We were trying to depict an especially slow and comprehensible scenario, among plausible scenarios.

In the real world, events often proceed in strange ways. Decades sometimes happen in weeks; and the world is never the same again.

If we were trying to depict a world as brittle and fragile as the real world seems to be, we could have had Galvanic just tell Sable to improve itself as much as possible. We could have written that this made it easy for Sable to achieve superintelligence — which is entirely plausible. The story could have leapt directly from the opening of Chapter 7 to the contents of Chapter 9.

Reality allows for technological leaps like that, as when the world woke up on the morning of August 6, 1945, to news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. In 2021, experts were saying that “AI won’t master human language anytime soon”; in 2022, ChatGPT shocked the world and became the quickest-adopted app of all time.

Real history often advances in unpredictable bursts. It often doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time, to those actually living through it. Real life is often stranger than fiction.^* But in a fictional scenario, going too quickly would have made the scenario feel less plausible.

In the story we wrote, we tried to keep things sounding plausible, while also keeping them actually relatively plausible.

And, of course, we kept trying to convey just how many options an escaped AI would have at its disposal.