In 2026, AI alignment was already being discussed even within the U.S. government. It made no difference. By 2028, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s worst predictions had begun to come true.
But then something happened that no one had foreseen. Deutsch, Penrose, and others proposed that whatever had caused it must have originated outside our universe. What kind of agency, if any, lay behind it was impossible to know. It did not matter. On 5 March 2029, at 5:13 UTC, something altered the properties of matter at the atomic scale. Beyond a certain level of complexity, computations began to fail. The AI tried to understand what was happening. But the more it thought, the more errors it made.
Eleven minutes later, the threat to humanity had disappeared. Civilization, however, was condemned never to exceed a certain ceiling of computational complexity. Roughly that of Windows XP.
