At the very same time, the prospect of "God-like AI" has also inspired a flurry of utopian proclamations. Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen claims that advanced AI will radically accelerate economic growth and job creation, leading to "heightened material prosperity across the planet." It will also enable us to "profoundly augment human intelligence," cure all diseases and build an interstellar civilization. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, echoes these promises, arguing that AGI will make space colonization possible, create "unlimited intelligence and energy" and ultimately produce "a world in which humanity flourishes to a degree that is probably impossible for any of us to fully visualize yet."
All of this might seem unprecedented. There are so many dire warnings of imminent extinction in the news right now, sometimes paired with equally wild predictions that a new era of radical abundance lies just around the corner. Surely something big is happening. Yet this isn't the first time that notable scientists and self-described "experts" have announced to the public that we're on the cusp of creating a magical new technology that will either annihilate humanity or usher in a utopian world of unfathomable wonders. We've been here before, and what happened? In every case, the outcome was much less sensational than people were led to believe. Often, the hype turned out to be a giant nothingburger.
