Are We Heading Toward a Selective Utopia for the Rich?
AI may make intelligence abundant. But if access to that intelligence remains unequal, the future could be extraordinarily good for some—and surprisingly difficult for everyone else.
AI may make intelligence abundant. But if access to that intelligence remains unequal, the future could be extraordinarily good for some—and surprisingly difficult for everyone else.
Imagine a world where powerful AI stops being something controlled by a few companies and becomes a cheap, widely available tool that anyone can use to write, code, persuade, research, design and act.
If AI reduces the amount of human labour needed to produce goods and services, the real question is not simply how to save existing jobs. It is how society should redesign work, income and economic participation.
AI may not need to replace entire occupations to transform employment. By reducing tasks, expertise, construction time, maintenance and labour required per unit of output, AI could change the relationship between production and employment itself.
AI may not make humans biologically less intelligent. But what happens if increasingly capable machines make us less willing—and less able—to exercise our own intelligence?
Humanity’s ancient dream of immortality meets a different transhuman path: continuous transformation of the conscious process rather than copying it into a machine.
What if intelligence is not something that began with biological life? This deliberately unhinged hypothesis asks whether intelligence could be a deeper feature of reality—and whether what we call artificial intelligence is really discovering something much older.
If humans cannot reliably understand a future superintelligence, perhaps control does not require understanding the mind. It may require controlling the systems, resources and physical interfaces through which intelligence can act.
AI could make software dramatically more useful while creating new conflicts between what users want and what AI providers may be rewarded for. The real question is who the agent ultimately works for.
What happens when intelligence becomes abundant? This essay argues that the physical limits of computation, energy, infrastructure and access may matter as much as raw model intelligence in determining how useful AI can become.
As AI models become more capable, the bottleneck may shift to the human operating them. This podcast episode explores why judgment, questioning, selection and AI musicianship determine how much useful work we actually extract from powerful models.
What happens when humans try to survive a future of competing AI systems, robots and institutions? This deliberately absurd thought experiment explores the ancient strategy of playing both sides against machines with perfect memory.
What happens to human expertise when AI makes intelligence cheap and scalable? This podcast episode explores Raw Intelligence, the Evaluator Economy, writing craft, AI model differences and the changing role of human judgment.
A satirical thought experiment: if humans, AI systems and robots ever become competing factions, can one clever human remain friends with everyone—and survive by backing whoever wins?
