When the Curve Goes Vertical
Take a look at a graph of world GDP over the last ten thousand years. For about 9,900 of those years, it’s basically flat. Then around 1800, it shoots up. That spike is the industrial revolution, the information age, the internet. But Nick Bostrom points out something interesting in Superintelligence: that curve has another jump coming. And this next one could make the industrial revolution look small.
If machine intelligence reaches human level and keeps improving, we’re not talking about gradual economic growth. We’re talking about a world economy that could double in weeks. Not years—weeks. Your salary becomes worthless between paychecks. Your savings evaporate before you can spend them. Economic planning becomes nearly impossible because by the time you’ve planned anything, the situation has already changed.
The Moving Goalposts Problem
AI researchers have been predicting human-level machine intelligence in twenty years since the 1940s. Every generation of researchers has looked at their current technology and thought, “We’re almost there.” And every generation has been wrong. The goalposts keep moving.
In 2014, Bostrom surveyed experts in the field—people actually building these systems—and asked when they expected human-level machine intelligence. The median response was 2040. With a 10% chance by 2022 and a 90% chance by 2075. 2022 came and went without our robot overlords, but we did get ChatGPT, which felt like the opening act of something much stranger.
“As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” — John McCarthy
That quote from McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of AI, captures something real about this field. We’ve been building “AI” for decades, and every time something works—chess, Jeopardy!, image recognition, protein folding—we rebrand it as “just software” and move the goalposts. Deep Blue beats Kasparov? That’s not intelligence, that’s brute force. Watson wins Jeopardy!? That’s not understanding, that’s pattern matching. GPT-4 writes poetry and passes the bar exam? Well, surely that’s just… something else.
| Game | AI Status | Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| Checkers | Perfect | Solved in 2002—AI always plays optimally |
| Chess | Superhuman | Deep Blue defeats Kasparov, 1997 |
| Go | Superhuman | AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol, 2016 |
What’s Coming Next
This isn’t science fiction. It’s the logical endpoint of a trend line that’s been running since we figured out how to make fire. The question isn’t whether this happens. The question is whether you’re ready for it. And honestly? Nobody is.
In the next part, we’ll explore the three paths to superintelligence: artificial intelligence, whole brain emulation, and biological cognitive enhancement. Each road leads to the same destination, but how we get there matters for what kind of future we end up with.
Continue Reading: Part 2: Three Roads to the Same Destination
