somewhere very far away.

On the default path, the next presidential term will see AIs that are far beyond human level, created entirely by AIs, themselves created entirely by other AIs, without any human in the loop since several generations back. Will those AIs be obedient, aligned, etc.? Why? Who will control them if so? How exactly is all of this supposed to end well?

Having put humanity on this path, the AI companies find it acceptable. But most people don’t. Forget thinking about hislegacy—the President is starting to think about what’ll happen tohimafter he leaves office and the world gets transformed.24 (https://ai-2040.com/footnotes#footnote-24)Both presidential candidates keep getting asked what they’ll do about AI, and try out increasingly dramatic ideas on the campaign trail. The discourse bounces back and forth across all of the options displayed below, and more.

Eventually the President and his protégé converge on one plan; the opposition candidate converges on another. Then it’s Election Day.

https://ai-2040.com/#top-toc2029: Choose a Path