Man on a racetrack about to start a race
Man on a racetrack about to start a race

Shower thoughts

AI

An observer’s perspective
on the race to AGI

Jan 5, 2025

Disclaimer

This is not an academic paper, neither is this for posturing. This is a heavily biased article from a genuinely concerned human being who would like to find answers. Quote me at your own peril.


Every 48 hours, there’s an AI related headline that’s making rounds and keeping the entire tech community and beyond, talking. Now, among all the companies that claim to be building revolutionary AI products that could one day save the world and become the foundation of our civilization, most of them are just marketing gimmicks and GPT wrappers, smoke that will soon disappear - a topic for another day - but for today, I’m more concerned about the major players who have proprietary code and AI products that are currently being used by tens and hundreds of millions of individuals, such as Open AI, Meta, Anthropic and the likes. 

It’s not very difficult to understand why I am concerned, I think the questions I’ll raise have likely crossed your mind if you have been following the evolution of AI as closely as I have, but I have decided to give voice to these thoughts just so we can pause and think, and if by chance you have an iota of influence in the industry, you can help rescue us from ourselves.

Before I DELVE (yes, I said delve, does that mean that this was written by AI? I guess we’ll never know) into my questions, I’d like to prep the canvas with a quick background.


Antecedents

The human society has gone through many eras and epochs that defined the general outlook and lifestyle of the people from that era, and a major characteristic I have observed in most of them is the movement of economic power and opportunity from one group of people to another. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century led to a world where economic opportunity moved largely from farmers and landlords to industrial laborers and industrialists.

Now, let’s skip all the way to the dot com boom of the 1990s-2000s. This era led to the rise of technology workers, and the movement of resources from … to online platform creators, online businesses and those with the skills to build these digital products.

Now if we skip a little further to this day, we’re in the right in the AI revolution. This revolution seeks to lead us into the intelligence age, where cognition and creativity are outsourced to artificially intelligent software and hardware. This revolution also seeks to move economic power from basically individuals and businesses in every major sector such as finance, legal, art, media, and many more to …drumroll🥁🥁🥁… 

Well, surprise surprise, NO ONE! (I'm being a little dramatic, I mean the few hundred/thousand people who are building, and own the technology) This leads me to question number 1


Who is the AI revolution empowering?

Once again, let’s go back a few centuries. A common denominator across the 2 major economic revolutions I highlighted is that there was a movement of economic power from one group of people to another; the first industrial revolution saw the movement of economic power and opportunities from landlords and farm labourers to factory owners, machine manufacturers and skilled labourers who operated these modern equipment. Similarly, the dot com boom led to the movement of economic power and opportunities from heavily fungible industries like media and paper to only businesses with a focus on digital goods and services, and the people with the skill to build and/or operate these technologies. Its also important to note that this dot com era led to the rise of new industries that facilitate the movement of physical items, such as the delivery and ride hailing industries. 

Now, back to AI. This AI revolution seeks to move economic resources and opportunities from every economic sector that has anything to do with information and intelligence, to a very tiny number of individuals who are building these technologies, and more importantly, the companies building them. 

In my opinion, one of the heaviest pitfalls of the emergence of AI is that it is moving economic power from people to the gigantic corporations building these technologies, without giving room to individuals and small players like in other previous economic revolutions. The AI game is structured such that the small companies are building on the frameworks of the larger companies with the proprietary AI engine which has been trained with vast amounts of data, collected over decades and I see this heavy dependence as a major issue because the ones who are truly winning are the few big players in this sector. I am bothered because wealth inequality is already a problem in today’s society (show wealth inequality chart) and the rise of AI will only make it worse, not better, since the world’s data is controlled by a few gatekeepers, without whom no business can thrive.


What is the end game?

Have you ever stopped to think why huge companies laid off tens of thousands of people, but are throwing money at AI companies and projects like a (whatever you think people throw money at)? Take Microsoft for instance. Between 2023 and today, Microsoft has laid off over 13,000 people. Now, within the same period, Microsoft has invested over $17b into AI endeavours such as Open AI, G42 and Microsoft’s AI division. I don’t know how you interpret this but my interpretation is very simple; Microsoft considers AI to be more valuable than human beings, since with the right amount of investment and effort, AI can eventually replace a lot of humans on the work force. Also, news flash: those jobs are most likely never coming back. 

My belief is that these AI efforts are primarily rooted in capitalist aspirations and not the well commercialised message of “innovating for a better world” crap that we’ve been sold. The end game is for big tech companies to make it impossible for life to exist without them, to replace as many humans as possible with AI (which needs no salary, has no family, can work without end, and most importantly, doesn’t ask for severance), and further widen the wealth gap.


Is AGI a disaster (without a kill switch) waiting to happen?

By the composition of the above question, you can perceive my bias and predict my response, so take this with a grain of salt. First of all, if you’re not familiar with the concept of AGI, Artificial General Intelligence is a state of AI in which an AI system is able to autonomously learn and perform tasks like a human being, and ultimately, much better and faster.

This all sounds like cool jargon, but if you read it twice, you may begin to see how inherently dystopian it is.

Now, permit me to answer my question with more questions like a true Nigerian.


First when we achieve AGI, doesn’t that mean that the AGI will inherit the existential questions that come with the ability to reason deeply — like a human being — and if this happens, doesn’t that mean that a super-intelligent entity could decide that the world is horribly organized, then proceeds to plot a fix, and goes ahead to execute it…autonomously?


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An observer’s perspective
on the race to AGI

  • © Chimdindu Chimereze, 2025 ✦ Designed and built by DDUC Design Studio ✦ With love from 🇳🇬 ✦ Video credit - Mark Yacoub on Youtube ✦