Race to AGI: The Board Game

This project won the "Best Interactive Deliverable" prize on our AI Governance (April 2024) course. The text below is an excerpt from the final project.

My final project was to explore the development of a board game which casts players in the roles of (American) frontier AI labs, competing to earn the most prestige (and income) while avoiding a host of perils: being outcompeted by foreign adversaries, losing control to the US government, or losing control over a rogue unaligned AI.

During the course, I became very interested in the race dynamic that exists between the leading AI labs. Labs compete to create the best AI tools, like chatbots and coding assistants. Labs with better products earn more revenue and gain prestige, allowing them to attract further investment and talent while increasing their influence on potential government regulation.

The race dynamic refers to the problem that given the huge incentives to be ahead of the competition, these labs have difficulty finding the time, money, or compute required to pursue other goals. And there are many other goals which these labs could be pursuing, in particular:

• Keeping their AI systems under control; that is, doing what their users want them to do rather than doing other things like killing all humans
• Keeping their technology and computer systems secure from theft, such as by computer hacking by very capable and motivated foreign state actors.

I was inspired by the release of the board game Daybreak last year. Daybreak puts players in the role of governments working together to solve climate change. Daybreak was exciting, in part, for bringing a serious look at some of the dynamics of the climate crisis to a wider, general audience. I did an impact analysis of Daybreak which I’ll link to here, but in brief its crowdfunding campaign raised $450,015 across 8977 backers by Oct 20, 2022 and was covered in several major publications including the New York Times.

Could I create a board game that gives players a chance to feel the competitive pressures that frontier labs feel?

To read the full project submission and to play the final prototype board game, click here.