Harmony Nexus

AI revolutionized numerous industries by accelerating technology innovation and automating many industrial and organizational operations. AI has transformed the way people work and live primarily through: 

• Automating most work leaving more people with the time to engage with their families, communities and pursue education and personal development. As a result, many governments implemented "Universal Basic Community Services" where citizens participate in helping others in their communities. 
• By augmenting human thought in research and economic growth, AI helped accelerate development of nuclear fusion and advanced materials that lead to faster technology breakthroughs in green tech. 
• Through AI-powered tutoring systems and communication platforms, fair decision-making supports current democracies and helps transform them into true pluralistic democracies through “Silk Revolutions.”

Serious global AI-related incidents had such negative impacts on global economies and human safety that most governments came together to draft much tougher regulations and restrictions on developing AGI. Some labs continue developing AGI and receive investments to develop products and monetize them. However, these labs fail to balance utility within regulations. 

With so much scrutiny around AGI, the AI industry gradually breaks into more specialized applications: educational assistants, professional assistants, information extraction tools, generative AI of various types and many even more specialized AIs for different uses in medicine, science, agriculture, etc. A few frontier models still have a big part of the market, but for the growing number of solutions, more specialized and less general models are the effective choice, so top AI labs are pressed to keep researching AGI to stay on top.

Thanks to forward-thinking investors who bet on materials science and nuclear fusion in the twenties, multiple converging technological advancements created a technology renaissance. First, AI technologies accelerated the development of nanomaterials, which accelerated the development of nuclear fusion plants. Then nuclear fusion plants enabled the widespread adoption of AI technologies by supplying plentiful and cheap energy for almost unlimited growth of AI applications. 

The first functioning design of a new fusion plant was in 2035 and since then, about 30 other organizations started building new power plants. By 2045, nuclear fusion powers almost a quarter of the USA, China, India, England and Europe. Abundant and extremely cheap energy creates profound transformation. New, sustainable materials make up a growing percentage of the built environment and products, dramatically improving decarbonization goals.

• Thanks to abundant energy, sustainable practices and powerful AI, developing countries can now afford to provide free, high-quality digital education to all citizens. Even those traditionally excluded such as women and those of low Caste participate. 
• New materials and inexpensive fusion power means electrification now powers every imaginable industry, dramatically reducing the use of fossil fuels, especially in air and sea transport. 
• New bio and nanomaterials transition all manufacturing sectors and their waste streams. With everything in the product and built environment transitioning to sustainable-only materials, serious decarbonization and widespread recycling become the norm across the globe. 

AI, nuclear fusion and materials technologies each face implementation risks and coordination challenges. The biggest risk AI faces is protection from bad actors who want to hack AI-powered public opinion platforms that underpin democratic policies with high approval ratings. That’s why international institutions guard free trade (such as WTO) and common regulatory markets. An IAEA-like institution called the IAIA governs AI safety standards. In this way, people across the world and across interest groups can securely coordinate through a multipolar system of checks and balances. 

With many countries moving away from nuclear fission, nuclear fusion faces a reputation problem. The Global Collaboration Coalition (GCC) has partnered with charter cities to adopt, improve and expand nuclear fusion plants throughout the world. By providing best practices from these cities as use cases, governments around the world start to trust and thus invest in nuclear fusion. 

With materials science, the ongoing challenge lies between the utility a material can provide with the level of circularity in the manufacturing process. As metamaterials, nanomaterials and biomaterials emerge, systems must be developed to bring them back into the supply chain instead of as waste. The GCC supports sustainable new material developments through grand challenges and other investments. Because many manufacturing plants now get power from nuclear fusion, the dramatic energy savings is now being directed at building circular manufacturing systems, which is now part of many government trade regulations.

Life in different communities and nations remains very diverse. Most of the western countries and some emerging economies went through something which was later called “Silk revolutions” where citizens stuck together to peacefully push through several reforms which were considered robustly good. Each country adopted different reforms such as new voting systems, some form of universal basic services and educational system reforms. The last two were mostly reformed earlier, marking in most countries the change in redistribution of wealth. 

Movements such as “Just Make It Condorcet”, “Sustainability Society” and many local intellectual communities pushing the changes forward were supported by data from charter cities and similar experimental government systems. The opportunity to make changes largely lied on abundance of energy and AI automation. Coordination was possible thanks to consensual communication platforms. 

In many countries, a global minimum corporate tax is agreed upon, and the tax windfalls from AI are used for a plethora of schemes like UBI, universal services, etc. depending on the jurisdiction. With basic housing and food costs provided and plentiful cheap energy available, people earn extra income by providing specialized services. Most active citizens contribute free time to their local or even global communities through in-person and virtual participation in “good for humanity” initiatives. Life in 2045 is more collaboration centric, as people work less manually and lean into developing consensus. Collaboration platforms provide opportunities even for non-democratic governments to face challenges together.

Overall, the world is wealthier, happier and more educated. Nearly everyone enjoys cheap, abundant energy, a cleaner environment and the benefit of personalized AI assistants. 

The world moves toward balancing R&D investment returns with the welfare of sentient beings. These trends correlate with improved mental health and wellbeing, including animal wellbeing and communication, as well as ecology. This trend is enabled by intellectual movements which fueled the the Silk Revolutions. 

However, concerns remain for how the systems will integrate with those countries that do not participate or for those that do not control leading technologies.Less developed countries may feel left behind by the nations hosting most AI and infrastructure. Despite significant aid from public and private sources, they often still lack the resources to grow and take a bigger part in global markets, often leading to resentment. 

An unintended side-effect of AI-driven wealth, when coupled with aging populations, is a perceived loss of dynamism and ambition across most of society. Since many rely on wealth redistribution, and despite high social mobility, less people are interested in driving innovation. Society still needs high-skilled labor to coordinate AIs and launch new ventures, but this economically active section of society keeps shrinking in number, and often feels overtaxed and unsupported. Meanwhile, “passive” members of society (who don’t participate in labor markets) resent the experts’ higher incomes and direct control of AIs and other technologies. Thus, society isn’t immune yet to fragmentation, and new sources of instability are yet to be mitigated.

Thanks to strong international collaborative initiatives led by citizens, more people than ever embrace democratic values—even in authoritarian countries. As this model spreads, a new level of collaboration results in social and technological innovations that enable people to take positive action in local, national and global communities. 

In 2045, innovation in all areas of science and technology continue to flourish and extend to solving tough environmental and equality challenges, especially through AI. From improving literacy to supporting inclusiveness, innovation is still core to economic prosperity. 

However, extractive business practices, “cult of personality” billionaires and populist politicians disappear as there are more programs aimed at balancing profit against human and environmental benefits. People value their own collaborative communities and networks, so there is not much attention dedicated to celebrities. Most countries find it inconceivable to fight a war. 

As universal basic income takes root, people find it unimaginable to spend 40 hours per week working in a corporate office or otherwise. Most people now enjoy a rich balance of personal time and resources, developing deeper, more conscious and authentic relationships. With more connectedness among and between separate groups, extreme ideologies based on alternative facts or disinformation disappear as networks become much more heterogeneous.

At a global level, the International AI Agency (IAIA) is established. Inspired by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAIA employs thousands of experts from all backgrounds and countries to set safety and regulatory standards for AI. The IAIA has a foundational role in establishing capable regulatory markets around the world while transferring technical skills to developing nations. An international chip registry tracks who controls how much computing power, ensuring irresponsible companies or countries don’t deploy frontier models on their own. A closely related institution, the World Data Organization, sets standards on the management and exchange of training data, as well as inference APIs. 

AI accidents make everyone agree on the need to cooperate, but some countries are still hesitant to do so too closely due to mistrust as intellectual property theft is still an issue. To compensate for the lack of objective oversight, blunt restrictions were placed on the trade of training data and computing hardware, unnecessarily delaying AI research. However, by 2045, the world’s great powers are more used to cooperating, and there are discussions on lifting most of these restrictions. 

Moreover, the UN’s International Court of Justice takes responsibility for AI regulations, so it can sanction and fine countries. Due to the increasing importance of transformational AI (TAI), the UN has thus grown into a more powerful multipolar system of checks and balances. By 2045, all these factors are making geopolitical competition and great power conflicts obsolete.

Through the late 2020s and early 2030s, fusion technology is greatly boosted by AI. Generative algorithms enable the rapid ideation and simulation of designs. The very best of these are turned into physical experiments - whose data is analyzed by AI. The climate crisis and the expansion of necessary compute also create huge incentives for abundant clean energy, leading to massive investments in fusion technology, which itself makes quick advances. 

By the mid to late 2030s, the first commercial plants come online, and the technology quickly extend throughout the world. Thanks to AI, the expertise needed to adapt and operate these power plants is far easier to deploy. Fusion also leads to a collapse in energy prices, enabling 

full electrification of most industries and transport, large-scale carbon capture and water desalination, fully circular economies, and rapid economic growth in developing countries. Overall, fusion allows society to become more sustainable and wealthier, and have each goal contribute to the other.