Rise of AGI: Danger of humanity entering the first stage of Kübler-Ross model for terminal diseases

Time of India

20-05-2025

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and her colleagues proposed that when a person faces an inevitable tragedy, the psychological phases he goes through are typically denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (in that order).
When I look at the way we are treating the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), I sense that we have entered the first stage of denial, and that is probably a very dangerous situation, as we may end up failing to act when we can, and we may regret it very shortly.
Though it has still not percolated all the way upto the bottom of the pyramid, most of these who are working in close proximity of AGI have realised that it has reached the zone of unpredictability; not in terms of what it can do, but in terms of what its owners will make it do.
The biggest mistake we are making today is imagining that AGI is a global phenomenon that will evolve democratically because it will be subjected to market forces, i.e., the choices we humans make while living.
Truth is, AGI is neither global nor democratic.
AGI is raw power and it is available only to a handful of people.
We may still carry on making H/Bollywood movies where a genius kid will save the world, the real life is showing very little evidence of that to happen.
AGI has and AGI shall usher in the era of THE BIG, as AGI lacks the limitations that being BIG traditionally brought to the table. AGI transcends the generalist-specialist divide, as it can be 'everything', ranging from advising a gardener on how to protect her French beans from aphid attack and (if need be, simultaneously) guide a drone to locate a human being an a battlefield and terminate him. Thus AGI can replace every human expertise, and it is slowly dawning upon some of us that the process has already started.
When Microsoft lays off 6000 humans from their jobs, it is just a small beginning. Soon the masters of AGI will come for every job that requires a highly trained and thus expensive human being. As the cull will start from the top, humans are unlikely to have a revolution, as the bottom of the pyramid, the traditional fodder for any revolution will benefit from the new economics that AGI will lead to.
Though my sympathies are with the doctors, engineers, lawyers and other experts who will face the first wave of the cull, it is least of my worries. AGI will change the world economics, and may even lead to a major economic collapse, but that is not half as scary as the more plausible deployment of AGI that we may end up having due to a small group of people controlling it.
What scares me is the fact that AGI is a source of power, and those who understand how the world works know that money has no real value when one has the power.
This means that AGI owners may initially deploy AGI to make money, but soon they will go for the bigger game, i.e., the game of controlling humanity.
Lets recognise that humanity has produced Alexanders and Genghis Khans even when it was not actually possible to control the world even if you win it. With the rise of AGI, the limitation of not-being-able-to-control-the- world is also gone, making it a very attractive idea for a (most probably male) member of a species that is designed to try and rise higher and higher in the social hierarchy.
With the wars raging across the planet and powerful nations getting a chance to deploy autonomous weapons and learning from the experiment, training and weaponisation of AGI is obviously on the fast track now. It is this arms race that is probably keeping ambitions at bay, but there is no doubt that, even as I write, ideas of ruling the world are passing through a few brains and may be even discussed in war rooms somewhere on this planet.
Humanity did see something similar with arrival of Atom Bomb amongst us, but the way Bomb worked was a bit too diabolical and horrible for it to allow USA to go for direct world dominance, and soon that edge was lost with many other nations making the required scientific breakthrough and go nuclear.
Weaponisation of AGI is similar to Atom Bomb in terms of disruption, and it may find power balance the way nuclear power did, but my concern is that AGI differs in how world dominance acquired via AGI will look like, making it worth a try.
The masters of AGI can take over the world first through financial and manufacturing disruption, and then go for the kill by taking on the armed resistance if any. And from that point onwards humanity will enter into an unprecedented situation.
AGI driven domination will allow its masters to track every individual human and prevent humans to build a collective with a critical mass required for successful revolution.
With the current distribution of AGI empowerment, it looks very difficult that we can escape this fate, but the first step towards liberation is to wake up to the reality.
If AGI is to live alongside us, it needs to be recognised as a natural product (as we did with genetic information) and make it impossible to patent or monetise it.
This may slow down the growth dramatically and return AGI to the academies (where it actually belongs) but if it is not done, we will soon have to enter the second phase, i.e., anger. And then it will be a downhill journey with no way to stop.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.