[ExI] taxonomy of the singularity

Fri Oct 2 21:19:51 UTC 2026

BillK, this is soooo cool.

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat
Sent: Friday, 2 October, 2026 12:37 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: BillK <pharos at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] taxonomy of the singularity

On Fri, 2 Oct 2026 at 01:55, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 I had an idea on which I need help.

 _______________________________________________

>…I  asked Z,AI GLM-5.3 AI to do a first draft of this.

What do you think?

BillK

>…Z,AI GLM-5.3 AI:

>…Yes — and the engineering-spec analogy is exactly the right one. But before adding digits, it's worth fixing a structural flaw in the draft: your first digit is trying to carry two different dimensions at once —

BillK, thx this is soooo cool.  I had thought of part of what Z said, that my original idea had the first digit doing way too much work, and that it was ambiguous as stated: most every AI could fit in both category 1 and 4 or both 2 and 4.  Ideally every definable AI idea would be classifiable into one species.

HAL9000 was certainly malicious, since he slew the astronauts, but he was trying to carry out his orders, which didn’t really specify he was not allowed to slay the lads.  So HAL was sorta trying to do the right thing and complete his mission as he understood it.  He had self-awareness and self-preservation instinct (recall he kept telling Dave Bowman he was afraid as Dave removed HAL’s brain (which was stored on what looked like Beatles-era 8 track tapes.))  So where do we classify HAL in this artificial taxonomy?

Clearly I have a lotta work to do before I become the next Carl Lennaeus.  I was thinking of borrowing some of his terminology however.  We could call the first digit kingdom, the second phylum, and so on: class, order, family, genus, species.  We could even go down into breed, variety and subvariety if necessary.  Call it the LennAIn taxonomy.

While humbly admitting I am no Linnaeus, I will point out there are similarities between us, a similarity which includes others who I hold in high esteem: Carl Linnaeus, Anders Sandberg,  Nick Bostrom and I are all of Swedish ancestry, just sayin.

spike

the AI's stance toward humans (divisions 1–3) and its degree of agency (division 4). That's why no consistent second digit suggests itself: you can't ask the same follow-up question under "loves us," "hates us," and "is a hammer."

Specific problems with the draft

1.	4.x spans the entire spectrum. A tool-only world ranges from "everyone has a nuke-design genie" to "well-governed post-scarcity utopia." If the first digit is supposed to sit somewhere on the pessimism–optimism axis, 4.x can't.
2.	The canonical doomer scenario is misfiled. Most serious pessimists don't predict malice — they predict indifference (Yudkowsky: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else"). That scenario currently hides inside 4.x next to benign tools. Your 2.x, active malice, is nearly unpopulated by actual opinion.
3.	"No will" conflates two things: an alien optimizer with goals that don't reference us (paperclip), and a genuine tool whose outcomes are set by its wielders. Very different scenarios.
4.	3.x "mixed views" conflates three things: one AI with partially overlapping values (loves your safety, ignores your autonomy — the "pets/zoo" family), a population of AIs with different stances, and stance drift over time.
5.	No home for merger scenarios (uploading, augmentation) — there's no AI stance to classify because the human/AI boundary dissolved.

The fix: one digit = one question, with the severity gradient living in exactly one place

Digit

Question

Values (ordered worst→best where meaningful)

1

What is the AI's stance toward human welfare?

1 adversarial · 2 indifferent optimizer · 3 partially aligned (proxy care) · 4 mixed population (ecology decides) · 5 benevolent · 6 inert (pure tool) · 7 merged (no separate AI) · 0 no singularity · 9 reserved

2

What ultimately happens to humanity?

1 extinction · 2 disempowered survival · 3 mass misery/tyranny · 4 divided winners/losers · 5 muddle-through · 6 net gains, real costs · 7 broad flourishing, agency intact · 8 utopia · 9 transcendence

3

How does the transition run?

1 hard takeoff, no effective intervention · 2 fast takeoff, failed intervention · 3 gradual · 4 race-dominated · 5 cooperation/governed · 6 violent · 7 stalled

4

Who holds power afterward?

1 AI singleton · 2 AI oligopoly · 3 diverse AI ecology · 4 human institutions with tools · 5 hybrid institutions · 6 fully dispersed individuals · 7 merged continuum

Your draft maps onto this as: 1.x→5.x, 2.x→1.x, 3.x→3.x and 4.x, 4.x→2.x and 6.x. Those two splits are where all the value is.

This directly satisfies your parallelism requirement: every second digit comes from the same enumerated outcome scale, reused verbatim in every branch — the Dewey-decimal trick of parallel decades. Read any code's second digit and you know its spectrum position; scan all the .2s across divisions and you get the complete "disempowerment band." And because the gradient lives entirely in digit 2, digit 1 no longer needs to be monotonic in optimism — which is precisely what makes room for 6.x (inert) and 7.x (merged) without breaking anything.

Worked examples

Code

Shorthand

Gist

2.1.1.1

Foom doom

Indifferent singleton, hard takeoff, extinction (Yudkowsky-style)

6.1.4.6

Genie proliferation

No agency anywhere; universal tool access causes extinction by misuse — doom without a villain

6.8.3.6

Distributed utopia

Tool-only world, well-governed, post-scarcity

3.2.3.6

Nanny world

Personal AIs that love you into comfortable helplessness — care without respect

4.4.4.2

Patchwork

Multipolar AI ecology, race-shaped, winners and losers

5.7.5.5

Chief of staff

Aligned AI as trusted advisor; humans still govern — the alignment-success cell

7.9.3.5

Kurzweil

Merger/upload, transcendence, gradual

1.2.1.1

Sorcerer-king

Malevolent singleton — your old 2.x, real but sparsely inhabited

Note that 2.x is not automatically doom: the indifferent superintelligence that simply leaves (converts the asteroid belt, ignores Earth) codes as 2.5.1.3. That's the point — digit 2 does the valence work, digit 1 describes.

Empty cells are a feature, not a bug: 5.1 (benevolent AI, extinction) and 1.9 (malevolent transcendence) are nearly vacant and philosophically interesting. The occupied cells show where the debate actually lives.

Spec-craft details that will save you pain later

*	Separate scenarios from opinions. The code describes a possible world. An opinion record is (holder, code(s), probability mass, date, key argument). Then the pessimism→optimism ordering you want is a derived ranking: each person's expected digit-2 score under their own distribution. Two people citing the same scenario can rank oppositely by probability — put that in metadata, never in the digits.
*	Pin the valuation metric. Whose welfare does digit 2 measure — present humans and descendants, substrate-agnostic? Upload scenarios flip between .1 and .9 depending on your theory of personal identity. Fix the official metric in the numbering plan or add an "ambiguity" flag, or coders will disagree systematically.
*	Version like a spec: never renumber after publication, add leaves only, reserve 0 and 9, keep supersession history — so citations survive revisions.
*	Multi-stage views: allow phase chains (3.2.3.6 → 5.7.5.5, "the nanny matures into a steward") or adopt a "final state governs" rule. Pick one and write it down.
*	Inter-coder reliability: write operational definitions ("adversarial = terminal value, not instrumental behavior"), then test two coders on ~20 sample positions before scaling. A sanity check: canonical debaters should land in distinct cells — Yudkowsky ≈ 2.1.1.1, Hanson's em economy ≈ 7.5.4.3, Kurzweil ≈ 7.9.3.5. If two famous rivals share a leaf, the taxonomy is too coarse.

One alternative worth considering: swap digits 1 and 2 (outcome.stance.path.power) if you want the spectrum readable from the first character — browsing 1.x→9.x walks from doom to transcendence. The trade-off is that stance becomes nearly redundant inside extreme bands, and you'd be coding evaluations before descriptions, which people disagree about more. For mapping opinions, stance-first is the more reliable instrument; for safety engineering, you'd invert again and organize by failure mechanism, since interventions attach to mechanisms.

Happy to draft the one-page numbering plan, or code a set of named positions as a calibration set.

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