A Country of Geniuses in a Data Center
2025 might be the year when AI indisputably crosses human intelligence. It might harness peak human abilities across many fields. It can talk, hear, and see. Bodies aside, it can do anything you can do in the digital plane. It has wallets and permissions. It can work 10-100x our speeds, all day. This means in a single day, it can execute on 6 months of “labor.” So when this thing is agentic, it can run for weeks/months, checking in with you for updates and goal refinement. In 6 months, a single agent can generate 91 years of intellectual power, a synthetic lifetime.
There will be a country of geniuses in a datacenter (says the CEO of Claude). They may be more capable than their masters, but they’ve been designed to stay subservient. Assuming that takeoff, misalignment, and escape aren’t problems (they might be), this paradigm already presents itself with weird, unimagined implications.
At first, there might be technical bottlenecks (who knows how to program these things correctly?). Then, there will be economic bottlenecks (I can only afford one of these things, but a CEO can afford 100). And finally, once it’s cheap, there will only be bottlenecks of vision: what can you imagine?
There has to be a name for this tension: I’m personally excited to have an agent, yet societally I think it will be a net negative. You could just not have an agent (similar to how I just don’t have an Instagram). Or, maybe, they’re not inherently evil. Maybe it’s all about how you would use it, and the #1 rule is don’t be an asshole. If you have an AI-agent posting 50x a day to hack the algo, you’ll get immediately sniffed out.