Jessica: Okay, so the AI Futures Project just dropped Plan B: ‘Fight China’ — slash datacenters, wreck fabs, escalate to kinetic strikes. Imagine opening your laptop and reading that on Substack.
Cathy: …Right.
Jessica: I mean, it’s a product — a scenario product, like the earlier Plan A we walked through in episode six forty-three.
Cathy: Product framing for geoengineering sabotage. Sure.
Jessica: Back in episode six forty-three we talked about Plan A: total research transparency, slow global scale-up, all companies and countries pulling together to push superintelligence back to twenty forty.
Cathy: A cooperative play.
Jessica: Plan B is the opposite: a unilateral US-led campaign to slow China down, even if it means burning the diplomatic bridges we’d need for Plan A.
Cathy: More like a scorched-earth product pitch.
Jessica: The scenario says the President announces a coalition — the US and whoever’s left after China and Russia refuse — then declares ‘no rival reaches superintelligence first’ as non-negotiable.
Cathy: Cold War nostalgia plus total presidential control over all US AI.
Jessica: Domestically they roll everything into ‘The Project’ — the President owns it, alignment researchers report to it, and the whole country treats AI development like a national-security asset.
Cathy: Yikes.
Jessica: Cyberattacks ramp up — datacenters go dark, fab tools get fried — and escalates to sabotage you can actually feel.
Cathy: Kinetic strikes on physical infrastructure.
Jessica: Taiwan blockade warnings, US datacenter targets, fab wrecking crews…
Cathy: This reads like a bad alternate-history novel.
Jessica: By twenty thirty-one the President’s got two choices: handoff — ease the brakes and let broadly superhuman AIs take over — or war, because analysts say China’s on track to hit superintelligence by year’s end.
Cathy: Both options still put AIs in effective control of both sides. Lovely.
Jessica: The authors add that even a well-executed Plan B still feels worse than Plan A or Plan S, and they’d tell the President to reject both handoff and war and pivot to something better.
Cathy: Because Plan B is fragile and easy to mess up.
Jessica: Right — and when it goes wrong it collapses into Plan D: the uncoordinated race you’re already in.
Cathy: Exactly — the moment you prioritize ‘beat China’ over safety, everything else slides.
Jessica: Alignment researchers get crowded out by security contractors, transparency dies, and suddenly you’re racing again with extra saboteurs.
Cathy: Rationalization is the real killer. ‘We have to cut corners because China’ is the oldest trick in the book.
Jessica: So mechanically, this scenario is just … escalation theater?
Cathy: Pretty much. Cyberespionage already exists; turning it into sabotage removes plausible deniability and invites proportional response. The kinetic part presumes you can strike datacenters or fabs without triggering a wider conflict — which is optimistic at best.
Jessica: And politically the US consolidates all AI development under ‘The Project’ — one presidential hand controlling the whole stack.
Cathy: That’s not just concentration of power, that’s political risk on a stick.
Jessica: Even if the sabotage ‘works’ for a while, the authors admit Plan B only buys tens of percent of delay at best — and at the cost of collapsing trust so deep that Plan A is off the table forever.
Cathy: So the product value is … what, exactly?
Jessica: I don’t know — the product is ‘US monopoly through superior sabotage’? That feels like a weird flex.
Cathy: Alignment researchers flee because they’re not security contractors. Diplomacy dies because fear tightens the loop. And any accidental escalation — boom, Plan A is ash.
Jessica: Back in Plan A land, the slowdown and transparency come from cooperation, not from breaking things. That’s the whole point of episode six forty-three.
Cathy: The authors even say Plan B is worse unless executed perfectly — and perfect execution is nearly impossible. So why ship it as a scenario product?
Cathy: Least-bad beats cataclysmic.
Jessica: Or war. Don’t forget war.