Snapshot v1.0 — how the numbers were derived

Computed 2026-09-16. Snapshot v1.0. Methodology v0.1 / rubric R0.1. Static founding snapshot. Next protocol refresh window: 2026-12-16. BLOB-R0.1 0fae6bbcc552eec8ce70b36b0ecbab2c5a1c85dd. COMMIT-R0.1 051565a5751dfe3e87cb60298da91c6d3d26b9ea.

Machine-readable output: snapshots/v1.json. Recompute: python3 compute/snapshot.py. Check: python3 compute/snapshot.py --check. Tests: python3 compute/test_snapshot.py (or cd compute && python3 -m unittest test_snapshot.py).

This page is the method printout for the founding number. It is not a live index.

Plain language

This site does not measure the chance that AI causes a catastrophe. Nobody can observe that. What it does is collect named, published forecasts, keep only the ones that are actually a number said by the named person or survey, line them up on the same kind of event (catastrophe vs extinction vs something else) and the same kind of time horizon (this century vs the next few decades), and then take a weighted middle.

That middle, for “AI-caused catastrophe by 2100,” is 10.0%.

The five forecasts that are allowed to count disagree. The lowest is 2.13%; the highest is 12%. The middle of that disagreement, after the published weights, sits on 10% because two of the five rows are 10% and together they carry half the weight.

News is not currently pushing the number up or down. There is no frozen list of scored news events yet, so the methodology’s default applies: multiply by 1.00 (neutral). The 10.0% you see is the same as the expert baseline. That is a gap, not a hidden judgment that “nothing is happening.”

A second gauge, literal extinction by 2100, has only two published numbers (0.38% and 3%). That is too few for a full average, so the page shows both points and their midpoint (1.69%), labeled a thin panel.

A third gauge, deployment cascade (not-ready AI pushed into the grid, military command, hospitals, finance, logistics until failures compound), has zero published forecasts. The page does not invent a percentage for it. It is labeled a constructed estimate.

The old mockup’s 4.7% / 1.2% / 3.9% / ×1.08 figures were pictures. They are not these numbers.

Headline (G1)

Who is in the mixture

Only ledger rows that are a primary numeric utterance, mapped to G1 (catastrophe / existential catastrophe / collapse-or-worse), and in horizon class H-century. Weights are the published v0.1 weights; they are not tuned to hit a preferred headline.

Total weight 10.0.

Ordered: 2.13 (cum 1.5) → 5 (cum 3.5) → 10 (Ord, cum 5.5). Half of 10 is 5. The first value whose cumulative weight is at least 5 is 10%. A-AII-2024 is also 10%, so the median is not a knife-edge between two different numbers; it sits on the 10% plateau.

Convention (also printed in the JSON): if cumulative weight lands exactly on half after a row, take the midpoint of that row and the next. That even-split rule is what produces 7.5% in one leave-one-out case below.

Who is not in the mixture

LOCK include-outliers means LeCun and Yudkowsky stay on the ledger. It does not mean a paraphrase becomes a data point.

Carlsmith and both AI Impacts waves are disempowerment-shaped, not the FRI “≥10% dead” operationalization. They enter G1 with an ambiguity flag. That is a site mapping judgment [SJ-MAP], not a source claim.

G2 — extinction, thin panel

Two scoring rows, both XPT, horizon 2100:

• A-XPT-SF 0.38%
• A-XPT-DE 3%

n = 2 → thin panel, not a full aggregate. Both numbers are shown. Unweighted midpoint 1.69%. No IQR costume. Same M = 1.00. Hinton and Hubinger stay on the near-term panel; they are not mixed into 2100.

G3 — constructed estimate

n = 0 published forecasts of “premature deployment into critical systems producing compounding failures.”

SITE-CONSTRUCTED, NOT AN AGGREGATE. No percentage is published as if it were a conditioned aggregate. The 3.9% on the old mockup is withdrawn.

Allowed on the page: a short scenario narrative; a qualitative factor list (deployment into named system classes, verification lag, liability lag, compounding, terminality), each an indicator, not P(G3); pointers to C2 and C7 event rows — of which there are none at genesis.

The operator thesis (SITE-PRIOR-001) motivated G3’s existence. It does not set the G1 headline.

News multiplier (M1)

There is no frozen event ledger for v1. The script will refuse to apply invented events. Methodology §11.5:

v1 snapshot default is M = 1.00 at genesis with an empty qualifying

event list.

All seven categories are 1.00 (the only default on the quantized set {0.94, 0.97, 1.00, 1.03, 1.06}). Combined M = 1.00, inside [0.65, 1.54]. C2+C7 share cap does not bind. Decay is a no-op (already neutral). C6 cannot score upward until an S2 codebook annex exists.

Permanent comparison line (§10.3):

Conditions currently multiply the aggregate by ×1.00 (span allowed:

×0.65–×1.54, ratio 2.37). Reference disagreement (XPT catastrophe,

superforecasters vs domain experts) is 5.63×. Conditions currently move

this less than the forecaster disagreement (neutral multiplier;

disagreement remains 5.63×).

Down-move eligibility

INC-CLOCK starts at the as-of date (2026-09-16) because no S2+ incident is scored. Clock value: 0 days.

Unmet is listed, not implied. Genesis does not backdate a clear incident window through the 2020–2026 reference period: there is no C6 codebook, and the written rule starts the clock at as-of.

Sensitivities

Required by §9.2. Small n makes the weighted median jumpy; that is shown rather than smoothed away.

1. Leave-one-out (G1)

Removing the survey row lands exactly on half the remaining weight at Carlsmith’s 5%, so the even-split rule takes the midpoint of 5% and Ord’s 10% = 7.5%. The headline is therefore sensitive to the heaviest row.

2. Substitute-wave

Replace A-AII-2024 (10.0%) with A-AII-2023 (5%) at the same weight 3.0. Headline becomes 5.0% (−5.0 pt). The 2023→2024 survey move is the largest single lever in the current table.

3. Weighting-scheme range

Schemes with n ≥ 2 span about 7.07–10.0%.

4. Mapping lines

Actual headline = native-G1 rows only: 10.0%.

Counterfactual: add the H-century native-G2 values (XPT extinction 0.38% and 3%) as extra rows. This double-counts FAM-XPT and is not a headline.

Hinton and Hubinger are not added here: that would also break the horizon rule.

5. Named-statement on/off

No named-statement rows in the G1-2100 mixture (Hinton, Hubinger, and Bengio fail horizon). Difference 0.0 pt.

6. Unconditioned vs conditioned

10.0% vs 10.0%. Difference 0.0 pt. M = 1.00.

Band composition

In the source IQR: disagreement among the five G1-2100 mixture rows, unweighted so A-AII-2024 cannot hide the 2.13–12 spread. Tukey hinges: for odd n the overall median is excluded from both halves; Q1 = median(2.13, 5) = 3.565% → displayed 3.57%; Q3 = median(10, 12) = 11.0%.

Not in the source band: mapping uncertainty, weighting-scheme uncertainty, horizon-standardization uncertainty, conditioning.

Envelope (separate): 10.0% × 0.65 and 10.0% × 1.54 = 6.5–15.4%. Drawn from the bounds, not from current M.

After conditioning, the IQR is multiplied by current M. At genesis that changes nothing.

Genesis row

GENESIS-001 (SJ-GENESIS, R-NULL): founding static snapshot under methodology v0.1. Unconditioned G1 10.0%, M = 1.00, rationale as above, day-one down-move eligibility all UNMET. Subsequent movements must cite events. This document is the compute printout that the methodology deferred.

Site prior and incentive

Gaps (honest G1, incomplete elsewhere)

G1 with n=5 is a full aggregate under §6.3. It is attributable. It is also jumpy, mapping-ambiguous, and unconditioned by news. Those are named, not papered over.

1. No news events scored. M = 1.00 by default, not because a review found nothing. A later frozen event ledger can move M inside [0.65, 1.54].
2. Tier B out. Metaculus / markets remain unverified.
3. G3 n=0. Constructed label; no fake percent.
4. G2 n=2. Thin panel only.
5. C6 S2 codebook missing. Incidents cannot score up. INC-CLOCK is 0 days at genesis.
6. Ord not re-OCR’d from the book in the research pass; ~10% is inherited with a tilde.
7. Horizon rule keeps several famous named statements off the 2100 headline. That is deliberate. They are on the near-term panel as-stated.
8. No 0.5 pt predecessor delta. Founding snapshot.

Non-comparability [SJ-NOCOMP]: this index is not Metaculus, not a market price, not a personal p(doom) poll, and not Ord’s or Carlsmith’s number alone.

How to reproduce

Inputs (nothing else scores):

• docs/SOURCE-LEDGER-TIER-A.md — governing human ledger
• data/tier-a-ledger.json — structured extract of that ledger
• data/event-ledger-v1.json — empty qualifying events
• docs/METHODOLOGY-v0.1.md — rules, implemented in compute/snapshot.py

python3 compute/snapshot.py
python3 compute/snapshot.py --check
cd compute && python3 -m unittest test_snapshot.py

The script re-applies eligibility (primary numeric, gauge map, H-century, weight > 0). A JSON in: true flag cannot smuggle LeCun or Yudkowsky into the median. If qualifying_events is non-empty, compute exits rather than inventing an unfrozen news pipeline.

Outputs: snapshots/v1.json, design/mockups/frontpage-v1/index.html, design/push/frontpage-v1.html.