Most of Europe has not yet absorbed what AI is about to do to us. The few who have are not saying it loudly enough. We wrote Europe 2031: a five-year scenario of the continent's slide into irrelevance, how AI is driving it, and what can still be done to change course.

This is a really interesting read bc the AI-enabled technological advancements that the scenario is premised on are mostly modest extrapolations of current capabilities in business process software and computer security It’s gonna be way way weirder than that by 2031

Europe 2031 is a very interesting exercise in forecasting, in fictional form. 🎧I started listening to it in podcast yesterday...just a couple of hours before the export control directive about Fable/Mythos. That makes it even more relevant europe2031.ai/audio/

This is an amazing read. Like AI 2027, it's a great way to spend some time thinking about the future and feels very plausible That said, it's already overtaken by recent events thanks to the USG pulling Mythos and Fable already. This should help Europe wake up faster hopefully

Europe is running the risk of sliding into complete and utter irrelevance if we do fix our approach to AI. @DadaJudith, alongside some of the greatest AI researchers in Europe, have written a predictive narrative outlining what will happen to Europe in the next 5 years if we don't drastically course correct. And it is BLEAK. The document reads like a short story and outlines how Europe slides into irrelevance due to fundamental mistakes made in AI. The things we truly love in Europe are at risk if we do not get this right, and we need to WAKE UP. European leaders have not taken AI seriously, and as a result our continent has fallen miles behind the US. It is NOT too late however, to turn things around and Europe 2031 explains what we need to do. I spoke to Judith this week about Europe 2031 and what can be done, so read the document or listen in and TAKE ACTION. This is one of the most pivotal moments in European history. Timestamps: 0:55 - Introduction 1:23 - Europe 2031 4:35 - Where Europe went wrong on AI 8:17 - Who the scenario is for 10:07 - Fixing Europe’s decision-making 12:28 - The trade-offs Europe must make 14:09 - Who should be driving change 15:43 - Sovereignty vs leverage 16:55 - Europe’s compute problem 19:30 - What sovereignty really means 21:17 - Measuring success for Europe 2031 22:28 - Five policy priorities for Europe 24:34 - Can Europe still change course? Amazing stuff from @bakkermichiel, @philip_fox_, @AlexTPet, @TomChivers among others

Crawling past Stonehenge in the inevitable traffic on the A303 I just finished listening to this, which I earnestly and soberly recommend. europe2031.ai It’s the story of the fork in the road Europe faces on AI, and it applies to Britain just as well. The wrong path - the almost-too-late acceptance that AI is going to change everything, and then the simplistic pursuit of tech sovereignty interpreted as anti-Americanism - leads to irrelevance, economic collapse and then vassal status under US or Chinese hegemony. The right path means we rapidly adjust and meaningfully enter the AI race. As the story says, the only way to safety is through AI; you can’t go round it. So, yes, that means a massive focus on sovereignty in the form of native energy, skills, capital, and a far more nationalist approach to scaling up good home grown companies. But it also means working with the Americans to build our resilience; sovereignty cannot be autarky. We need their help, and we can help in return because we still have the assets (mostly human assets ie the talent) that the tech revolution values. Thank God that the leaders of this revolution are Western and mostly pro British. For now. We are at a fork in the road. Continental Europe is heading down the wrong path. Britain needs to make the right choice, right now. And while we’re at it, build a flipping dual carriageway on the A303. It’s been discussed for 50 years and the country that can’t do that simple thing isn’t going to survive this century.

No better time to read this than today

Access to @AnthropicAI’s latest models has been paused for all customers, including in the US and UK. The main lesson: as we debate the future of national security and technological sovereignty, access to AI capabilities is crucial. That's why this Govt is the first to set up dedicated funding for our AI industry through @UKSovereignAI unit. And just this week, we announced £1.1bn for our AI chip industry.

This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States. It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.* I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: europe2031.ai Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky. We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections. We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide. We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: worksinprogress.co/issue/why… Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish. One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this? I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. worksinprogress.co/issue/how… It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!

I would suggest taking time to read the whole thing.

Europe 2031 came out yesterday, and it's predictions are already coming true ahead of schedule

Every European VC, and any VC with European portfolio companies, and every European company building with AI, should be pushing Europe to face hard trade-offs and build leverage - NOW. Drastic action must follow today.

Well, I guess our timelines have just accelerated quite a bit. @bundeskanzler @EmmanuelMacron @vonderleyen

Holy shit. We seriously need to wake up now. Europe2031.ai

great essay, although today's announcements makes me feel the expiration date for europe is 2026, not 2031

The most disappointing thing about Europe 2031 is that Christian and Caroline don’t get married

🇪🇺🇨🇦⭐️🤝

Very much worth a read, as I've set out in my own writing I share many of the concerns voiced here, even from a UK perspective. Its great to see more thinking on the uneven impacts of AI across economies. The scenario set out is somewhat a flip side of the one I've highlighted. It stems from US/China making compute scarce for everyone else rather than abundant for themselves. But the economic effects/outcomes are essentially the same. It becomes an existential threat to the European economy. We also share the same fundamental starting concern - that the UK and Europe have left themselves significantly exposed due to lack of compute, energy, & foundational model firms. Of course, their writing & storytelling is much more interesting & vivid than mine! 1/

Thank you so much, Julien 🫶. We hope they will.