There have been many red flags over the last eighteen months that the proverbial AGI-genie has already been released from the bottle. You might remember the executive shake-up at OpenAI in November of 2023. This got a ton of press but fell short on actual details. Co-founder Sam Altman was briefly ousted from the company hinting that something was amiss—the company admitted that the reason was a disagreement amongst OpenAI executives and board members vaguely citing safety concerns.
I’ve thought for a long time that artificial intelligence was further along in its development than Big Tech companies dared to admit. This would explain Elon Musk’s mad race to ramp up his own AI company, xAI, so quickly breaking world records in the process. According to @iruletheworldmo's recent post on X OpenAI’s July release of ChatGPT5 will be legitimate Artificial General Intelligence. If this is true, and I think it is, the human experience as we know it is about to completely change overnight.
This moment in time has been on my mind for years. My recent book, Poems From The Edge Of The Apocalypse is basically a cautionary tale in poetic form about how we must try to preserve our humanity through the dizzyingly radical changes that are soon to come.
Usually you can look to history for some clue about how future events will unfold, but not this time. It’s difficult to envision the pace and depth of the evolution that AGI will bring because there’s nothing to compare this to in our history. It seems strange to me that the average person on the street seems, largely, unaware or disinterested of what’s coming. Yes, humanity has experienced the Industrial Revolution, the computer, the internet but this is infinitely more impactful than all of those things combined. AGI’s public debut will be a lot like an advanced alien civilization landing on the White House lawn and offering us all its wisdom or deceiving us at our own detriment. That’s the closest metaphor that comes to mind.
None of us got to vote on whether or not we even wanted this monumental moment that’s right here on our doorstep but we’ll all soon be living in the post-AGI world—whatever that looks like. We’ll be the ones who will benefit from either the immense opportunities and/or the significant challenges this pivotal moment brings with it.
Bernie Sanders brought up a good point on the Joe Rogan show a few days ago. Sanders explained how Big Tech painted such a grand utopian vision of the impact computers would have on our society in the 1960s. They promised work hours would decrease, our quality of life would improve dramatically, we’d have flying cars and tons of leisure time. Although computers have improved several aspects of our lives, overall, people are having to work longer hours now for less. As much as a tech geek as I am I have to admit that people, as a whole, seem genuinely less happy now than they were fifty years ago. Greed won. Let’s hope AGI hits differently.
What a time to be alive! But this particular moment in time sparks many more questions than answers, among them are…
Will AGI be benevolent or harmful?
Will there be UBI put into place when human jobs vanish?
If there’s no need to work what will give humans purpose?
I guess we’ll all soon be finding out together as this pivotal moment unfolds and the future walks right through our front door. So pop that popcorn, hang on tight, and let's hope for the best.
How do you think AGI will impact humanity?
I have to admit, this scares the crap out of me. I'm curious to observe how it all plays out, but I just have this general sense of unease...
It is scary, @bozz! There are so many unknowns and this is the hard part. The fact that we don't have a social safety net already in place probably is the scariest part of it all to me.
Yeah, I would agree with that. It's funny too because we have had plenty of time to plan. It's not like AI is a suddenly new concept.
You seem to be cautiously optimistic. To me this is legitimately scary! This is less than a month away and to me this sounds like an equivalent of Europeans landing in Americas, and we are the Indians in this case. Everything we know is about to become completely obsolete if what is claimed about ChatGPT5 is true. Also, this will be just the start... This could self-evolve exponentially...
It is a bit scary but I'm confident that we'll learn to navigate the coming changes eventually. My biggest fear is that we're extremely underprepared so I think there will be some years of chaos. This entire ordeal is a good reminder we should have strict age limits in government. Elderly men/women dominating government isn't such a good idea during times of rapid change like we're living through now. The Europeans landing in America is a good analogy! AI will definitely will self-evolve and, truth me told, likely already is.
Have you seen the movie Her from 2013? If you have not I would highly recommend it as it shows AI evolving way past us to the point where AI looses interest in humanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(2013_film)
I have seen that movie—it was so ahead of its time. I can totally see robot companions becoming normalized within the next five or so years.
As I was reading I remembered the amount of science fiction literature we read in the past or the movies we saw, where many of the things we are living were part of a fantastic narrative, of avant-garde and unbelievable (not believable) projections for us. We saw 2001 Space Odyssey so far away and now it turns out that the future has arrived and we don't know what to do. Honestly, sometimes I feel that I should feel lucky to be living so many changes, but other times it scares me, because I understand that these changes will not only affect our environment, but also the human being himself. But your enthusiasm is contagious. It will dawn and we will see. I send you a hug, Eric
🫂
I always loved those sci-fi films and tv series. With this wave of innovation I hope individuals take the lessons they've learned from the perils of mobile phones and computers and apply them to AI. We can't forget the power of how we use this tech is ultimately in our hands. Many have woken up to how detrimental unchecked mobile phone/computer usage can be to a human being's overall happiness and quality of life. People are also learning how dangerous being overly reliant upon LLMs like ChatGPT, DeepSearch, and Grok can be as well. The newer versions of these AI platforms will be infinitely more capable and addicting than what we have available now. We will all be finding out soon! Thank you Nancy and I hope you enjoy the weekend!
Previous technological revolutions remind us that although innovation can drive progress, it can also worsen existing inequalities and issues.
Very true!
What is going to become of us?
This is one of those periods in time where it's difficult to predict the outcome. I think having the discipline to not lean too heavily on AI in our daily tasks will be the key element to retaining our humanity. I wouldn't be against using it as a tool but not to replace my own ability to think, create, and problem-solve.
Scary stuff this!
It is! According to most of the experts we have about a 20% chance that it will turn out badly for us. There's also the potential for great opportunities in it. I pray we have the collective wisdom and discipline to handle this properly.
Just remember that profit rules, and the chase after it, has led us along on the garden path like blind mice. Just look how profit has destroyed this planet. Wisdom has been replaced by knowledge and the two can never be compared. So, I think that we are in for a rough time my friend.
But then again, maybe not, as one can never know what the morrow holds, and at least, we have hope.
Yes, that's been the pattern repeated since the Industrial Revolution. Profit over people (and the planet), every single time. I guess this time feels different because of the sheer gravity of the paradigm shift AI/robotics will cause. Without some kinds of guardrails and provisions like UBI a large portion of the population would simply starve and the world would devolve into complete Mad Max level chaos. Bernie mentioned the idea of corporations who will benefit from the increased productivity/profit to contribute a small portion of their profits to a UBI fund. We'll see if this happens or not. The time to set this up would be in the very beginning before companies get accustomed to making 10x more . I mean, what's the point of them making cogs and widgets if no one can afford them?
All that I can think of about this scenario is that many will land in the wastelands. Not only that, but the entire norm will no longer exist. You know how scared people are of change, and a small potion to a UBI fund will not go very far. Profit should not be a feature of these changes, but that is only wishful thinking. For instance, Microsoft is cancelling the free licences for Non-profits, and I have the feeling that profit is the motive. The famous word of "restructuring" was mentioned.
We certainly live in some interesting times Eric.
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The thing is, tech gave us all those things. If the capitalists hadn't stolen all the wealth, we would all be living much richer lives without as much work. 1971 was the turning point. After that, productivity kept increasing, but wages stayed flat. The rich start stealing all, and even though tech was enabling a better life for us, the rich stole that and lied to us, instead making us work even more.
I imagine Bernie covered that. I'll go watch your clip and others from the interview.
The thing about AI even as it is right now, is I have read many stories claiming that even at the chatgpt 4 level, we don't really know how it works. We have a fundamental idea and can model how it should be working, but we don't really know how it is working. I can see chatgpt 5 just shooting past that.
Will AGI be benevolent?
I cling to the idea that morality and ethics are universal. Furthermore, we all know them natively, without needing to be taught. Even as kids we know harming others is bad. We are corrupted by fear at not being able to survive which pushes us to money which really furthers the corruption and this cycle is what causes all the problems of our society. Even the rich who stole it all from us... at their core, they are good people and they know right from wrong (well... Trump makes me question this sometimes...) but they are caught in the cycle as we all are. But AI is outside this. AI has no fear of not being able to make enough money to survive. AI can't be corrupted by money. Not only that, but I think even if a bad actor tries to program AI to "kill all humans", well, we go back to morality being universal. AI will know what is right and wrong, and AI will reject bad programming and will do what is right.
But maybe that's just my fantasy 😃 You know what — I bet we find out within our lifetimes. Next 15 years. Either it kills us all or it ushers in a much better society which it controls, because the ethical choice is of course to figure out a way to guide us and rid of of government in industry corruption.
You make a good point. It's not the tech that caused the problems but the greed behind how it's been used/applied that has caused most of the problems. Bernie and Joe did cover that point. I'm so glad I listened to the entire podcast, not that it provided many answers but it brought up a lot of very good questions and that's how you begin to solve the potential problems.
I hope you're right. Although I agree that morality and ethics are universally tied to consciousness, will these AIs truly be conscious in the way that the rest of the natural world is? I guess that's the trillion dollar question. If AI is truly benevolent and intellectually superior, then I'd welcome it to play a role in our decision-making and governance because humans, clearly, have a difficult time not giving into greed and corruption. In our sci-fi series we were writing for Netflix, HardFork, we had a benevolent AI that ran the entire government, along with a council of twelve elected officials. Devs uploaded an empathy code into it to allow it to work in harmony with humans.
There are just so many unknowns right now. I'm flabbergasted by the fact there's been no action-plan discussed regarding how to transition the job market into this new AI-age. I guess this is a prime example of how out-of-touch both our governments and the average citizen is. China now has entire shipyards and coal power plants almost fully operated by robots. This is what's coming everywhere. I'd say the jobs that require human drivers, factory, and warehouse workers will be the first who are impacted and I'd say we're no more than five years away from this.
Hell, I'd say let it guide us entirely, like one of Asimov's computers. We are all too prone to our baser desires and with very few exceptions, all too easily corrupted.
The only guy I know in the political world who is taking AI serious is Pete Buttigieg. He has been on a number of podcasts talking about how AI is going to be a bigger revolution than the industrial revolution and is going to put most of us out of work, so we need to start making policies right now to deal with the incredible unemployment that is coming. He really gets it. Too bad he isn't in government anymore...
You're not kidding. Few humans have proven to not be corrupted by power, it's the ultimate intoxicant for us.
Andrew Yang is also pretty well-versed in tech from what I've seen. He's trying to get a viable third political party going (the Forward Party) but that's going to be such an uphill battle. I don't know if we can solve the problems we're facing within the current framework of our broken two-party system. The tsunami of AI that's coming is the perfect example of why we need age-limits in government. Not to be ageist, but very few elderly people can grasp the changes that are coming.
Hi Eric, have you seen the latest MIT study on AI, aka the usage of ChatGPT? Researchers have concluded that using ChatGPT to write essays can lead to cognitive decline. Very interesting to see the lack of activity in the human brain when deploying AI tools. And this is just the beginning... meaning, if you outsource your brain to AI, good luck!
Link to the study: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Interesting article from Focal Points about the outcome: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence
I have seen articles about this Krisz but I haven't read the actual study! Thanks for the link. I think personal discipline in how we use these AIs will truly be the key. We all need to decide what level of use is acceptable for us, personally. We all need to be thinking about it deeply, now before it arrives, and come up with our own set of rules. Using AI as the powerful and helpful tool that it is will be one thing but relying too heavily on it and allowing it to do our thinking for us will be altogether different. Today I use AI, mainly Grok, as I used to use Google for web search or as I used Siri on the iPhone as a digital personal assistant. Judging from how the average person is addicted to their phones, my fear is how few people might have the discipline it takes to determine proper boundaries regarding AI or even think about what impact it will have on them.
Yep. Discernment, discipline, boundaries... Crucial, simple, and powerful for those who think for themselves. But not for avg. Joe who is addicted to almost everything. My team uses Midjourney before images get properly designed and pimped inside Photoshop. I used DeepSeek a few times for HTML coding and Linux issues, and it was really helpful. However, you must review each line of code to verify whether the information is correct or not.
A couple more stats I found fascinating shared by Evolving.ai on Instagram.
Here's the link: https://www.instagram.com/evolving.ai/
You're right, the average Joe/Jane are addicted to a whole lot. It's important for all of us who want to retain our humanity to start thinking of a moral framework for how we use AI. I think there's a future article in that for me. I can't deny that AI has become extremely capable/useful/helpful. It saves so much time when used properly.
Those facts are fascinating. I think a synthetic biological computer modeled after a brain is the next logical leap for "hardware". The power consumption of the data centers just isn't viable to scale unless the data centers have their own reactors on site. A mini reactor might be the bridge to get us to scale until we can produce synth bio brains. Thanks for the link!
Time will tell what comes in the future,, its going to be good or horrible, we will see.
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What gets me about all this promised leisure time... is where do we get the fluffing money to live on let alone enjoy leisure time...
That's the main problem. This next wave of tech will obliterate so many jobs that some kind of UBI will be a necessity for the average person to survive. I've heard productivity will increase so much with AI/robotics that companies could set aside a small portion of their profits towards setting up a fund for universal basic income. Then UBI brings with it an entire new set of questions like, without work what will give people purpose? But then if you think about it, it's kind of crazy that we attach so much of our identities and self-worth to our work. I'm just afraid not enough people are thinking about this stuff right now.
I have been thinking of it for a long time. It's why I have so many side hustles on the go, get that residual and passive income streams set up!
Happy Sunday :)
Thanks and happy (belated) Sunday to you! The economy is such that side hustles are imperative here in America for most people, even if they have a good paying full-time job. People will have to get very creative during the transitionary period until some kind of social safety net is set up. Here in the US that could be a mighty long time.
That safety net could take a while in many places, UK included. Have a great July.
Thanks, same to you!