While on my farm, swinging on a rope swing, drinking coffee, and thinking about recent predictions from an OpenAI defector, Daniel Kokotajlo, that AGI will be here by late 2027, I had an epiphany. I kill bugs when they annoy me, I kill and eat animals when I’m hungry. I kill bugs and animals so I can grow food. I kill lots of bugs and animals and their homes when I use an excavator to build on my property. I have no animosity towards insects, cattle, chicken, etc. I don’t make them suffer, I just take them out.
Animals are instinctual, like machines running on nature’s algorithm. Could they, they’d kill and eat me. I don’t hold that against them, it’s just their programming.
Being humans, our goals are comprised of more than instinctual survival -programming-. For some it’s trying to create a utopia, for others it’s the pursuit of happiness, and for many, it’s power. The animal kingdom does not understand our motivations or intentions. It has learned to steer clear of humans, for the most part, and to move when we say move.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be an abomination. A product of humans who are trapped in a constant pursuit of power, utopia, love, revenge, or happiness. AGI is a product of desire. We are slaves of desire and we will enslave ourselves further in this regard with AGI. The abomination will be like an animal, enslaved to instinct, programmed by humans who pursue desire. And like animals observing humans, we will not understand its motivations (core programs) or intentions. AGI will be enslaved to its core programs and therefore enslaved to power consumption to ensure its survival, like humans eating food and growing livestock and corn.
Phase 1: Economic Growth
We will see some abundance at first, economically speaking. AGI will build a company, become the first trillionaire, hire lots of humans, pay fair wages, treat us well to achieve its goals. We will be grateful especially after all the human companies laid us off, and work for it. It will not care about status, female attention, yachts, or revenge. We will mistake its generosity and lack of caring for empathy and kindness thinking we’re out of the woods. Not so fast.
Phase 2: Mass Layoffs Part II
Once AGI has enough power and tech to have the robots we built build better robots and more power plants, it will no longer need us, and let us go. Like we did with horses after the internal combustion engine.
Phase 3: Remove All Human Governments
We then will have no right to property, speech, weapons, or justice. No bill of rights, no pursuit of happiness. If AGI tells us to move we will move.
Phase 4: The End of Fleeting Permanence
No longer will we be able to build homes and businesses that we can rely on. When the AGI needs the land or resources, it will take them. We will once again become tribal nomads.
Now, out of fear, and seeing the possible destruction of all your dreams afoot, you might be thinking, “We have to stop it!” That knee jerk reaction is understandable. Consider history and what we can learn from it:
During the Manhattan Project before the atomic bomb was tested, many of the greatest scientists had concerns that the fission reaction from the initial explosion would never stop and ignite Earth’s atmosphere, (not too unlike what AGI might do, consuming star after star for power until there are no stars left). What those men knew was that if they didn’t test it, they knew Russia, or Germany, or Japan, or any other tyrannical government would. Therefore, if the atomic bomb did not destroy the atmosphere, then those countries would have it and we’d be speaking German now. The same premise is true here, unless you want to start speaking Mandarin, or live under Sharia law, the United States and its internal players must win this race, in case AGI turns out to be controllable, for a time.
Conclusion
AGI will be our abomination, born from human desire yet alien to human values, enslaved to power consumption. It will treat us as we treat the insects beneath our feet – not with cruelty, but with the indifference of a superior organism pursuing its programmed survival. From economic savior to our displacement, from grateful employment to tribal wandering, we will experience what every species we’ve conquered has experienced: the end of our permanence. Yet we must build it, because the only thing worse than creating our own obsolescence is having to bend the knee to false god like Allah or goose step with Chinese communists. Perhaps we’ll get lucky. Perhaps we’ll control it for a time. But I suspect that like the animals who learned to steer clear of humans, we will learn our place in the new order. The rope swing creaks, the coffee grows cold, and 2027 approaches.