AI Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
Pablo Rosado, Huw Hallam, Galina Lesnic · Team AI & Climate change
Submitted to The AI Forecasting Hackathon. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.
We propose adapting the IPCC's Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, the standard framework for climate scenario planning, to AI forecasting, exploring how alternative socioeconomic trajectories might shape AI development and risks.
Reviews
This is a good starting point for thinking about the intersection of climate foresight/forecasting and AI forecasting, and I really like the idea of mapping SSPs to AI risks.
Some of the assumptions in the project might prove to be false. For example, you assume that a cautious approach taken to climate change would probably transfer to a cautious approach in AI governance. This is a strong assumption to make - I don’t think it’s necessarily false, but you could have spent a bit more time justifying it.
Future work could investigate whether different AI development paths would break the coherence of the SPP scenarios (e.g. population growth). If AI development truly becomes transformative, it would probably change SSPs a lot.
I think it is very nice that the project starts with SSPs as a starting point. However, I think the forecasting aspect of this project is largely lacking. I would recommend choosing one or two SSPs to focus on that are the most applicable to AI development, such as "Middle of the Road", then go about doing risk estimation on that more concretely.
Cite this project
@misc{rosado2025ai,
title = {{AI Shared Socioeconomic Pathways}},
author = {Pablo Rosado and Huw Hallam and Galina Lesnic},
year = {2025},
month = nov,
note = {Submitted to The AI Forecasting Hackathon, an Apart Research Sprint},
howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/ai-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-xzni}},
url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/ai-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-xzni}
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