AI can dramatically expand human agency

What will people do in the intelligence age? Anything we want.

Excerpt: "When we zoom out to look at thousands of years, this process looks smooth and continuous. But when we zoom in, it appears as discrete improvements. Some of these are small, like a new type of machine tool. Some are large, like electric power—such a fundamental enabler of other improvements that we call it a “general-purpose technology.”¹ And some are so fundamental that they reorganize civilization itself.

The last category, however, is rare.

There have only been three basic modes of production in human history, which define the three main eras: the stone age, the agricultural age, and the industrial age.

Is industrial production the end of economic history? Or could there be a fourth age of humanity? And what would such a future look like?

Recall that annual growth rates in world GDP were less than a hundredth of a percent in the stone age, a fraction of a percent in the agricultural age, and single-digit percentage points in the industrial age. If this pattern continues, a fourth age would eventually produce sustained double-digit growth, meaning a world economy doubling time measured in years. Such a massive shift could only come from a technology that is as fundamental to production as tools in the stone age, farming in the agricultural age, or engines in the industrial age.

In the year 2025, the best candidate for such a technology is AI.

The promise of AI is that it could be to cognitive work what power and mechanization were to physical work: a technology that automates much of it and assists with most of the rest. Someday, AI could help perfect robotics, which would let us automate most of what remains of physical labor as well.²

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that sufficiently powerful AI would be like a “country of geniuses in a data center” and could accelerate fields such as biology and medicine by 10x, helping us make a century of progress in those fields in a decade.³OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calls the AI future the “intelligence age.”⁴