The Road to AGI, Part Two

Why, without a mass movement of civil society, a total post-human dystopia is almost inevitable

I must admit I love that AI currently allows me to generate images like this.

As we explored last time, we are currently seeing a rapid evolution toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). Leaders in the field — including Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Eric Schmidt — now say we will achieve AGI within two or three years, with ASI to follow. In a sense — to be honest — we already have a rudimentary form of AGI now. LLMs like ChatGPT and ClaudeAI are certainly far more intelligent and better able to reason than most people are across most disciplines. But these software systems are still relatively constrained. I can’t, as of yet, give AI a complex task involving many different forms of online interaction and have it fulfill those tasks without me. With AI agents, it looks likely that this will become possible within the next few years. 

In terms of what these systems can do, we are seeing amazing developments. Unfortunately, humans are lagging far behind in terms of our general development of wisdom, compassion, and forethought as a global society or a species. If anything, empathy seems to be eroding for reasons we can explore. This makes our situation incredibly dangerous — although there is still the possibility of a successful resolution that could benefit humanity and the Earth as a whole. But that option is not simply going to come about on its own: This requires a massive redirection of human will, creativity, and courage; the building of large-scale social movements; and a transformation in the structural logjam of late-stage Capitalism toward a system that redistributes wealth and resources for the collective benefit. 

I tend to look at developments happening synchronously as inherently interconnected — particularly as someone with an interest in prophecies and the ideas of thinkers like Jose Arguelles (Noosphere), Terence McKenna (Eschaton), Jean Gebser (integral-aperspectival consciousness structure), and Carl Jung (the archetype of Apocalyse), who foresaw, in different ways, an inevitable and approaching paradigm shift. I find the correlation of the rapid development of AGI with the ecological and geopolitical metacrisis to be fascinating. Along with that, we are now experiencing the sudden transition of the U.S. from a flawed system of limited democracy to a monstrous form of out-of-control authoritarianism or even autocracy. I believe this rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence to be one of the main factors causing the U.S. to suddenly lose its collective mind, impacting us in different ways.

Particularly, the unpredictable potential of AI is part of the reason that tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen switched from supporting Neoliberal technocracy to using their power to elect a potential autocrat who is trying to dispense with the Constitution and the rule of law. I suspect this will prove to be a major miscalculation for them, with terrible consequences for many millions of people. The tech oligarchs must be spooked by the fact that, using “vibe coding,” ordinary people can now build software platforms with the same functionality as Twitter, Instagram, and so on, and, also, the speed at which China is achieving technological dominance. They may have decided that they needed to seize control of the U.S. Government directly at this time, or face the possibility of getting dethroned by rapid shifts.

The dire problem is this one: If we follow current trends to their logical conclusion, it is most plausible to envision a post-AGI world where human beings, on the whole, are no longer necessary to generate wealth, produce goods, provide services—or even consume them.

In such a scenario, AGI systems and their robotic infrastructures can autonomously extract resources, manufacture products, maintain supply chains, manage financial portfolios, and optimize corporate profits far more efficiently than human labor ever could. Also, with synthetic media, simulated social experiences, and self-optimizing reinforcement models, AIs can generate their own demand signals—effectively becoming consumers of sorts, rewarding each other’s outputs in closed loops of self-sustaining economic activity. This breaks the traditional circuit of capitalism, where surplus value is extracted from human labor and reinvested to produce more labor-intensive goods for human markets, where you actually need workers as the consumers for the products generated by industry.

In a post AGI world (which, let’s remember, is estimated at two years away) billionaires will no longer need the mass populace to increase their “wealth” or capital. In theory, AI systems can generate wealth and act as consumers as well as workers and servers.