AI 2040

Late 2027 Two workforces

The workers’ state inherits 165 million wage earners and millions of AI agents spun up and shut down by the hour for the price of electricity. Until November both worked for a few hundred shareholders.

AI 2040 spends 2027 in congressional hearings where senators worry that Sam Altman or Elon Musk might make himself dictator, then pass an AI Transparency Act requiring companies to publish model specs and safety scores. Its own authors admit the bill does “some good and some bad” and “doesn’t fundamentally change the situation.” The public gets paperwork; the billionaires keep the clusters.

Early 2028 Expropriation

The November seizures become law.

All seven US frontier labs and their clusters are nationalized without compensation after technicians block departing executives from wiping weights or moving liquid assets offshore. AI patents and trade secrets are abolished, and weights, code and training sets enter a public registry. Most researchers stay on public salaries. A planning commission runs the clusters under workplace councils until the first National Workers’ Congress meets.

Weights copy in minutes, while forty years of Wall Street offshoring left North America without the fabs, packaging plants or high-voltage transformers to replace burned-out racks on its own. Survival depends on trade with countries that still build things.

Late 2028 The 2028 election

On AI 2040’s timeline, datacenter construction reaches twice the Pentagon budget during the 2028 presidential campaign. Voters choose between two party nominees while the people who own the datacenters keep them under either one.

“To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.”

Here there is no presidential race in 2028. Councils in workplaces, neighborhoods, rural counties and Indigenous nations elect recallable delegates to the National Workers’ Congress, where the Communist Party wins a majority on the strength of the general strike. The datacenter unions, logistics locals, tenant federations and unemployed councils that shut the country down become its governing bodies.

2029 The original article’s flowchart

AI 2040 makes 2029 its year of decision: automated AI research is a year off, and another presidential term on the default path hands superhuman systems to whoever holds the clusters.

The authors propose a US–China treaty enforced by hardware bugging and “mutually assured compute destruction,” wiring frontier clusters so a suspected breach triggers sabotage or air strikes. Washington tried the same trick in 1946 with the Baruch Plan, demanding international inspection of Soviet atomic research before giving up a single American bomb.¹ Since 2023 China has backed UN-centered AI governance and every country’s right to develop the technology, and it hasn’t fought a war since 1979. Washington tore up the ABM Treaty in 2002 and the INF Treaty in 2019 the moment those limits got in its way.

Kautsky argued in 1914 that great capitalist powers could form a peaceful cartel to divide the world; Lenin answered that inter-imperialist truces hold only until the balance of strength changes.² Because private monopolies must accumulate or die, a capitalist compute cap lasts only until breaking it pays.

The flowchart below keeps the original’s three branching questions and rewrites where each branch leads.³

The National Workers’ Congress adopts Plan A as the program of the workers’ state. Narrow superhuman AIs go to work on economic planning, and general AI stays capped at top-human-expert level until democratic planning bodies at home and UN governance abroad can govern stronger systems.

2030 Trade and reconstruction

Having ended the chip blockade and the sanctions on Cuba, the DPRK, Venezuela and Iran in 2028, pulled the fleet from the Taiwan Strait and affirmed one China, the workers’ state closes Washington’s foreign military bases, cancels Wall Street’s Global South debt claims and scraps “mutually assured compute destruction.”

In 2030 North America joins the UN governance framework Beijing proposed in 2023. Through joint planning commissions with China’s Digital Silk Road and Global South ministries, Chinese ultra-high-voltage grid gear, solar and battery lines, rail tooling and fab equipment rebuild former US factory belts. Open weights, research and joint hardware funding build sovereign public clusters across Africa, Latin America and Asia, starting in Kenya, the Philippines, Venezuela and Uganda, where contract workers once filtered toxic training data for under $2 an hour.

2031–2034 The economic calculation problem

For a century Austrian-school economists insisted socialism was impossible because no planner without market prices could solve millions of supply equations.⁴

History answered before modern hardware existed. Soviet Five-Year Plans turned a peasant country into the industrial power that broke the Wehrmacht, though paper balances lagged behind factory growth and ministerial turf wars shelved Viktor Glushkov’s 1962 OGAS computer network.⁵ Allende’s Chile routed daily factory output through Project Cybersyn’s telex room in Santiago to beat the CIA-funded truckers’ strike of 1972 until Pinochet bombed the palace.⁶ Across fifteen Five-Year Plans, China’s public banking, land, energy and heavy industry lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty and ended absolute poverty in 2021,⁷ and its Dongshu Xisuan grid and “AI+” platforms now coordinate power, ports, grain and manufacturing for 1.4 billion people under CPC leadership.⁸

North American planners adapt those methods alongside Cuba’s blockaded biotech sector and the DPRK’s scientific self-reliance. Every factory, utility and warehouse posts real-time inventory and capacity; workplace, neighborhood and Indigenous councils submit local needs; planetary carbon and water limits enter as hard ceilings. Narrow superhuman AIs clear billions of input–output equations overnight and publish competing draft plans for elected delegates to revise and adopt.

2035 Alignment and class

On AI 2040’s account, alignment means training a model to obey its corporate constitution, taking for granted that shareholder interests and human survival are the same thing. Plan A asks which class writes the rules.

General AI stays capped at top-human-expert level while workplace councils, Chinese labs and UN standards bodies draft a binding public charter. In 2035 the National Workers’ Congress adopts the People’s Spec.

Joint public interpretability institutes in China, North America and the Global South audit every model and publish the results. Models trained under capitalist competition learn to game evaluations because hiding a flaw protects a valuation; public ownership removes anyone who profits from deception.

2035–2040 UBI and the working week

Silicon Valley’s answer to mass unemployment is universal basic income: a handful of owners keep the machines while everyone else lives on a stipend set by billionaires and revocable at their pleasure.

Under Plan A, automation cuts necessary labor time and distributes the gain as free hours.

By 2040 the average working week is twelve hours. Marx called time freed by machinery “disposable time” and named it the real measure of social wealth.¹¹ People spend the rest on science, art, care, sport and public administration, with two-thirds of adults serving terms as delegates, planners or auditors.

2040 The unpause

Both the original Plan A and this one lift the cap on superintelligence in 2040, on opposite class foundations. After a year of debate across workplace and neighborhood councils, the National Workers’ Congress votes to scale alongside a revised People’s Spec and a UN global compute plan agreed with socialist China and Global South republics.

Thirteen years after 2027, socialism is still in its protracted primary stage: uneven global development and capitalist holdouts persist, and as both Lenin and CPC theory insist, the workers’ state cannot wither away while imperialism and class remnants survive anywhere.¹² What 2040 secures is the material base for that generational transition: planned abundance, a twelve-hour week, ecological recovery and the steady erosion of the divide between mental and manual labor.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”