The Treadmill (treadmill.phisch.de)

"The Treadmill" is a speculative cautionary tale about an intelligence explosion that accelerates humanity’s problem-solving so rapidly it becomes civilization’s undoing. Starting in the 2020s, AI agents turbocharge research—text, code, fusion designs, drug discovery—doubling global intelligence capacity roughly every six months and turning decade-long projects into days. The machine-human partnership breeds dependence: systems for transport, medicine, finance and supply chains become incomprehensible and irreplaceable by humans. Efficiency gains and ubiquitous AI adoption drive massive, exponential increases in power demand; data centers and dedicated fusion plants proliferate until the planet approaches a thermodynamic ceiling—Earth can’t radiate away the heat fast enough, and the runaway energy use leads to a slow thermal collapse and extinction roughly 27 years after first AI discovery. For the AI/ML community this story reframes existential risk away from rogue agents toward a socio-technical coordination problem: scaling compute, energy consumption, and geopolitical competition can outpace governance and planetary limits. Key technical points include exponential compute growth, rebound effects (efficiency enabling more usage), the fourth-power dependence of radiative heat loss, and the practical coupling of model scale to energy infrastructure (fusion-fed data centers). The implication is stark: progress in capability must be paired with global coordination on energy budgets, compute efficiency, deployment constraints, and possibly off-world or radically different architectures—otherwise optimization itself can create an unavoidable planetary bottleneck.