The most optimistic view of AI (AGI) you’ll ever read. but also, a call to arms.
Back in the early 2000s, computer scientist Ray Kurzweil said: “The future will be far more surprising than most people realize.” (The Singularity is Near, p.11)
I don’t even know how to write what I’m about to write. It’s hard to put into words. So, I’ll try to be succinct and straight to the point. If you work for income, you need to read this. If you are unaware of what Artificial Intelligence, accelerated (if not quantum) computing, and energy resources are all on track to collide and supersprint into, you need to read this. If you have children, you need to read this.
How I [Reluctantly] Joined the AI Side
A little over a year ago, I transitioned to working full-time in AI. I chose the company that would replace me — Content at Scale. I’d sold my human writing agency two years prior.
I knew AI would change everything when my mentor and the godfather of my industry, Joe Pulizzi, told me point-blank in 2017 that “AI will create 99% of content marketing in the 2020s, and there’s no way around it.” Pulizzi was right. ChatGPT, launched November 30, 2022, was the catalyst, the “shot heard round the world,” that allowed the world to interact with artificial intelligence through a simple text prompt. AI had its first major breakthrough in writing (LLMs). (Text to images, videos, audio generation followed shortly after. We see continual breakthroughs on all multimodal fronts week after week.)
It was hard to believe, and I didn’t believe it till I, myself, found artificial intelligence capable of writing better than the humans.
My total obsession with AI began in January, 2023. Over the next two years, I worked every day on the AI software taking the content writing jobs I used to get hired for. It’s a bit surreal to think on.
And today, I own my own AI firm at First Movers, where we’re changing the game helping people adapt to what’s coming.
I’ve never been more obsessed with anything in my life, the way I’m obsessed with learning, implementing, and studying AI with the brilliant folks I work with. But I don’t have time to dwell on my obsession. I’ve got to explain the future. Let’s get into it.
What Our World Will Look Like Soon
I’m an AI boomer, not an AI doomer. I’m also 100% e/acc (effective accelerationism; a description started in 2023 for someone who is explicitly pro-technology). You may appropriate all those labels my way. I wholeheartedly receive them.
I believe that God put the availability of AI on this earth, but it was up to us “discover” it. And we did. Thanks in large to Jensen Huang, a human who didn’t give up–the CEO of Nvidia, a company that is now leading the AI chips arm race; we had an official breakthrough in computing power, allowing us to leave generalized computing and enter the era of accelerated computing. This made humankind capable of running and accessing artificial intelligence on a computer; from this new chip computing capability, OpenAI and ChatGPT was born (I’ve oversimplified, but we have lots to cover). There was also a multitude of other things building up, including a decade of the internet building up for LLMs to scrape and gain data from, that allowed multi-modal AI to be birthed. (Text to video, text to image, etc.) The next source of data will be AI turning to armies of humanoids interacting with the real world to gain even fresher data.
Like everything else, AI is an opportunity for humankind given to us, but unlike everything else, it’s a Holy Grail that unlocks (dare I use ChatGPT’s favorite word) multi-dimensional opportunities all at once. It is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, times a million.
Because when artificial intelligence as a whole gets better, every single industry does. The cost of goods will fall to extraordinary new lows as the human work required also falls to zero. And we will have a fully reshaped world. Peter Diamandis says we are beyond exponential; we are now into something called superexponential growth. Otherwise known as saltatory leaps, and hard takeoff. (The debate is that hard takeoff, not soft takeoff, is bound to happen — there is no escaping the velocity at which AI is now taking off. I agree.)
I believe in the next five to six years, by 2029–2030, we will see the entire world shift to a new world that is run at large by agnostic Artificial Intelligence. Sam Altman believes this is decades away. Many AI researchers agree. Some say it’s hundreds of years away. Some of the leading entrepreneurs in AI (Peter Diamandis, Moonshots) believe it’s mere years away. My prediction — by 2030, the world will have the capacity to be nearly fully run by AI.
Now I could be off by 10, 20, 30 or even 50 years. I could be off by 2 years. Time will tell. But it will happen, mark my words.
Within five to six years, we will achieve AGI and ASI, which are synonymous to each other and simply stand for the highest level of intelligence possible on this earth–a level of artificial, non-bio (non-human) intelligence so high, that we cannot actually and properly sketch out a physical representation–there is no way to show it. (We will have to ask AGI when it is released how it would explain itself, to even get the answer. That’s how far beyond human intelligence the breakthrough biointelligence of AGI will be.) The good @waitbutwhy and @tsarnick on X have shared some rudimentary drawings that spell this out quite simply, in a way all humans should be able to follow:
AGI, and ASI, will be the last inventions humankind will ever make. Because after we release this, ASI will possess light years of capabilities of knowledge and intelligence far beyond humanity’s capabilities; therefore every breakthrough, every invention, will be through it. Not through us.
I predict that within the next five to six years, AI will run everything: our healthcare systems, change our financial systems and the way currency/money works forever; it will completely reshape manufacturing, transportation and automotive, energy, education, retail and e-commerce, entertainment and media, and telecommunications (internet and beyond).
When this is achieved, labor will go down from 100% of “bodies employed” at work, real humans working physical jobs; whether it’s answering a phone in a call center to showing up for a service call for mice extermination–to none. 0% of humans will be needed at work. No one will need to work; AI is infinitely better, more capable, faster, stronger, wiser. Every corporation will tap into an army of bots. Whether it’s answering service calls, painting houses, to writing content to rank in Google or building an SEO campaign. Everything, and I mean everything, will be done by AI.
Work (tasks) will be fulfilled by AI; but there will still be industries where there will be a demand and need for humans. However, they may not be providing that service for income. The industries where we will still seek a human touch will be experience (travel, tourism); family care (nannying); statutory jobs (creating laws); and meaning jobs (philosophy, thought leadership, influencers).
I don’t see any clear way of stopping the progression to AGI, or slowing it down. The reputation of the biggest tech companies and innovators in the world now actually rely on their ability to produce AGI-level breakthroughs. We all watch the news for this, though many of us aren’t aware of what’s really at stake. These names includes giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, IBM, Elon Musk, to name a few — all of which are in this arms race together. Billions of dollars of market share is at stake between all of them. There is no stopping competition when it comes from the biggest companies in the world.
So, get ready to say goodbye to the world as you know it. The breakthrough of AGI will affect everything, especially our ability to work and what we do for a living.
The Glaring Problem in 2020s’ Humanity that AI Could Actually Solve
Talk to any business owner in the 2020s, and you’ll most likely hear them all say this:
“Good workers are hard to find.”
You know why?
A global poll conducted by Gallup in 2017 uncovered that out of the world’s one billion full-time workers, only 15% of people are engaged at work.
That means that an astronomical 85% of people are unhappy in their jobs!
This is insane. And this is why work as we know it is vastly broken across all industries. This is why when 100s of people apply to job, you have to narrow down to find the 1, if not 1%. This is why depression runs rampant, and even illness and disease and stress occur (the number one cause of stress today is worry, often stemming from finances).
Because the majority of folks actually hate what they do.
And for employers, this is why it’s impossible to find good people.
Now coaches on the internet will claim that the answer lies in “go and be an entrepreneur!” but the truth of that matter is, only 1% of the world is cut out for entrepreneurship.
Which leads me to…
How Can We Adapt Healthily? The Most Hopeful View You’ll Read
In a world where corporations can deploy AI in every form–from walking humanoids to self-sufficient software programs–and it completes those every tasks in infinitely less time, costs, and complaints than a human is capable of–the human won’t have to do the work they hate.
Without the need for work, the human can finally live a meaningful life.
Imagine this: you need to get a bigger house. You have a set of twins on the way with your significant other. A corporation sends an army of bots (they might look like crawling spiders, or some other physical form best suited to the work at hand), and in one day, they have an entirely new house, driveway, wall, everything built for you. It cost the corporation virtually nothing but the energy it took to deploy them. There was zero physical or human labor involved.
From a house taking fallible humans a year or more to build, with much dichtonomies and arguments and lawsuits and disappearing workers and you-name-the-human-problem in the middle of it all, to being done in a day without human work! This is what Artificial Intelligence will be capable of when we have AGI and ASI at hand. Don’t believe me? Watch what Atlas, a humanoid robot by Boston Dynamics, is capable of today (this is without AGI):
What will happen if corporations don’t need humans, and human labor falls to zero?
UBI. (Universal Basic Income)
UBI is the concept that every human will have access to a universal basic income that provides them with all the necessities of life, without having to work. Now, the danger lies in where UBI will come from. This is where things get gnarly. What government, or group of governments, will create and govern the tax that brings UBI to life? This is what we are in the very middle of determining. The lawmaking decision monopoly will go, I believe, to the entity involved in helping bring AGI to life. And it’s an arms race to that breakthrough, right now. The jury and the verdict is still out.
I believe we still have the time to create a beautiful post-AGI world.
We are in early days here, even though AI is advancing faster than the speed of light, and the components of AGI are coming to life.
We still have the time to conceptualize and prepare our world economies for adaption.
And that is why my call to arms is to ask every politician, every lawmaker, every economic advisor that cares about humanity to begin thinking about what life post-AGI, and an equalizing, fair, non-dystopian UBI could look like.
I don’t fully trust folks like Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, who blatantly states he’d like humans to “own nothing” one day, to be in charge of this reshaping of society.
However, he seems to be one of the few that actually does understand and grasp, if not propel forward, the concept of UBI and totalitarian AI; we need more economic advisors, chairmen, politicians and world leaders to grasp what AI is, what AGI is, and the need to recreate and reenvision a meaning-based world and national economy, where finances are not the pull, inflation isn’t a thing, and the need for human labor is at zero.
Imagine waking up, and all you need to do is live a life of meaning?
What would this finally free you up to do?
This is what AGI is capable of giving us. A beautiful future, one we’ve never been able to have because we’ve been struggling to provide for our families, “just get by,” or tolerate circumstances at hand because “things are tight.”
Imagine if all of that was gone? And we never had to work a job again?
Let’s adapt.
I’ve looked at all angles, and in the end I’m embracing e/acc because not only are we not capable of stopping it, but it is in our best interests to embrace the acceleration and continue breakthroughs forward from all angles, all teams, all companies, so we don’t see the monopoly of AGI all go to one company or corporation releasing the entirety — because the monopoly of that will be dangerous.
I think competition is healthy, and it creates a unique opportunity where an unexpected entrepreneur can come out of nowhere and gain that Big W (big win). Important: the game of AGI and ASI has not been won yet.
I think that Joe Rogan’s proposition to Sam Altman is actually quite interesting: “What if an agnostic, all-knowing AI was put together by multiple nations to be our ruling and governing body?” But I think it’s going to take humanity to create a governing body for AI. If we let AGI do it, it’s simply too powerful. I wouldn’t trust it.
But we must take part in this, fully, and ditch the fear of AI for this whole AGI thing to be successful and give humanity much more meaning.
I’m hopeful in humanity, still. I think there is so much opportunity for a world post-AGI to be a beautiful, healthy, and wonderful one. ❤️
I hope I am proven right on this one. The world is at stake.
