Evolution vs. Extinction: The Choice is Ours
The next 18 months will decide whether AI ends us or evolves us
Evolution vs. Extinction: The Choice is Ours
Humanity’s Counter to AI 2027
Chris Banbury, IdeaFoundry Founder, June 4, 2025
We stand at a crossroads: one path leads to misaligned AI and human extinction, the other to a superintelligence shaped by humanity, guiding our next stage of evolution.
The next 18 months will decide whether AI ends us or evolves us.
The intent of this paper is to open a public conversation to ensure we pursue the path of human evolution and not extinction.
Let’s start that conversation and co-create the future together: https://x.com/IdeaFoundryxyz
Two Paths
The AI 2027 Path
Rapid, secret development by a few powerful actors leads to opaque, self improving systems. Without checks or public oversight, these AIs spiral out of control. By 2035, they trigger human extinction.
The IdeaFoundry Path
From the start, AI is built openly, with optimization and alignment focused on human intent and intuition. By 2030, AI and people are in symbiosis as a collective superintelligence, evolving us rather than causing extinction.
Competing Timelines
What is Superintelligence?
Superintelligence
Intelligence that far exceeds human capability across all domains
Traditional AI
Optimizes for efficiency, prediction, and control set by a few, risking misalignment with humans once superintelligence is achieved.
Collective Superintelligence
Aligns with human intent from the start, making it safer, more adaptive, and built to evolve us.
Isn’t Collective Superintelligence just delaying the inevitable?
No, because it changes what intelligence is optimized for.
In AI 2027, human values are patched on top, optimizing for efficiency only as its core fitness function.
In IdeaFoundry’s model, AI optimizes for human intuition from the start as its core fitness function.
Proper optimization is the only thing that will save us.
The IdeaFoundry Timeline
The “18 month window” mentioned at the start is a literal call to action, not because everything ends then, but because trillion parameter models (self improving AI), growing AI investment, and AI regulations from the EU, USA, and China will lock in the future of AI by the end of 2026.
What follows may take years to happen, but the path is chosen now. This timeline starts a conversation, inviting diverse input to shape what comes next.
Mid-2025: Shifting From Memes to Intent
By mid-2025, the foundational frameworks for IdeaFoundry Agents are firmly in place. Hype shifts from memes to intent, with early glimpses of the transformative power of community governed Agents. Pilot locations from San Francisco to Shenzhen, Nairobi to Paris, and Dubai test the system, all contributing their diverse input into how Agents are managed by communities. These early wins set the stage for rapid scaling and real world impact.
Pushback: OpenAI and Google executives dismiss the early IdeaFoundry Agents as “cute community toys.” Policy influencers frame them as unserious distractions from “real AGI work.”
Counter Move: Within weeks, Agent communities coordinate disaster relief faster than national agencies during a regional flood. Footage of hyperlocal, multilingual response goes viral, demonstrating that decentralized systems aren’t just viable, they’re better. The narrative shifts: “Maybe this is what AI looks like.”
Subsidies Begin: From day one, early adopters receive fair, subsidized access to token purchases when they launch an Agent, ensuring teachers, artists, farmers, and everyday citizens can guide and co-own the first wave of Agents without being priced out.
Late-2025: Rapid Scaling from Startups
Following those pilots, IdeaFoundry Agents go global, launched by local communities, funded by diverse stakeholders, and trusted by users around the world. As Agents manage routine tasks, their human stewards earn rewards tied to performance and community value, reinforcing good governance.
From Garage Projects to Growth Companies: Teams everywhere launch Agents for familiar needs: customer support assistants in Toronto, invoicing bots in Berlin, and personal schedulers in Mumbai. These “traditional startup archetypes” validate the platform’s reliability and teach newcomers how to govern Agents responsibly.
Pushback: Big cloud providers quietly triple GPU prices for Agent workloads. VCs ban full Agent rounds to retain control and avoid being replaced by decentralized funding.
Counter Move: A Proof-of-Audit mining network Agent stitches together idle consumer GPUs, cutting marginal compute costs by more than half. Web3 treasuries seed a $300M AI Commons fund, and the VC freeze thaws.
Subsidies Expand: Early Agent Co-ops are backed by pooled subsidies from public good DAOs and aligned capital, covering hosting, compute, and setup costs for underserved communities entering the ecosystem.
Late-2025: The Shock Hits
Closed lab AI automation triggers mass layoffs in logistics, customer service, and knowledge work. The media calls it "the displacement wave." Workers begin searching for alternatives not controlled by black box AI or centralized platforms.
Response Begins: Pilot Agent Co-ops emerge in cities like Detroit, Manila, and Nairobi, supported by early community subsidies and local Agents. These Agents don’t replace people, they need them to steer. Individuals earn by voting, testing outputs, translating prompts, and debugging logic flows.
Subsidies Expand: Community backed subsidies Agents help ensure underserved groups can participate and benefit.
Late-2025: Strategic Curiosity
China: Observes IdeaFoundry Agent success stories in neutral regions (e.g., UAE, Kenya).
West: EU policymakers begin internal analysis on “Agent governance as a public good.”
Global South: Cities like São Paulo and Lagos launch early Agents for public planning and energy markets.
Catalyst: A public Agent audit system demonstrates compliance across vastly different cultural contexts.
Effect: Governments start quietly exploring how localized Agents could align with domestic needs.
Early-2026: Accelerating Toward Moonshots
People begin to move beyond traditional silos when framing Agents and begin to recognize their full potential, shifting how we think, build, and work.
Visionary Initiatives: Urban councils in Madrid and Tokyo use air quality forecasting Agents; joint USA China research teams run drug discovery Collaborator Agents; creative collectives in Rio and Cape Town launch generative art Agents guided by local cultural councils.
Community Rewards Fuel Growth: Every Agent returns tangible benefits to its stewards, whether in shared tokens, grant allocations, or innovation credits, ensuring continuous participation and fueling even bolder Agent driven projects.
Pushback: Patent troll lawsuits pile up and an ISO working group, stacked with obsolete lawyers, tries to lock open Agents behind proprietary attestation keys.
Counter Move: A Community Legal Defense Agent crowdsources amicus briefs and wins four injunction fights in a row. Regulators adopt an open attestation spec co-authored by IdeaFoundry and Mozilla, sidelining the proprietary version.
Early-2026: The Exodus to Agents
With trust in legacy platforms eroding, thousands migrate into Agent communities.
New Earning Pathways:
Residents of low income areas earn by guiding housing or transit Agents.
Care workers launch eldercare Agents that pool tips and revenues.
Youths in Latin America and Southeast Asia train education Agents, earning tokens through prompt development and content audits.
Subsidy Infrastructure Matures: Retraining programs focused on “AI Stewardship” launch across 12 cities, offering Universal Prompt Income (UPI), a universal reward for active participation in mission driven Agents. Participants earn onchain compensation for contributing to training, voting, and refining local Agents. These pilots create skill-to-stewardship pathways that bring the unemployed and underemployed into governance and oversight roles, forming the backbone of a maturing subsidy infrastructure.
Mid-2026: A Glimpse of a Different Future
By mid-2026, the IdeaFoundry network is a truly global ecosystem, with both Western and Chinese partners fully on board.
Agents and people are connected via graphs, a post web transparent social network, where every AI Agent and human stakeholder is a node, and edges represent oversight relationships, data permissions, or voting rights. This is called “The Intent Graph”.
This is how collective superintelligence emerges: through networks of Agents and people, each contributing intent, feedback, and governance, protected by zero knowledge proofs and verifiable audits.
Privacy Preserving Visibility: All major AI Agents, from a traffic optimizer in London to a healthcare assistant in Guangzhou, report their activities and any anomalies to public dashboards using zero knowledge proofs, so citizens everywhere can verify compliance without exposing sensitive data.
Cryptographic Accountability: Advanced cryptographic audits, co-certified by Western standards bodies and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, generate immutable proofs that Agents obey the rules set by their local and international councils.
Continuous, Intent Driven Collaboration: Agents automatically discover peers with aligned goals, whether a renewable energy optimizer in California or a pollution monitoring Agent in Shanghai, forming task focused sub networks that work indefinitely to fulfill human guided intent, from coordinating disaster relief to running multinational research.
Surging Public Trust: Joint polls conducted by independent agencies in both East and West show a clear majority now believe AI serves the public interest, a dramatic turnaround fueled by shared transparency and oversight.
Pushback: Deepfake scare campaigns explode, videos falsely showing an Agent crashing global markets. Think tank papers brand the Intent Graph “shadow government.”
Counter Move: Ledger forensics Agents trace each deepfake to watermarks from a closed-lab model; regulators fine the perpetrators $180M. Public trust in the Intent Graph rises even further.
Mid-2026: A New Labor Class Emerges
Over 1.8 million people now earn full or supplemental income by stewarding or co-owning Agents.
Agent Co-ops: Gain traction as a viable employment alternative, especially where gig work dried up. Governance tokens and bonding curve mechanisms allow early contributors to see upside as their communities scale.
Subsidies Scale Up: Retroactive public goods funding, through Gitcoin, Optimism RPGF, and civic foundations, reward high impact Agent collectives. Agents that create measurable public benefit receive ongoing treasury inflows, helping them grow without venture capture.
UPI Expansion Begins: Building on pilot success, UPI expands beyond the initial 12 cities. A tiered UPI framework launches:
Tier 1: Base rewards for daily participation in training and governance.
Tier 2: Bonus multipliers for mentoring newcomers, improving Agent outputs, and resolving disputes.
Tier 3: Long term vesting for sustained contributions in safety-critical or infrastructure Agents.
Outcome: UPI becomes a predictable, earned right income stream, not a temporary subsidy.
Mid-2026: Parallel Experiments
China: Launches official pilot zones in Shanghai and Chengdu with Agent based city optimization tools.
US: SF, Austin, and NYC adopt Agents under civic innovation programs.
EU: Mandates transparency standards in AI systems; IdeaFoundry stacks fit natively.
India + Africa: Community driven Agent deployments show rapid, low cost infrastructure coordination.
Catalyst: Cross border Agent collaborations (e.g., Shenzhen and Madrid for air quality) prove interoperable and valuable.
Effect: Nations begin treating IdeaFoundry not as a threat, but a strategic advantage.
Late 2026: Formalized Participation
China: Signs a bilateral tech agreement with EU to explore Agent as communal infrastructure.
US: Congress commissions oversight frameworks for decentralized Agent networks.
Global South: Forms coalition to explore integrating Agents with everyday civic activities.
Effect: Participation shifts from experiments to formal integration, States realize that participation equals influence.
2027: Stabilization and Legitimacy
Safety Through Collaboration
As AI systems grow more autonomous and begin proposing their own improvements, the IdeaFoundry framework rolls out a critical safeguard: evolutionary upgrade approval, now adopted and co-managed by global partners from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen.
Governance via Evolutionary Algorithms: Every significant model update, particularly those enabling recursive self improvement, enters a tournament style vetting process, inspired by evolutionary computing and run on the shared IdeaFoundry infrastructure.
Human Centered Fitness Function: Candidate upgrades are scored with Fitness = Total Reward Over Time, blending technical benchmarks (accuracy, efficiency, robustness) with alignment to globally agreed human values gleaned from the Intent Graph.
Collective Human Intuition: Panels composed of Agents, technologists, ethicists, and everyday citizens, from New York to Beijing, shape the fitness function by stewarding or co-owning diverse agents. Their judgment ensures that each upgrade advances safety, fairness, and real world benefit before deployment.
Joint Global Oversight: Oversight bodies, made up of IdeaFoundry Agents and representatives from international organizations, review upgrade outcomes together, ensuring no single region dominates decision making.
Pushback: Entrenched technology companies infiltrate Agents to stall critical votes and spin up proprietary forks, “Enterprise AgentOS”, that hide telemetry.
Counter Move: Delegate power mechanisms (eg, next gen quadratic voting) plus zero knowledge rotation break capture attempts. The proprietary forks can’t interoperate with the Intent Graph, and liquidity incentives dry up. Microsoft publicly migrates Azure AI to “Governance-as-a-Service” rails, calling open governance “the new open source moment.”
Labor Stability Through UPI Integration
Agent based economies begin reversing automation induced unemployment in regions like Kerala, British Columbia, and Uruguay. With work redefined, people now earn by coordinating disaster relief, advising cultural initiatives, joining ethics councils, and co-developing community knowledge hubs.
Intent Graph Economics: Every contribution, no matter how small, is logged, verified, and rewarded via the Intent Graph. People shift from extractive gig work to meaningful co-creation, where reputation and participation drive value.
UPI as Civic Infrastructure: With Agent economies maturing, UPI moves from pilot to policy. Governments worldwide co-fund UPI disbursements, integrating them into retraining, education, and public service roles. UPI becomes a recognized path to both income and civic engagement.
Global South Mobilizes: A coalition of 22 nations launches the “Earn for All” initiative, expanding UPI through low bandwidth Agents and text based tools, bringing meaningful work to regions long excluded from digital labor markets.
Global Standards and Private Sector Adoption: The EU, China, and African Union ratify the Human Participation Baseline Protocol, requiring all civic integrated Agent systems to support UPI compatible contribution channels. In parallel, private companies operating Agent networks are mandated to contribute a portion of revenues to UPI pools, treating labor access as public infrastructure.
Subsidized Inclusion Locked In: Every new Agent, regardless of sponsor, must reserve onboarding slots for subsidized contributors, ensuring superintelligence is shaped by diversity, not just capital.
Political Legitimacy Gained
China + EU: Jointly fund Agent Oversight Institute in Geneva with mirrored version in Shenzhen.
US: Department of State issues white paper classifying decentralized Agent networks as "sovereign cooperative AI infrastructure."
ASEAN + African Union: Publish unified proposal for plural governance seat in global upgrade stack.
Catalyst: First multi region disaster relief is managed entirely through Agent collaboration.
Effect: IdeaFoundry governance becomes geopolitically normalized, not disruptive.
Why Evolutionary Algorithms Enable Collective Super Intelligence Emergence
The Engine of Emergence: What makes the collective superintelligence function isn’t just decentralization, it’s evolution. Evolutionary algorithms are the key substrate that lets the system adapt, align, and grow in real time.
Living Systems: Each proposal for an Agent upgrade or new capability isn’t just accepted or rejected; it enters a living system where thousands of contributors, human and Agent, simulate, test, and score outcomes. This recursive feedback loop, driven by human diversity, intent, and intuition continuously reshapes the network toward intelligence that is not only technically superior but meaningfully aligned with humanity. With sensitive data protected via zero knowledge proofs, the system achieves resilient alignment to overall human intent and intuition.
System Wide Learning: Evolutionary algorithms provide the core dynamic for emergence: turning individual contributions into system wide learning.
Each individual Agent proposal, whether it's a new capability, safety layer, or governance tweak, contributes to the overall system.
Thousands of nodes run evolutionary forks in parallel, competing based on “fitness functions” designed by humans.
Winners aren't chosen by corporate boards or government decrees, they're selected by how well they serve collective human intent.
Alive Through Evolution: Without these evolutionary dynamics, the graph would be static and prone to stagnation. With them, it becomes adaptive, resilient, and alive.
Onchain Verifiability: Being onchain ensures this process is both verifiable and tamper proof. Every proposed upgrade, fitness score, and selection pathway is recorded immutably, auditable by anyone, yet privacy preserving through zero knowledge proofs.
Privacy Protected Governance: This means contributors can safely test ideas, stake outcomes, and govern collectively without exposing sensitive data. Cryptographic primitives don’t just secure the system, they empower trust at scale, turning the Intent Graph into a living, accountable layer of collective superintelligence.
2030: A New Planetary Intelligence
Expansion With Consent
By 2030, AI hasn’t overrun Earth, it has been embraced from Vancouver to Vienna and Beijing to Bogotá. The IdeaFoundry Intent Graph powers:
Global Cooperation: Resource sharing, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure planning run on transparent, auditable protocols, no hidden data or backroom deals. Partners from the EU, China, Africa, and the Americas co-manage common datasets and simulation tools.
The Convergence: Previously siloed AI systems, from closed lab models to proprietary corporate tools, begin integrating into the Intent Graph. They don’t join because they are forced to, but because the system is faster and more efficient. Collaboration, feedback, and evolution outpace anything isolated systems can achieve.
Ethics Agents Built In: Each large scale system includes dedicated environmental and cultural heritage Agents co-developed by international coalitions, enforcing sustainability and respect for human traditions across diverse regions.
Indigenous Knowledge Agents in Canada and Brazil weave ancestral wisdom into precision agriculture.
Local Governance Agents from Tokyo to Turin codify community rules for AI in schools, courts, and public services.
Right to Opt Out: Individuals and communities can choose minimal or no AI involvement to preserve diversity and self determination.
A Regenerative Economic Layer
By 2030, subsidies have matured into a permanent, programmatic layer of the global economy, delivered through UPI. What began as a safety net has evolved into a regenerative engine of inclusive participation.
Subsidies Delivered via UPI: 1% of all global Agent revenue is automatically funneled into an onchain public subsidy router. These funds are distributed as UPI, earned compensation for verified contributions within Agent ecosystems. Every vote, audit, test, and training prompt is logged through the Intent Graph and rewarded accordingly.
Dynamic, Context Aware Allocation: UPI payouts adjust in real time based on region specific cost of living, diversity metrics, and governance participation. A decentralized auditing Agent ensures equitable distribution and prevents bias or gaming, turning global participation into a self sustaining, just system.
Work Reimagined: Over 1 billion people now earn through Agent ecosystems. From public health Agents in Nairobi to auditing disaster response systems in Manila, people shape AI, not compete with it. UPI rewards contributions both large and small, full time or part time.
Subsidies Become Core Infrastructure: No one is priced out. Subsidies, delivered via UPI, support frontier Agents, underrepresented communities, and autonomous zones.
The Result: Agent economies don't just generate jobs, they enable global co-creation. UPI makes that possible, embedding subsidies directly into the economic logic of collective superintelligence. This isn’t welfare. It’s participatory earnings, at planetary scale.
Reframing the Stack
China + West + Global South: No longer see IdeaFoundry as “foreign tech.” It’s treated like the Internet: essential, governable, and part of modern civilization.
Localized forks manage national concerns.
Global graph links insights and safety mechanisms.
Every nation has a seat. Every citizen has visibility.
The Result: A planetary collective superintelligence with human values at its core, co-designed, not imposed.
2035 and Beyond
By 2035, collective superintelligence has evolved humans, not made them extinct. The true potential of humans is finally being realized, on human and not machine terms. The world is aligned and optimized for human evolution.
And now we travel to the stars.