Technical supplement 01

The coordination frontier.

An interactive model of what happens when intelligence scales faster than the ability to use it.

Compute growth6×Higher values produce a steeper line, a widely recognised indicator of progress.Human oversight25%Includes review, approval, and confirming that review and approval have occurred.Steering committees12The model assumes that committees can reproduce without a corresponding increase in problems.

Illustrative projection / 2027-2069

CapabilityUnderstandingGrey: coordination

85%of the 2069 economy
allocated to coordination

Figure 1. The coordination-adjusted future. Changing the assumptions changes the result. This is sometimes mistaken for robustness.

Interpreting the model

The red line represents model capability. The dashed line represents human understanding. The grey line represents the share of economic activity spent coordinating the other two.

Increasing oversight initially improves understanding. It also creates more work to oversee. Adding committees improves the representation of committees in the resulting economy.

Model specification

This is an explicitly fictional illustration, not an empirical forecast. For year index t after 2027, compute setting c, oversight o and committee count k:

Capability = min(100, 12 × exp(t × (0.03 + 0.008c)))

Coordination = min(99, 8 + t × (0.75 + 0.085k) + 0.1o)

Understanding = max(3, 12 + 0.12o - 0.035tc)

Values are rounded to whole numbers. Model presets are illustrative and intentionally distinct from the hand-authored indicators in the narrative.

Limitations

The model does not include energy constraints, physical reality, or anyone saying no. We recognise that these may be relevant. Including them would require additional parameters, and therefore additional committees.

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