The keys to our AGI future?

In order to imagine humanity’s most important technological revolution, we must start by first remembering its greatest past achievement.

Throughout history, human flight was merely a dream, until one day in 1903, two brothers achieved the impossible. Like any new technology, the first version of the airplane was basic: It flew just 12 seconds and traveled a little more than a football field before crashing.

Few at the time could have imagined that just a decade later, planes fitted with machine guns and bombs would change the nature of war.

Even fewer would have conceived that a decade after the war, humanity would become interconnected by global commercial aviation.

Barely 66 years after that first miraculous flight, humans strapped to a rocket were escaping Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour to walk on the surface of the moon, crowning humanity’s greatest achievement.

Today, we are on the brink of a much larger civilizational milestone, and there are two key ideas we must keep in mind if we wish to prepare:

The first key to imagine our future is to always remember that any idea about AI should sound as absurd to us as it was for people in 1902 to hear that technology would allow them to fly to the moon.

The second key is to always attempt to keep in mind that on this occasion, the revolution we will experience will happen in years instead of decades.