AI End Game

The Threat to Humanity's Future and What We Can Do About It

According to many leaders in Artificial Intelligence, we are just a few years away from Artificial General Intelligence. Demis Hassabi, founder of Google DeepMind said at the AI conference in Paris last week:

AGI is a system that can exhibit all the cognitive capabilities humans can. That's important because the the human mind is the only example that we know of in the universe that is a general intelligence. Of course how to test that is the big question… I think it's a little bit further out maybe 50% chance of in five years time so maybe by the end of the decade. I think we don't have systems yet that could have invented general relativity, what Einstein did with the information that he had available at the time. Another example I give is: Can you invent a game like Go — not just play a great move like move 37 or build Alpha Go that can beat the world champion. Could you actually invent a game that's as beautiful aesthetically and as Go is. I think it's going to take a little bit longer to get that kind of capability.

While it is fun that AGI may invent some cool new strategy games (I love both Chess and Go), I think we should be far more concerned about the impact it will have on human society in the short term. In fact, I argue below, it is already having a massive impact. Most people are not aware of what’s already underway: We need to educate the people, very quickly, about the trajectory we are on now.

Elon Musk’s actions as unelected co-President point toward a rapid AI takeover of the US Government, with clear White Supremacist and techno-slavery intentions. JD Vance’s speech at the Paris AI conference basically made it clear there will be no regulation nor guardrails, despite the anxieties expressed by AI safety experts who worry an unleashed AI could, almost accidentally, eliminate humanity altogether.

In “AI Is in Its Empire Era,”

Brian Merchant

— who formerly covered the tech industry for LA Times — writes:

When Vance and the industry leaders like Sam Altman or Elon Musk or the DOGE lieutenants talk about “AI”, they are hardly talking about innovation anymore, they are talking about a project whose aim is to consolidate as much power as possible. AI is a twelve-figure, semi-fictive Stargate project in the Texas desert designed to inspire awe and further investment. AI is more data centers, more training data, more, more, more—despite non-American competitors like DeepSeek demonstrating that other routes are possible. They’re possible, but they’re not desirable, because the American approach to AI is empire-building.

Of course, Vance and his cronies are very excited about AI-based surveillance as an instrument to keep the population entirely under their control. Larry Ellison says he wants to build a system that keeps the entire U.S. population on its “best behavior,” and also shoot us up with more experimental mRNA vaccines for kicks. Trump is giving him $500 billion to build this system, called Stargate. I find it very ironic — and potentially very tragic for all of us —- that the millions of hoodwinked people who voted for Trump because they feared technocratic totalitarianism didn’t realize that we will get it 100X worse under Right Wing rule.

The Intelligence Curse, a must-read from

Luke Drago

, argues that as artificial general intelligence (AGI) becomes widely available, powerful actors (governments, corporations) will lose any incentive to invest in human capital. He makes an analogy to nation-states that draw their wealth primarily from a mineral resource like fossil fuels or rare Earth minerals (Saudi Arabia, the Congo). These countries often brutally neglect or mistreat their citizens because they don’t need them — they aren’t drawing tax revenue from them, hence they don’t need to feed or educate them, or keep them healthy. He argues that AGI will function more like a natural resource that powers society. The new AI-based techno-feudal system will replace what we have now, which requires a huge number of workers in many different areas (programmers, tax collectors, legal aids, phone salespeople, and so on).

Just as oil-rich nations generate wealth without developing their human capital , organizations with access to AGI will find it more efficient to generate value without human workers, after a brief transition. Without a huge pressure movement from civil society, they will stop investing in education, infrastructure, and other systems that traditionally supported human flourishing.

This shift is most likely to create a techno-feudal or techno-slavery society where a small elite controlling AGI systems holds almost all of the power and wealth, while the majority of humans become economically irrelevant, lacking the bargaining power to demand better conditions since their labor no longer provides value to these powerful actors. I have already heard of tech billionaires looking into buying collars with explosives implanted in them that they will force their security guards (and harems?) to wear, keeping them existentially compliant. If we do want an alternative, we better work fast at figuring one out.

Two of my recent essays give you more of my my current framing of what's happening. Here are links and I sum up the main points below:

Basically, I want to leave you with three main points:

1.⁠ ⁠This is an intentional demolition of the U.S. orchestrated by transnational oligarchs (including our own) who seek an economic depression here to buy up the public good and distressed assets just as they did in the USSR in the 1990s, as Naomi Klein covered in Shock Doctrine.

2.⁠ ⁠The group that has taken over the US government will never willingly give up power because of the inherent logic of Fascism: Now that they have taken so much power and broken the laws of the US, they can't risk handing over that power to any other group. Yesterday, Trump went even further with a new Executive Order giving himself absolute power to define the law. This is so utterly unconstitutional that it is blatantly absurd - but of course, the White House also removed the Constitution from its website as one of its first acts.

3.⁠ ⁠There were a number of underlying factors that led the tech elite "broligarchy" to make a hard right turn. One is they want to protect their tech monopolies which Biden and Lina Khan were seeking to break up because it would be better for the consumer and also better for tech innovation in the US, which is falling far behind China in many areas (TikTok, BYD electric cars, Deep Seek etc). But most importantly, I would say, they understood that AI — and, soon, AGI — is going to transform society by eliminating the vast majority of labor (first cognitive labor or "knowledge work" and then manual labor via robotics). This is going to happen in the next 5 - 10 years, so quickly. It could lead to an “infinitely stable dictatorship.”

My month-long Rudolf Steiner seminar starts tomorrow. Hope you will join us!

Right now, we are at a fork in the road for the future of human civilization and basically everything is on the line: Either we find a way to pressure governments and corporations to distribute the benefits of AI so that everyone has some share in the collective wealth, or power will become totally centralized in far fewer hands. Everybody who is not part of the small controlling group will be expendable.

In fact, when we consider the impacts of climate change and global depletion of resources, the power elite may seek to reduce the population significantly in a short period of time.