increasingly dirty, the robots begin to target humans as well in an effort to force the other side to back down. The US avoids using nuclear weapons because the Chinese AIs have sophisticated anti-nuclear systems and have threatened total annihilation of the US in the event of attempted nuclear strike. After a few days, it becomes clear that China will win the conflict, and the US concedes.

2086: China now has a clear lead over the rest of the world in military capability. Rather than risking a pointlessly costly confrontation, other countries grudgingly fold into China's umbrella, asking for some concessions in return for transferring their best scientists and engineers to China's Ministry of AGI. China continues its AGI development because it wants to maintain control of the world.Before the second half of the 20th century, many history books glorified the winners (Europeans). After a brief period in which humans are quashed by a rogue AGI, its own "history books" will celebrate its conquest and the bending of the arc of history toward "higher", "better" forms of intelligence. (In practice, the psychology of a rogue AGI probably wouldn't be sufficiently similar to human psychology for these statements to apply literally, but they would be true in a metaphorical and implicit sense.)

David Althaus worries that if people sympathize too much with machines, society will be less afraid of an AI takeover, even if AI takeover is bad on purely altruistic grounds. I'm less concerned about this because even if people agree that advanced machines are sentient, they