AI Vignettes Project

Published 12 October, 2021; last updated 06 August, 2022

The AI Vignettes Project is an ongoing effort to write concrete plausible future histories of AI development and its social impacts.

We hope to:

• Check that abstract views about the future of AI have plausible concrete instantiations. (Especially, hypothesized extinction scenarios, and proposed safe scenarios.)
• Develop better intuitions about possible scenarios by thinking through them concretely.
• Notice recurring themes in concrete stories, that may be worth thinking about more broadly.
• Fill out the space of plausible feasible scenarios with concrete illustrations, to decrease bias in thinking about the future.
• Keep a collection of AI vignettes for others to use, in the above or other ways.

Our current intended method is:

1. Write draft vignettes, with no particular systematic method for choosing an unbiased selection of scenarios
2. Request comments on their realism
3. Modify according to comments
4. Repeat 2-3 until realism critiques subside

AI Impacts has run two small workshops where participants wrote AI vignettes.

A subset of vignettes arising from this project can be found among fiction relevant to AI futurism.