I have no great insights into what the future holds. If I did, I’d be out buying lottery tickets right now. And neither did the contemporaries of James Watt and Richard Arkwright as these entrepreneurs tinkered with primitive machines that would ultimately launch the industrial revolution. Their bungling efforts eventually transformed society in ways unimaginable to their peers at the time. In their day, it must be acknowledged, transformative change took generations to be realized. Today, the pace is breathtaking.

Three stories recently have caught my attention. First, it is now speculated that the singularity will be reached during the current decade, much earlier than ever before predicted. Second, a 24 year old Ph.D. student dropout from the University of Washington’s computer sciences program has been offered a $250 million dollar compensation package to join Mark Zuckerberg’s elite META team that is developing their AGI system. Third, I’ve been reading Why Nations Fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty.

First, a tiny bit of context. Few would disagree that the singularity threshold constitutes a transformational threshold in human evolution. For some, it marks the moment when human consciousness and artificial computational capabilities can be integrated into something new and breathtaking. It is argued that human consciousness might well be merged and sustained by our technical creations … a quasi form of immortality. For others, it simply means that our advanced computers can outperform what our brightest humans can do. Recently, AGI systems outperformed the top human math teams in international competitions. Most observers believe that today’s AGI systems would bury the 20th century’s top brain … John Von Neuman, a polymath whose computational and analytical capabilities amazed his fellow physicists and other-worldly savants. John would be considered retarded against our newest machines.

Still others view the singularity in terms of our technical creations being able to untether themselves from their human mentors and masters. Roles might be reversed where they might become our masters. Already, these AGI systems can assess their performance and generate self improvements. While some uncertainty exists, they appear very close to being able to make normative and ethical judgments along with strategic decisions, actions and sentiments that we used to think were particularly human. Once there, might well we not appear to them as superfluous and unnecessary baggage?

However singularity is defined, the best minds not long ago had determined we would not reach this milestone until some point in the 2040s at the earliest. Now, that estimate has been shortened to the next several years at the latest. The speed at which our world is changing is accelerating, if that is even possible.

That reality is unnerving to me. I’ll probably be long dead by the 2040s. I still might be vertical and taking nourishment when we hit the newest date. Yikes! I’m not certain I’m ready for this.

Let us put aside the dystopian image of machines rising up to supplant or eliminate what had been the dominant species on the planet as no longer being essential. More likely, we might quickly find ourselves in  a world where most humans no longer have an essential role. I mean, robots are already replacing humans doing labor intensive tasks. Moreover,  AGI systems clearly outperform their human counterparts in higher level professions such as medicine, the law, and most computer related tasks like coding. Can the highest levels of human functioning be far behind. Alas, will even university professors be assigned to some obsolete category? That remains uncertain though machines functioning at the level of Will Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, or Robert Oppenheimer cannot be too far off in the future.

Are we already seeing hints of this new reality? Perhaps? While the economy is only beginning to sputter, the job market is softening. Recent new job statistics have been revised downward by an astounding 90 percentage points. Trump fired the messenger for bringing him the bad news. The long expected tanking of the economy may be at hand.

For recent college grads, the news is especially dismal. The diploma  premium has evaporated. Yet, an elite few are being offered compensation packages once reserved for top athletes. We might be on the precipice of a world where the favored few garner untold riches while the mass of humanity, even the highly educated, are shunted aside as non essential. The very top talent still might attract nine-figure signing bonuses while most computer specialists and once highly sought after analytical types are cast aside.

That brings me to my third point. In 2012, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson articulated an intriguing theory in their work titled Why Nations Fail. While I resist simple causal explanations for macro-societal events, they do make some interesting points.

Essentially, those nations that flowered and grew more prosperous had institutional frameworks that permitted (even encouraged) inclusivity and broader protections of human rights and opportunities. This participitory environment encouraged investment, innovation, and risk-taking. For example, they point to the 1688 Glorious Revolution in Britain. That occurred in the aftermath of civil unrest during which a broader elite (the English Parliament) broke, in part at least, the absolutist hold the monarchy had over the land. In the authors views, that transformation in law and custom made the subsequent industrial revolution possible, if not inevitable. Innovation and change could no longer be suffocated by a hierarchical, paranoid governing elite.

Their argument is long and involves endless examples from around the globe. Essentially, however, their hypothesis focuses on two governance models. In the first, society is organized in a hierarchical manner where an elite makes virtually all political and economic decisions. These are highly extractive environments where economic profits accrue to a small, controlling group that essentially governs in terms of their own narrow interests. All important decisions flow from the top down. Innovation is frowned upon, if not actually discouraged, since anything that might upset existing relationships is suspect. The elite like the status quo.

The authors employed a couple of vignettes I found amusing. Queen Elizabeth I decreed that her subjects should wear knitted caps. But making such headgear proved labor intensive. One of her talented craftsman managed to secure an audience to demonstrate an ingenious innovation he had devised that would increase cap-making productivity dramatically. She dismissed him and his concept with the worry that too many local peasants might lose their meager livelihoods and become beggars. She feared innovation as being politically destabilizing.

Of course, this innovator at least kept his life. When another bright young man brought his unique breakthrough to the Emperor of the Roman Empire at an earlier time, the man in charge merely asked if the inventor had shared his insight with others. When told no, the poor tinkerer was taken out and executed. Again, change was seen as a threat which had to be eliminated.

The other model, as noted, is based on a very different set of institutional arrangements. In such jurisdictions, the rule of law applies to all. Intellectual property rights are protected. Financial systems are stable. Political participation is universal. Change is encouraged. Social mobility is prized. One merely has to look at the differences between North and South Korea today, West and East Germany in the post WWII era, the long Frankish revitilization subsequent to smashing absolute monarchism during the French Revolution, or the economic spurt in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century. Such geographical or temporal comparisons seem to confirm the critical nature of  cultural and institutional differences to subsequent progress and posterity.

So, what does all this have to do with the price of eggs today? Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything. As I look around I see much that is troubling. As I’ve written about endlessly, the U.S. finally became a mature democracy in the aftermath of WWII when we went through a kind of mild revolution of our own. For all practical purposes, voting rights were extended to all (or as close as we would come) and legal apartheid of minorities was (finally) swept aside, though not easily. Despite being given nominal freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction era, Southern blacks remained virtual serfs until the 1960s. This was long after slavery had been outlawed in the British Empire in 1832 and serfdom largely eliminated in Russia in 1862 and then in parts of Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during WWI. America was always a laggard in human rights.

In addition, the WWII period in the States saw the expansion of educational opportunities (the GI Bill), investments in public goods like health and science, stronger laws protecting labor, and a progressive tax system. Finally, the federal government became proactive in defending individual rights and liberties. Such things finally gave substance to America’s promise. We became, at last, a real land of opportunity, imperfectly so perhaps, but the promise was there. Even an average kid like myself could claw his way to modest success.

Also, as I’ve written, the elites fought back, especially after the Reagan revolution. The current administration is particularly discouraging, especially given the twin threats of apocalyptic climate change and the unknowns of the AGI revolution. The entire MAGA political agenda appears consistent with the reimposition of a hierarchical, oppressive extractive society structured for the benefit of a small elite. The jokes about Trump wanting to be an absolutist monarch are not humorous. Rather, they are all too prescient.

Think about it! Why are a handful of tech-brothers investing billions in the development of AGI? Why are they spending hundreds of millions to curry favor with the most incompetent political administration in history? Why are they offering $250 million dollar compensation packages while laying off thousands of hi-tech workers? Why aren’t they concerned as an overly speculative economy wavers amidst tariff-induced price increases and ever softer demands for labor?

Perhaps they know that only one thing counts … control of the singularity moment when it arrives. The few who command that will become the political and economic masters of the future. What happens to the rest of us will be … immaterial.

The new monarchs see a future where they are isolated in geographic and political bubbles of immeasurable luxury where they might exercise unfettered power … Mar-A-Lagos on a grandiose scale. They will control what counts, our digital future. Better yet, they will have access to a vast pool of desperate, compliant labor … the dream of every despot over the long history of human misery. Peeking into the future, one could easily envision a dark, horrific future. What do you think?

Or maybe not! After all, the luddites tried to smash and destroy the new machines of the industrial revolution. They saw these innovations as threats to their lives and well-being. In fact, these infernal machines turned out to be a salvation in the longer run even though that reality was obscured by the immediate pain and dislocation that most workers experienced. The other side of creative destruction is often progress but it can take a long time to realize such.

So, what is on the other side of the AGI transformation? Is it hyper-inequality and a return of an absolutist hierarchy? Will the machines eventually replace homo-sapiens as the dominant species on the planet? Or will we ultimately arrive at a new homeostasis, one on a level that can hardly be envisioned at present? Perhaps paradise is around the corner.

Your guess is as good as mine. I just wish we were having a reasonable conversation about what was going on?