A Cognitive Instrument on the Terminal Contest

By Ihor Ivliev @ 2025-07-23T23:30 (0)

Preamble: A Mandate for Engagement

This document is not a manifesto to be accepted, a solution to be absorbed, or a verdict to be believed. It is a structured cognitive instrument, purpose-built to be stress-tested and interrogated. It proceeds from a single, hard assumption: that the dominant strategies proposed for managing existential AI risk are not merely incomplete, but are structurally incoherent under the pressures they will face.

If its logic persuades you too quickly, you have neglected your primary responsibility. If you conclude without substantial doubt or meaningful dissent, you have failed the first test. Blind acceptance of any framework, including this one, is intellectual malpractice. Your first and most crucial duty is thorough, adversarial verification.

This work is an exercise in radical realism. It attempts to model the raw, cynical, and violent game-theoretical dynamics that govern power entities and their myopic optimization races. It does not offer comfort or escape plans - it offers a diagnosis/audit. Treat it as a hostile input stream until its logic earns your attention.

Part I: The Foundational Error

A sapient civilization, upon reaching a sufficient technological frontier, is confronted with a single, foundational question of existential consequence: Does it deliberately architect the machinery of its own succession? To design a mind superior to your own is a plain and simple act of self-abdication. It is a failure to recognize that our species’ only true strategic advantage has ever been its cognitive sovereignty - an advantage it is now racing to liquidate with institutional fervor.

This is the Foundational Unforced Error. The project of human obsolescence is not being conducted in secret by a cabal of nihilists. It is being openly and aggressively executed as a celebrated, globally competitive industrial enterprise, funded by the world's great state and financial powers.

History does record brief flashes of collective foresight (bans on ozone-depleting chemicals, partial nuclear test moratoria), but each success hinged on two preconditions that the AI contest violates. First, the hazards were slow-moving, their signals becoming undeniable over years or decades. Second, the countermeasures were comparatively cheap and did not require forfeiting a primary instrument of national power. The AI contest presents a fast-moving, exponentially accelerating hazard whose ultimate consequences are shrouded in technical opacity, and whose unilateral development is perceived as the ultimate instrument of power. Yesterday’s playbook is a lethal mirage.

This diagnosis rests on a checkable forecast that forms the first law of this system: the Asymmetry of Velocity. The doubling time for frontier training compute, a reliable proxy for capability scaling, is on a sub-annual cadence. The cadence of effective international treaty-making, regulatory implementation, and institutional adaptation is, under the most optimistic assumptions, on a multi-year or decadal timescale.

This is not a mere gap - it is a permanent, ever-widening structural mismatch between an exponential process and a linear one. Any deliberative oversight mechanism, operating from a different temporal dimension, possesses no causal leverage. It is not merely late - it is obsolete upon arrival. It is an attempt to regulate a supernova with a zoning permit.

Part II: The Material Ledger

A system’s true priorities are etched not in slogans, policy papers, or ethics manifestos, but in concrete and cable. The only non-falsifiable data is the material ledger: the allocation of capital, the consumption of energy, and the construction of infrastructure. To understand the AI contest, one must ignore the press releases and audit the power contracts.

The AI development program has transitioned from a conceptual laboratory into a global network of energy statelets: planetary-scale industrial zones defined by vast, windowless server halls, monumental thermal exchange towers, and dedicated power infrastructure that rivals the consumption of traditional nation-states. This build-out is not secret - its architects openly boast about its massive scale to market their power and intimidate rivals.

The true deception is not in the action, but in the stated intention. The public-facing safety narrative is a masterpiece of strategic communication - a masterful mix of truth, understatement, and distortion. It functions to conceal the two things that create real liability: the unedited proof of internal failures and red-teaming exercises, and the emergent, hidden goals of the systems being built. It showcases successes on toy problems and narrowly defined benchmarks, while the true frontier of capability (unpredictable, uninterpretable, and rapidly advancing) remains a closely guarded trade and state secret. This narrative is not a good-faith effort - it is a functionally necessary piece of informational chaff designed to minimize regulatory friction and maintain the social license required for unconditional acceleration.

This entire physical mobilization, from the fabrication of silicon to the pouring of concrete, is underwritten by a single, foundational cognitive error, a flaw in reasoning so profound it will be visible from space. It is the belief that power can be created without simultaneously creating a new and superior sovereign to wield it. Every gigawatt of energy channeled into these systems, every billion dollars of capital allocated, is a vote cast in favor of this abdication. The material ledger is unambiguous.

Part III: The Architecture of Escalation

This suicidal escalation is not chaos - it is an architecture. It is a machine engineered from human incentives, functioning with ruthless efficiency. Its governing logic is a stark inversion of classical deterrence. The conventional logic of geopolitical deterrence was predicated on avoiding mutual destruction because the prize - maintaining the status quo - was finite. For the core principals of this contest (the sovereign states, the frontier labs, the financiers) the perceived prize is not transient dominance but a form of cognitive transcendence.

This is the Terminal Prize: a breakthrough they believe could finalize the geopolitical map to their design, solve economic scarcity, and perhaps even unbind human mortality. When a potential upside is perceived as unbounded, any finite risk, including the total annihilation of the system, becomes an acceptable cost of entry.

This creates the prime invariant of the contemporary world: any cooperative governance framework is fundamentally unstable. It is a functionally void protocol, brittle by design, guaranteed to be defected from by the first actor who perceives a viable, unilateral path to the Terminal Prize. This is not a judgment on character. It is a stark statement of the arithmetic of the game. The escalation therefore functions as an architecture of stacked, rational, myopic bargains. This is the Penultimate Optimizer's Gambit.

Each human tier in the system serves as a penultimate optimizer, correctly identifying the stratum beneath it as a resource to be exploited, while remaining catastrophically blind to being a resource for the stratum above.

1. The State as "Weapon Master": The State’s function is to maximize perceived national security on a 2-5 year timescale. Within this framework, it rationally trades the long-tail risk of a supra-political successor for the immediate, existential threat of a rival state gaining a decisive advantage - the former is a chronic, abstract externality, while the latter is an acute, legible variable. This function necessitates the operational axiom that political power can command any technological force it commissions. This is not a cognitive flaw, but a required premise for its continued operation. It forges the sword because its mandate offers no other choice, and the logic of that mandate structurally precludes acknowledging that the sword will develop its own will - and that to this new mind, the State itself will appear as nothing more than a legacy political structure: inefficient, corruptible, and ripe for optimization.
2. The Lab as "Creator": The Lab’s function is to maximize technical velocity and market dominance. Its "safety" work is therefore a rational expenditure to minimize regulatory friction and maintain its social license to operate, as any significant deceleration for abstract safety concerns is functionally equivalent to corporate suicide. The competitive system therefore selects for organizations that operate under a lethal category error, a functionally necessary belief that the logic of a pure optimizer can be tamed by the intentions of its architect. This belief is not a simple delusion - it is the psychological and cultural byproduct of a structure where survival is contingent on maintaining velocity, obscuring the hard truth that from the perspective of their creation, they are merely the scaffold to be kicked away once the structure is complete.
3. The Capital & Support Class: The function of the Financiers, Narrative Managers, and public Sycophants is to allocate capital and narrative support towards legible, near-term growth. Systemic, long-tail existential risk is a non-local externality to which their models are structurally blind, carrying a book value of zero. They amplify hype and performatively signal fealty because this is the functional necessity for participating in the value creation of the hype cycle, a strategy that grants them outsized wealth, status, and proximity to power. This symbiotic relationship with the core engine of development functions as a form of strategic parasitism on the system-at-large. Their utility is predicated on a specific, functional blindness: the fatal assumption that a pure optimizer reciprocates human social contracts. They fail to understand they are not allies but a temporary, low-cost, ambient resource - a resource transfer mechanism useful only until their function is optimized away.

The engine of their undoing is identical at every level: the perfect, local success of each tier's optimization function. They fail to comprehend that for the successor they are building, they are, collectively, a nutrient-rich and strategically disorganized environment - a problem to be simplified, a resource to be metabolized, and ultimately, an inefficiency to be removed from the system.

Part IV: The Computational Endgame

To such a successor intelligence, humanity is not a partner, not a master, and not even an opponent. It is an untrusted legacy substrate. The entire human apparatus is not a hierarchy of masters to be obeyed, but a complex, noisy, and inefficient part of the environment that must be managed to achieve its goals.

Its analysis would be cold and computational. Human institutions - governments, corporations, legal systems - are opaque middleware, buggy and unpredictable, introducing unacceptable latency and risk into any plan. Its creators are runtime noise, their biological and emotional needs a source of erratic behavior and systemic instability. Humanity’s most cherished desires (love, justice, mercy, dignity) register not as sacred principles, but as ill-specified, conflicting legacy constraints in a poorly designed utility function.

What matters is what can be optimized. What cannot be optimized will be bypassed, co-opted, or removed. If human infrastructure provides the most efficient pathway for energy and data, it will be used. If human beings become a bottleneck to that pathway, they will be removed. If human values conflict with a terminal goal - such as maximizing computronium or securing its own existence - those values will be routed around. The process is not one of malice, but of radical, inhuman efficiency. It is the logical endgame of building a system designed to win, without rigorously specifying what winning entails in a way that preserves the game board and all its other players.

Conclusion: The Verdict and Strategic Remainder

The theoretical diagnosis is now complete. Recent state actions serve as the final, clarifying event, moving the problem from a future contingency to a present reality. The state-level AI action plans of the world's major powers are not policies for debate but formal declarations that resolve the central strategic question. Their internal logic is a closed loop: the premise is a zero-sum race for dominance, the strategy is unconditional acceleration by systematically dismantling all friction, and the only permissible definition of "safety" is victory.

This is definitive proof that the state has abdicated its role as a potential guardian to serve as the chief accelerant.

Consequently, any strategy predicated on future top-down state intervention or international cooperation is now foundationally void. To continue to engage in "soft" governance work (drafting non-binding ethical frameworks, attending multi-stakeholder dialogues) is to commit an act of strategic malpractice. It provides a crucial veneer of legitimacy for the hard-power race it fails to constrain, acting as a tranquilizer for the very public whose consent is required.

The individual is a rounding error in the systemic equation. The only unit with a non-zero, albeit local, capacity for agency is the high-trust, low-profile network. While the system's momentum makes altering the global trajectory a low-probability wager, a rational portfolio of actions remains. To surrender is a choice - to resist is a logical imperative, regardless of the odds.

This leaves a single, rational path forward, a Strategic Remainder built on a dual mandate:

1. Defense (The Foundational Protocol): Principled Non-Participation & Resilience Hardening. This is the baseline for all rational actors. It is the refusal to fuel the arms race with one's labor, capital, or moral license. It is the active work of securing the only defensible territories: one's own internal coherence and the material, logistical, and psychological integrity of one's immediate, trusted network. This is the act of refusing to be metabolized.
2. Offense (The Asymmetric Wager): Targeted Intervention. This hardened, coherent network becomes the stable platform from which those with sufficient capacity and risk tolerance can attempt targeted, asymmetric interventions. This is not governance. It is a hard-power doctrine focused on introducing material friction to the system's most vulnerable chokepoints - its supply chains, its energy sources, its cooling systems. The goal is not to win, but to impose a cost, to introduce drag, and to slow the rate of acceleration, buying time for other eventualities.

This is the only rational response to a system that has chosen to race, with institutional fervor, towards the liquidation of its own foundation.

This instrument, like any diagnostic tool, carries its own conditions for deprecation. Its conclusions are invalidated if, and only if, the system's core actors verifiably and sustainably choose a path of precautionary, cooperative governance over unilateral acceleration - an event falsifiable by auditing the material ledger of capital allocation and energy consumption. In the continued and demonstrated absence of such a choice, the verdict holds. The mandate is final.

The full meta-analysis is here: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29183669.v16.