Reversion is the most drastic safety play: humanity deliberately rolls technology back to a pre-AGI level — and chooses to stay there. No superintelligence is possible because the industrial and computational base that could build one has been dismantled or abandoned.
Trading the future for safety
It's the only scenario that removes the risk by removing the capability. But it forfeits everything advanced AI might have given us — the cures, the abundance, the reach — and history suggests such rollbacks are extraordinarily hard to choose and harder to maintain.
Sometimes the only way to be sure you never lose the game is to refuse to play it. The question is whether anyone can hold that line for centuries.
It's the extreme end of the spectrum that runs through 1984 and the Orwellian Outcome and The Gatekeeper — and the polar opposite of The Abundance Argument.
Related: 1984 and the Orwellian Outcome · The Gatekeeper · The Abundance Argument