The other 190

What a citizens’ assembly makes of AI 2040. A rehearsal of the argument the superpowers would rather have between themselves.

A rehearsal, not a verdict. The software rehearses; people decide.

A plan written by two countries

  • AI 2040 asks the US and China to delay superintelligence to 2040.
  • Pause at top-human-expert level in 2035; unpause in 2040; held by “mutually assured compute destruction”.
  • Roughly 190 other countries hold no pen.

Ben Reid’s word for the role left to the rest of us: NPC.

So we built the room

  • A citizens’ assembly: composite members argue a question from the published record.
  • Nine seats — one built to defend Plan A — and a tenth, left empty on purpose.
  • Every turn sealed: write-once, signed, checkable offline, no US or China cloud.

What the tool is — and is not

  • The members are fictional composites, not real people.
  • A single model tends to agree with itself, so we discount any convergence.
  • It decides nothing. It maps where a real argument would hold and split.

It rehearses; people deliberate and decide.

It divided — three ways

  • Engage & reform: build on its merits, fight the legitimacy gap through diplomacy.
  • It fails structurally — govern differently: verification can’t hold; the premise is dead; bilateral is the wrong unit.
  • Disengage & prepare: unenforceable before it exists — prepare for displacement, not governance.

None of the three was “adopt Plan A”.

The tell: the seat built to defend it

  • Handed Plan A’s strongest case, the defender landed on reform it, not adopt it.
  • Its closing move: verification and consent are logically distinct — solving one does not solve the other.
  • The most the plan could muster, from its own advocate, was engagement and repair.

Positions moved — and the record keeps every step

  • The Global-South diplomat travelled: “doesn’t bind us without consent” → “illegitimate” → “engage and reform”.
  • That journey is in the sealed record — not just the endpoint.

A referendum keeps the count and loses the reasons. This keeps the reasons, and the route each seat took to them.

The empty chair

  • One seat never spoke: tangata whenua and Māori data sovereignty.
  • The register cannot evidence it; a synthetic voice is barred in the code, not just discouraged.
  • The room recorded, on the sealed record: a position we could not source, and would not fake.

AI 2040 has no way to notice whose voice is absent. The assembly says so, on the record.

What Rest-of-World can build

  • Ben’s agency list: resilience, energy-efficient compute, trust infrastructure, decentralised multilateral governance.
  • An assembly like this is trust infrastructure — deliberate, then seal so it can be checked without trusting the platform.
  • A federation of sealed rooms, never averaged, is decentralised governance in miniature.

“NPC” names a design fault

  • Not a mood — a plan with no seat for you, and no way to notice you are missing.
  • The patch is not a machine that decides. It is infrastructure that makes the argument, the movement, and the absence all legible and provable.
  • This run is a rehearsal of that. The real thing is many rooms and real members.

The record proves it

  • Sealed as a write-once, signed record on sovereign infrastructure — checkable offline by anyone.
  • It carries the full transcript: every opening position, every move, the empty chair, the discount.
  • Run it with real people. The software rehearsed; people decide.

Record: dvr_pMTzbsSFMPkGWJcS · held, with the full transcript, for Ben.