Scale Is All You Need? Part 4-1: The Post-AGI World

Note: If you haven’t seen Part 3-3, you can read it here.

In a post-AGI world, humanity faces an unprecedented transformation in every aspect of life—from economy and culture to social relationships. As AGI takes over labor, production costs may drop to nearly zero, allowing people to shift from work as survival to work as self-expression. This economic upheaval could pave the way for cooperative systems that prioritize creativity over competition.

Culturally, AGI’s potential to surpass human intelligence in science and philosophy could redefine the purpose of knowledge, focusing more on introspection and experience. Socially, AGI companions may blur the line between human and machine relationships, challenging traditional norms around family and love. With ethical, philosophical, and existential questions at stake, humanity stands at the brink of a future shaped by our choices today—either a utopia or a dystopia awaits.

Part 4: The Post-AGI-World

We are at a turning point in human history: the development of AGI not only promises general efficiency and progress, but will presumably transform the entire foundation of our social and economic life. So far, the debate about AGI has focused primarily on technological challenges, computing capacities, and energy requirements – and I, too, have devoted a significant portion of my working hours to this question (Scale Is All You Need? Part 3) But now the crucial question arises: How will humanity redefine and shape itself in a world shaped by AGI?

In the first three parts of this article series, we devoted ourselves to a definition of AGI, explored the status quo, and analyzed the theoretical and technical hurdles on the road to AGI (bottlenecks). We described the bottlenecks in computing power and energy supply, as well as the growing social inequality, as potential challenges that could occupy us for a long time to come. But this fourth and final part looks further into the future: What might human civilization look like when AGI is fully integrated into the social fabric? What upheavals await us in the economy, culture and interpersonal relationships?

Imagine an economy that moves away from its current form of wage labor and instead enables a society in which people, instead of working, send AGI, both embodied in robotics and virtually agentic, to do their work. Does this mean the end of the market economy as we know it? Will the idea of competition give way to a cooperative model when production costs drop to almost zero?

The AGI era could also provide new cultural impetus. In a world in which machines generate knowledge and gain insights, the meaning of science and the human quest for progress could be seen in a new light. The path to self-knowledge, art and creative expression could be reinterpreted if human existence is no longer defined by work.

Finally, the question arises as to how AGI will shape our social interactions. Relationships, family and friendships – all of these could take on a different form under the influence of AGI, especially if machines appear so human that we choose to have them as companions or even partners. Such a society demands new ethical considerations that explore the boundaries between humans and machines, reality and artificial creation.

With this vision of a post-AGI society, this concluding article aims to provide space for reflections that make the long-term consequences of AGI for humanity tangible.

To this end, in this fourth part, I will focus in three chapters on what I consider to be the most essential areas of human existence: 1) a global economy in the post-AGI era, 2) human cultural life in post-AGI, and 3) social coexistence in the future. 

It has been a great pleasure to write this series of articles. I have learned an incredible amount through the research and have been able to embark on a journey that has made me much more optimistic about the future than I already was before. I am firmly convinced that humanity will overcome all hurdles and challenges on the way to AGI and that this qualitatively new technology, which in the future will be merged with humans, will bring a freedom and wealth that was previously reserved exclusively for illustrations in fantasy stories. 

However, I have to make a small reservation at this point. The question of what a post-AGI era actually is, is somewhat difficult to answer. It is, to a certain extent, an elementary component of AI that its realization will ultimately lead to a further acceleration of the rapid pace of development; from AGI, general intelligence, it will presumably only be a small step to superintelligence, which – to put it bluntly – as a computer god will be superior to any human expert. Or to put it another way: the development of humanity with all the economic and cultural improvements that we have experienced in the last 250 years will probably only take a few years in the dimension from AGI to ASI. Or to put it yet again: the acceleration of the upheavals is exponential.

Post-AGI is therefore not a gradual period stretching over hundreds of years, but rather a short leap from General Intelligence to the Singularity. What the world will look like after the singularity is almost impossible to predict. It is difficult enough to calculate what the world will look like in five years and what breakthroughs we will experience by then, but it is even more difficult to extrapolate this state of development up to the singularity. That is the challenge of exponential development.

Nevertheless, the A(G)I research ultimately results exclusively from the conviction that progress will bring us more prosperity than if we did not devote ourselves to technology. Consequently, for our own motivation, we also need at least a rough idea of how the better life, the promise of happiness for humanity, will come about. To do this justice, I would like to try to provide a rough illustration of the future, despite all the anecdotal evidence, after AGI has fundamentally changed humanity for some time. So, we extrapolate and anticipate from the present into the future based on data supported by evidence.

Finally, the time horizon for AGI and ASI should be noted at this point. At present, many studies seem to be increasingly focusing on the year 2029, when AGI is almost certain to be realized. However, Ray Kurzweil himself now considers the 2029 estimate to be rather conservative, as he emphasized in a recent interview with the physician Peter H. Diamandis. [3] 

The world-famous banking group Citi also estimates the timing/period for AGI around the year 2029, with an ASI starting shortly thereafter.

In other words, AGI and ASI will come with relative certainty between 2025 and 2040. But no one can say how quickly the world will change from then on, whether a few years in the future will see technological developments like those of the past few centuries. Unfortunately, this is the consequence of exponential development: it is not tangible and cannot be predicted. Consequently, it is only partially possible to visualize what the future will look like. Nevertheless, let's take a leap into the unknown and think about what the new world could look like.

Part 4-2 is coming out soon. Subscribe to the Forward Future Newsletter to have it delivered straight to your inbox.