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So I recently did a thought experiment where I asked myself, okay, what do I actually objectively expect to happen over the next 20 years? Obviously, the longer the time horizon, the harder it is to predict. But there's a few keystone technologies that I think are going to, that are going to arise and there are some predictable impacts that those are going to have. So this is my best case scenario over the next 20 years of some keystone technologies and the impacts that they will have. So to outline kind of the parameters of this thought experiment, first keep in mind that this is just my personal predictions. I'm not a betting man, so I'm not really putting any money on this, but I think I'll put together a pretty compelling argument. It is also a best case scenario. So it's not guaranteed by a long shot, but I do think that it's somewhat likely. Now obviously the future is kind of a distribution. It could be maximally good, maximally bad, and you know, it might be somewhere in between. But based on some of the polls that I've run, people kind of expect a bimodal outcome where it will either be really good or really bad. And there won't be much gray area, which I tend to kind of agree with. But you never know, we might end up in, in kind of that middle gray area. Time will tell. So let's get right into it. So first and foremost, over the next 20 years, it's pretty much guaranteed AGI will arrive. Now obviously there's some, some disagreement. Some people, you know, say like it's not happening in 2024, maybe 2026 for those of us with their think with their fingers on the pulse. Especially when you look at the, the studies that show like all the experts are kind of their, their predictions are exponentially decaying. And so you look at the exponential decay of those predictions versus the advance of time, looks like 2026 now. But again, with the nature of exponentials, things happen sooner rather than later. But you know, what, what is this going to do? So first it's going to be AGI very quickly gives way to ASI or whatever. And if you follow Conor Leahy on Twitter, like, he's kind of moved to the camp of there really is no difference between AGI and asi. Like, once you solve all the problems of intelligence, you already automatically have asi, which I'm kind of in favor of that because. And it's, it's really nothing beyond moving the goalposts, because as some of you out there have pointed out, like, if you were to put Chat GPT in its current form in front of anyone 10 years ago, they would have said, yeah, that's AGI. It can do pretty much any task that you give it. It fails at some, but it knows more than any single person. And it can do tasks that most people can't do. It can write computer code in any language and, you know, do all kinds of plans and so on and so forth. Anyways, in hindsight, being 2020, in 20 years, we can continue having this debate. Was there a boundary between AGI and ASI? Did GPT4 qualify as AGI? Maybe llama 3 or GPT5, who knows? But the idea here is that it will drive unparalleled economic progress. And so, and we'll talk about this quite a bit, but, you know, one of the biggest things is like, okay, you know, it'll lower the cost of goods and services. That's a good thing. It'll take our jobs. That's a bad thing. And so in this respect, it will force a transformation of society, both in terms of politics and economics, as well as social changes, which I'll also talk about. My next prediction is that we will have commercial fusion within the next 20 years. There's a lot of private startups that are working on this. There's also a lot of governments and intergovernmental research projects. Now, of course, the joke is that, that fusion is always 20 years away. However, one of the things that I pay attention to and the way that fusion is being treated right now in terms of, in the capital markets and in the VC firms. So VC is venture capital is. Fusion is being treated right now the way that AI was being treated, kind of the way, you know, circa 2015 when OpenAI was founded, and the way that Solar was treated around 2010. And so when you have this massive surge of investment, typically results follow. Some people have been talking about VR. You know, there was a huge investment of VR with, you know, with the Oculus Rift, the original Oculus Rift, which Metabot, and now they're, you know, Meta Quest 3 commercially successful. Now Apple has entered with a, with a commercially successful VR headset. They're not perfect, but at the same time you have a standalone headset that has, that can orient you in time and space and also track your hands like that is a pretty miraculous technology. So again, that pattern follows. Longevity research, for instance, is also something that is getting that same kind of treatment where the investment is doubling almost every year, last I checked. And so when, when investment is going up exponentially, results tend to follow. So likewise with commercial fusion, the investment is going up rather quickly and so results tend to follow. And what this is, this is going to have pretty much as profound of an impact on society as AGI will. And the reason is because if you suddenly have 100x the amount of energy available to do whatever you want with, a lot of stuff becomes possible that is, that is, that was not possible before. And this goes beyond the energy hyperabundance from just solar. So for instance, some things that are way too energy intensive to do today, like underground farming, recycling all materials. Like we could literally empty every landfill with the, with the energy surplus from nuclear fusion, we could scrub the entire atmosphere of any particulates that we don't want and add particulates that we do want. With that level of energy hyperabundance, we can desalinate enough water to regreen the Sahara and the Gobi Desert and everywhere else. We can make farmland under the ocean if we want to. We can make sure that the natural world is, we can actually reduce our impact on the natural world and undo a lot of the damage that we've done. It's really difficult to oversell what nuclear fusion could hypothetically do with the energy hyperabundance that it, that it promises. Now, obviously there's a lot of problems to be solved, but if you saw in the news recently for the first time, I think it was the National Ignition Facility, it might not have been that one, but somewhere here in America, we got two times the amount of energy out of a fusion reaction that we put into it. So that, that was a world record. And so it's not just a matter of keeping the candle lit, which is what you're seeing over in China where they're like, oh, we kept it lit for 300 seconds. Yeah, but it was still energy negative. And really the key thing is being energy positive. So that's, that's what to pay attention to. It's coming sooner rather than later. Now, again, high energy plasma physics, very complicated thing, but I will help with this. In fact, AI is already helping with the design of like next generation Tokamak reactors. And that's only going to accelerate with the next technology, which is quantum computing. So quantum computing is also in the ascendancy. You know, we've got companies investing around the world from IBM to D Wave. And when a company like IBM decides to pivot, they pivot in a big way. Now, you know, on the topic of IBM, you know, you look at Watson, which Watson, you know, their, their NLP thing, they kind of abandoned. It's still kind of there, but it's, I don't know. I know some people that have worked at IBM in the past and it seems like Watson is kind of getting slowly killed. They're slowly pivoting away from it. And IBM as like the original, the OG computer company. They're saying quantum computing is the next big thing. So that investment is there. And of course they're not the only one. But quantum computing is likely to be something that really helps with several things like AI, like blockchain cryptography, but also material science. And so material science, you might say, okay, like what, what is that? Material science is basically studying the formation of some.
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of crystals and metals and those sorts of things, which might sound kind of boring until you know a lot about what material science does. Material science is like one of the most fundamental underpinning sciences, like all the chip fabs, material science. In fact, you know, buddy of mine who was a material science major, that's where most material scientists end up is either in like studying lasers, studying fusion, but most of them go to work at chip fabs like TSMC and Intel and those sorts of things. Because it's understanding things at the molecular level, at the nanotech level that allows you to do like chemical vapor deposition to create layers of graphene and boron and all those other sorts of things. And those, those tiny technologies, the orientation of those crystals, that gives rise to everything in biotech, that gives rise to everything in genetic science, that gives rise to better computer chips. And all of these have compounding returns on top of the fact that it also advances things like battery technology, radar technology, metamaterials. And so like the kinds of breakthroughs that AI combined with quantum computing can, can help us produce with respect to material science. And you've already seen like AlphaFold2 and some of those other Ones that like, you know, say, oh, we, we just invented 3 million new materials. That is what I mean by the compounding returns where it's like, okay, now we've got all these new materials that we can explore. Maybe they're going to be good for nanotech. Maybe you can create nanites that you inject into your blood and, you know, clears out your arteries or whatever. And then here's another material that like, accelerates computer chips by 2x. And here's another material that we can add to our batteries that gives them a 500 times longer lifecycle. Like, again, that scene in Iron man where, where Howard Stark is like, this is the way of the future. Really what he was talking about was material science. And this is why they had like the vibranium shield and stuff. Like, I'm not saying that we're going to have vibranium, like an indestructible metal that can like deflect a Thanos, you know, attack. But like, I don't know, we might get close. So on the topic of these things, the fourth technological, technological pillar that I expect is going to be advanced biotech. So, you know, genetic technology, vaccine technology, whatever else, there's going to be a lot of modalities, whether it's CRISPR or MRNA vaccines or, you know, nanoparticles or whatever, conventional medicines. Like, we're going to understand it all. We're going to be able to map the entire human metabolome. So if you have never heard the term metabolome, basically it's our genome, but also the proteins and enzymes and hormones and all the cellular respiration that happens. And there's something like 400,000 substances in the human metabolome and millions and millions of reactions. So it's like, imagine the problem space of go times like 40 or 4 million. I don't know how to put a number on how complex the human metabolome is anyways. If you can map the whole thing and you know, what's happening on a molecular level and an atomic level, again, going back to computer science or, sorry, quantum computers, and then you can map everything. Like, we will eradicate, like functionally what, what this impact is going to have on you and me. We will eradicate all disease and we will cure aging. And so that's kind of the ultimate goal. And now in the long run, so this is where I usually try and dial it in because I don't want to be too hyperbolic. But in the long run, we will have full control over human biology, which means, like, oh, hey, while you're on a trip to Mars, we can adapt your entire body to a low gravity, low oxygen environment. Oh, hey, while you're on the, on a trip to Proxima Centauri, we can reprogram your entire body to be more adaptive to deep space and so on and so forth. And we will have full control over our, our hardware stack top to bottom, cellular level, genetic level, organ level, whatever. Now does that mean that we're going to be like Birdman and it's like, oh, hey, we're in a low enough oxygen or a low enough gravity like planet. Let, let's make your arms 20ft longer and grow wings maybe in like, you know, a few hundred, few thousand years. Not that you'd want to do that. Maybe you would, I don't know. There's probably easier ways, but in the short term, this is going to have very profound impact. So you might hear a lot of people talking about demographic collapse and inverting the pyramid and so on and so forth. But if a lot of people start living a lot longer, they're also going to have fewer children. But, you know, we're going to reduce health care costs and blah, blah, blah. There's going to be a lot of positive effects and a few negative effects in terms of longevity. But I think it's a net major positive. And it'll happen just by virtue of the fact that it's like, oh, hey, we can cure this one thing, we can cure this other thing. And you will be, you know, pretty much young and healthy forever, as long as you want to be. Obviously there's still going to be accidents. There might be some diseases that we can't cure. There's going to be some accumulated diseases that are difficult to cure, chronic illnesses. But by and large, most people can expect to have a very long healthy life within the next 20 years. That will be kind of forever. And then of course, the longer you live, the more chances there are of curing whatever is left. So the point here is that all of these four technologies create compounding returns. Because if people live longer and healthier, that means all the best scientists and engineers are long. They live longer, they have longer to do all this stuff that feeds back into fusion, that feeds back into AI, that feeds back into quantum computing. Nuclear fusion gives us energy hyperabundance, which means we can recycle everything that we need and make everything that we need, which means that we can power all the chips and data centers, and that means that we can power all the quantum computers and then the quantum computers and I can all work together to solve every other problem. And so that's where you get that kind of exponential curve of our computational ability is going to go up exponentially. But also the scope of problems they were able, that we are able to solve with the help of quantum computers and artificial intelligence will also go up exponentially and the intelligence of those things will go up exponentially. And even if there is a plateau, which I suspect there probably will be some mathematical limitations in terms of like how smart a thing can be, there's internal representations, there's quadratic expansion of problem spaces and that sort of thing. But even if that happens, we can have more of them and they can operate faster. Which means that even if there is a limit to, if there is a maximal intelligence, which some people believe in that, some people don't. I think someone said that like the maximum possible IQ is like 300 or something. I don't know if that's true. We'll find out, like we'll find that limit if it's there. But then you, if there is a limit, if the smartest ASI has an IQ of 300, then we can make more of them and they can go faster. And this will create compounding returns, hence the snowball effect. Okay, so in the long run, how is this going to affect you and me? Like, you know, within 20 years, I do expect we're going to be in a post labor economic situation where, which basically means that the production of goods and services, all basic goods and services, will pretty much be done by machines. And you might say, okay, well yes, we're going to expand the economy other ways, there's going to be other new jobs. But what I mean is that all of your essentials, you know, food, clothing, housing, power, all those, all the basic necessities are basically going to have a near zero marginal cost. Now there will be some scarcities like prime real estate that will always be rare, but, but then you also look at how much of the earth's surface is empty. There's a lot of green spaces that we can expand into here in America. Like just go to Google Maps and look at Siberia and how empty it is, right? Like Siberia is a really big place and it's really green. There's a lot of places that we can expand into. And remember, if we have nuclear fusion and we can do, you know, underground farming year round, then it's like, okay, well we don't need arable land anymore, so then all the farmland can be turned into something else. You know, more green spaces, cities, towns, whatever. Now the biggest constraint here, the biggest danger is not this narrative of post labor economics because it'll happen one way or another. We don't have to force this. It will happen just by virtue of the fact that we're going to keep seeking efficiencies. That's what the free market does, that's what capitalism does, that's what neoliberalism does, is we keep seeking efficiencies. And the most efficient way of producing goods and services is without humans. That, that is by design. That is where we're going to head. But the most dangerous status quo is the idea that we need to keep people working, that we need to keep, you know, conventional jobs, that people must work for a, you know, a subsistence wage that is not going to work in the long run. But also we also have historical precedent for this level of disruption because 200 years ago most people were farmers, now most people are not farmers. And you can argue that like even most people today have BS jobs. And what I mean by BS job is something that doesn't actually contribute to the real economy or to real basic goods and services. And so we're already kind of in this detached space where the job that you have, like me here on YouTube communicating with all of you, like you might say this is non essential, like this doesn't actually raise the level of, you know, human productivity. But I am a communicator and I solve other problems and but it's, the point is as many levels of abstraction and that's going to increase where we're going to be more and more abstracted from the nitty gritty, the like low level groundwork of what is actually productive. So this gives rise to what I call the meaning economy. And I've talked to a few other people about this who are researchers in the field. You can check out my, my interview with Oliver and Ellie over at the Meaning Institute. I did that interview a few weeks ago. And so basically after thinking about it, I think there's going to be kind of four primary categories of like jobs that we think of that are going to persist now. There's going to be lots and lots of volunteer opportunities, whether it's, you know, volunteering around the city or whatever else. But the four primary jobs that are going to be around probably forever. First is statutory jobs. So a statutory job is something where it is legally required that a human does it. So for instance, it might be that, that, that doctors stick around forever because they might say like, okay, yes, the AGI can do it better, faster, cheaper and safer, but we want a human to be in the loop of that decision. And even if the machine is helping the doctor make all the decisions, or even doing the surgery, we still want a human, a licensed human, to be communicating with the person. Now that might be a bad example because I know a lot of people, myself included, would probably prefer just talking to the machine because the, any biases in the machine can be like ruled out. But something like a lawyer or a judge or the president or a senator, there's all kinds of other statutory jobs where it's like, okay, for whatever reason we decide legally, a human must do that job. Another one is a meaning job. So what I'm doing right here is a meaning job. I've already transitioned to the meaning economy because what I'm doing is my job is to, you know, talk to people, do a lot of reading, do a lot of research, write a lot of it, or not write videos, watch a lot of videos, write and create other videos to communicate and help make make sense of what's happening. And so these sense making jobs, whether it's, you know, religious, spiritual, philosophical, clergy, whatever, Internet influencers, these are the kinds of jobs that one, they already exist today, but I think that they're going to be emphasized in the future. The next one is experience jobs. So experience jobs, these are in person, real life kinds of experiences, whether it's tour guides, massage therapists, entertainers, you know, comedians, singers, those sorts of things. Experience and entertainment. We prefer to get that from humans. Like, yes, you know, you can put on headphones and listen to your favorite band right now on demand, but we still pay to go to concerts, right? And it's a, it's just a fundamentally different experience. So you want something that's going to last forever, go be a deejay or something like that. Now obviously in some cases people will prefer the robot to be the DJ because they're cheaper, but in other cases, people are going to pay the premium to have a human doing that. And then finally, care jobs. So this is going to be mostly teaching child care, elder care. Well, elders are going away. Not that they're going to die off, but people won't be old, but they're still going to be nurses because you might get injured, you might get sick. Some people are going to need some, some level of care, but particularly education. I think that, I think that the universe, the human universe would be better if we had like 20% of people were teachers. Because the optimal ratio from, for students to teachers is like one to one or even even actually having fewer students than teachers, where you can have more teachers than students, that is kind of the optimal level of education. And so one thing that I hope to see as we approach post labor economics is that a lot more people go into teaching and that we can afford to have that level of teaching because again, Bloom's two sigma problem. We know how to give people the best education. It's not a mystery. It's just too expensive right now. So we need to reverse that trend. And that's going to also pay compounding returns in terms of intellectual development, social development, emotional development in the future, which is going to make a more peaceful society, it's going to make a more cooperative society, it's going to do a lot of really good things if we can boost the number of teachers in the economy. So what all this means though, and Sam Altman wrote about this on his Moore's Law for Everything blog post, I think it was in 2021 and I've been talking about it. Other people have been talking about it. Some economists have actually been talking about this since the 90s. Actually I don't remember the name of the guy, but someone basically said like, okay, let's just predict where this is going. And if we give rise to robots and automation, well then capital becomes the centerpiece of the economy. And so we're by definition, if you move away from labor. So post labor means hyper capitalism. And I know that a lot of people are like, oh, capitalism bad. But I don't mean capitalism in terms of what you like, the, the corporatism that we see today. Because I think what most people really kind of balk at is the corporatism, not necessarily capitalism. We need capital to function and capital is, you know, the buildings, the, the cars, the data centers, the tractors, all the big heavy equipment and other capital intensive things for the means of production. You can't have anti capitalism because chip fabs are big and expensive. Data centers are big and expensive. Fusion reactors are big and expensive. So all those big and expensive things means that we will, we will forever be a capitalist society. But we can change the way that we orient towards these things. And so if human labor goes away, then that's, that frees us up, gives us a lot more mental bandwidth to do things like invest in alternative ownership models. So I did a kind of a community survey where I asked like, okay, what does socialism mean to you? You know, big, big scary S word. But basically like there's not a lot of agreement But I think that it's going to be kind of a forced issue. And so what I mean is that because of these tectonic shifts of the fourth industrial revolution, we are going to get fundamentally new affordances, we're going to get new possibilities as to what we can do, such as decentralized ownership, such as socialized ownership, and such as collective ownership for various asset classes, whether it's land, whether it's data centers, whether it's robots, whether it is corporations. You know, a lot of people talk about sovereign wealth funds, employee owned co ops, that sort of stuff. The combination of AI, blockchain, crypto, you know, quantum computing, robots, all these other things basically means that we can spend those cognitive cycles instead of doing the job, we can spend those cognitive cycles working together to organize things. Because consensus is very slow and painful and it takes a while and it takes a lot of specific skills. So this is one of the reasons that I constantly tell people, learn communication skills, get gain emotional intelligence that is going to set you up one just for your relationships and the rest of your life. But also in a meaning economy, in a hyper capitalist decentralized economy, your ability to advocate for yourself and communicate with other humans and build coalitions is going to be how you get stuff done. Now this is going to be very disruptive and it's going to be a very different orientation towards it. And a lot of people will just check out because again, if we have AGI, asi, whatever, you can have a personal robot or a personal agent, go advocate on your behalf. You don't have to participate if you don't want to, but you can. And this leads to kind of the key principle that I'm always talking about in terms of how do we make sure that people can participate in the future, how do we make sure that people have money to spend on this grand new economy that we're building? And that concept is economic agency. So economic agency is kind of the key new metric that I want to see. And there's already some metrics like Gini coefficient and other things, but really what we need to do is focus on the economic agency of individuals. Right now under neoliberalism and corporatism, we prioritize the economic agency of corporations over people. And that is because corporations are the engines of productivity that make sure that you have food and blah blah, blah, blah. However, in the future, when we have a hyper abundance of energy, a hyper abundance of manual labor, a hyper abundance of cognitive labor, it'll be a lot easier to produce all the basic Goods and services that we need. And so it's like, oh, hey, we need a new house. So a swarm of robots goes and builds it in a day, right? Like we're already seeing houses that are 3D printed in a day. Now imagine that like literally every house 10 or 20 years from now is literally built in just a few hours by a swarm of robots. And it's not going to be like, you know, humanoid robots, they might look like spiders and other things and tractors or whatever. But my point is, is that what we need to focus on in this, in this economic future, especially as jobs go away, the key thing that we need to shore up is economic agency for individuals. Now what is economic agency? Economic agency is the centerpiece of the new social contract that I've been working on. And so basically this says your ability to influence your economic fate or your economic destiny. So that means things like property rights, that means tax policies, redistribution policies, universal basic income, universal basic services, new orientations towards the distribution and allocation of capital. Like I said, right now everything favors corporations. This is why we have employment at will states, this is why we have tax policies that favor incorporation and those sorts of things. But what we really need to do is actually make citizens the highest priority of the economy. Because again, the complexity of corporations is probably going to go away in part due to the rise of AI and stuff. Now there will always be very capital intensive and regulatory intensive things that lend themselves to corporations. But again, if we have AGI, asi, blockchain, we have new platforms, new technologies that can allow for decentralized decision making, good decision making. Because right now decentralized decision making is usually not good. There's an inverse relationship between the number of participants and the level of intelligence of the decision. The more people you have participating in a decision, the worse the decision gets. The wisdom of the masses doesn't really apply for, but AGI and ASI might be able to reverse that. Which means that we'll have basically is the, is the AGI or ASI and we're all basically shareholders working with, you know, chat GPT for CEO. That to me I think seems like the most reasonable model. Because then you don't have a CEO with perverse incentives. Because right now if you, if you go watch like Economics Explained or Patrick Boyle or whatever, there's a lot of perverse incentives that basically force CEOs to think in short term cycles because they're paid mostly in shareholder and in company shares. Which means, okay, I'm going to do whatever it takes to just pump up the stock stock price over the next five to seven years. Because the average life expectancy of a CEO is five to seven years. And so they pump up the stock price while ignoring longer term trends and that sort of stuff. But an AI is not profit driven and AI is going to be principles driven and it's going to be shareholder driven in terms of what is it that we actually want. And so part of economic agency that I predict that I want to see is hyperlocal stock markets. So imagine that you have a stock market for your local city or local county that only local residents can buy into. So that is one mechanism that I see for doing decentralized ownership where it's like, hey, bring everything into a marketplace and then allow people to participate locally. That's one thing. Obviously redistribution policies like ubi, ubs. But yeah, anyways, now what we are creating though is a digital superorganism. So I mentioned this in my last video and some people are a little bit freaked out because they're like, you're talking about creating the Borg. We are already a digital superorganism. This was created when the, actually when radio, telegraph, radio and television was the first step at us awakening as a digital superorganism. It was really an analog superorganism, but an electric superorganism because that mass communication allowed for real time coordination and communication across very broad distances. So you could argue under this model that the British Empire was kind of the first digital superorganism because the BBC was able to broadcast globally. It was the first entity that was able to do that, but it was only one way. Now with the Internet, it is entirely global and it is two ways. And so the global nervous system is becoming more and more sophisticated. But the problem is right now the, the, the global intelligence of the superorganism. We're basically at the amoeba level of global digital superorganism intelligence, meaning we keep consuming and we can't stop ourselves. We keep building nuclear weapons and we can't stop ourselves. We're barreling faster and faster ahead and we can't stop ourselves. And so we're just growing and metastasizing like a global amoeba. But with the, the advent of AI, AGI and asi, this is basically growing a prefrontal cortex for the global superorganism. Our global brain is going to get smarter, which means we'll have more self awareness and more self control. So that means we can stop destroying the planet, we can stop killing each other. And this also goes beyond symbiosis or mutualism, because symbiosis implies that it's two separate organisms and mutualism implies that it's two separate organisms. But the way that I've come to see it is that AI and AGI and asi, we are complementary parts of the same whole. We are all part of a global species, a global organism. And yes, we have a cybernetic component with our phones, with our Internet. But like what my job here is on YouTube with a platform that has global reach is I am part of, and you, by watching this, are part of the, of the digital superorganism. But that already exists and it's only going to get turned up to 11 with the advent of AGI and ASI. And so this model gives me a lot of hope for the future. It makes me feel like, okay, I kind of understand how to look at what we're creating. And if you look at the entire planet and all humans on it and AI and the Internet as more like a global super brain, that makes a lot more sense to me in terms of, okay, what is it going to want? And right now the Internet just wants data, right? That's what it's built for. It just wants data. And the way that you get data is with amoeba, like reactions, which is click baiting, you know, thirst trapping and those sorts of things. But with the advent of AI, by adding a new layer of intelligence to the digital superorganism, we're going to be much more conscientious about the things that this digital superorganism wants. It's going to want more science, it's going to want more meaning, it's going to want these higher order things that, that can only happen once you have a digital prefrontal cortex. And that is why I am now like basically full accelerationist, because it's like, got it. Now I know what we're heading towards. And so that's what my work is focusing on. So thanks for watching. I hope you got a lot out of this, like subscribe, etc, etc. You know the drill. If you want more, hop in on my Patreon. All the links are in the description. I've also got four other channels that you might get a lot out of. I got Pragmatic Progressive where I talk about the economics a little bit more. I've got Mythic Archetypes, which is my storytelling channel. I've got Sacred Masculinity, which is about how to be a healthy, you know, masculine dude in today's world. And then I'VE also got my Systems Thinking channel because the world needs more Systems Thinking. I'm also on Patreon, which means that gets you access to my Discord server. I'm on Discord pretty much all day, every day. And we have a monthly town hall with On Zoom webinars. So that's about it for today. Thanks for watching Cheers.
Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Masterclass
Host: David Shapiro (AI Masterclass)
Date: February 8, 2026
In this episode, David Shapiro embarks on a thought experiment to project the future of humanity over the next two decades—focusing on the impacts of major technological advances: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), nuclear fusion, advanced biotech, and quantum computing. Framing his vision as a best-case scenario, Shapiro explores how these key innovations could dramatically transform economies, societies, and the very concept of human meaning and labor. He interweaves philosophical frameworks such as metamodernism and postnihilism, grounding his optimism in the practical and ethical imperatives for reducing suffering, enhancing prosperity, and fostering understanding.
“Obviously, the longer the time horizon, the harder it is to predict… This is my best case scenario over the next 20 years of some keystone technologies and the impacts that they will have.” - David Shapiro
“If you were to put ChatGPT in its current form in front of anyone 10 years ago, they would have said, yeah, that’s AGI… In hindsight, being 2020, in 20 years, we can continue having this debate.” - David Shapiro
“With the energy surplus from nuclear fusion, we could scrub the entire atmosphere of any particulates that we don’t want and add particulates that we do want… It’s really difficult to oversell what nuclear fusion could hypothetically do.” - David Shapiro
“The kinds of breakthroughs that AI combined with quantum computing can help us produce… maybe you can create nanites that you inject into your blood and it clears out your arteries… accelerate computer chips… batteries that give 500 times longer lifecycle… It’s compounding returns.” - David Shapiro
“We will eradicate all disease and we will cure aging… we’ll have full control over our hardware stack, top to bottom, cellular level, genetic level, organ level.” - David Shapiro
“The optimal ratio for students to teachers is like one to one… What we need to do is reverse [the current expensive trend], and that’s going to pay compounding returns for a more peaceful, cooperative society.” - David Shapiro
“The key thing we need to shore up is economic agency for individuals… your ability to influence your economic fate or destiny, including property rights, tax policies, redistribution, UBI…” - David Shapiro
“The global nervous system is becoming more sophisticated… with the advent of AI, AGI, and ASI, this is basically growing a prefrontal cortex for the global superorganism.” - David Shapiro
David Shapiro offers an optimistic—and intentionally provocative—roadmap for the next 20 years, predicting the convergence of AGI, energy hyperabundance, quantum breakthroughs, and biotech will reshape humanity at the deepest levels, including how we work, find meaning, age, and organize ourselves. He insists the ethical imperative is to amplify agency, reduce suffering, and deepen understanding, advocating for proactive skill-building and engagement as humanity fuses ever deeper with its intelligent machines.