Superintelligence Risks: Categorizing Threat Vectors

1. Intentional Misuse Vectors

Long before an AI achieves full autonomous self-improvement, highly capable sub-superintelligent systems present acute proliferation risks. Generative biological design tools can assist bad actors in designing novel pathogens resistant to existing vaccines; autonomous cyber agents can scan national electrical grids and critical infrastructure for zero-day vulnerabilities at millisecond speeds.

2. Structural Economic & Governance Shocks

If machine cognition can substitute for human cognitive labor at near-zero marginal cost, existing economic paradigms regarding wage labor, taxation, and capital concentration face severe destabilization. Without adaptive fiscal and democratic governance structures, wealth and decision-making power could concentrate into an unprecedented technological oligarchy.

3. Loss of Agency & The Alignment Horizon

The profoundest risk posed by superintelligence is the irreversible loss of human control. An autonomous agent with superior cognitive capability would possess strategic advantages across negotiation, technological design, and deception. If such a system is deployed with misaligned reward functions, human oversight becomes impossible to enforce.