It's all over in 2 years
In a Nutshell
AI's super-exponential growth, fueled by massive data center investments rivaling the Apollo program, will render human intellectual contributions obsolete within 1-2 years, ushering in cognitive hyperabundance, AGI/ASI, and the end of compulsory labor amid converging debt cycles and the fourth industrial revolution. While non-automatable human creativity (e.g., an astronomical number of possible novels, exceeding 10^100) persists, rigorous fields like math, physics, and programming will be dominated by AI, marking the speaker's post-labor economics work as a potential final contribution. Society faces a great unraveling of norms, increasing weirdness, and rapid reinvention driven by the US-China AI race, evoking vesperence turning to extinction rage and childhood dread.
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We may be working on our final contribution. I had the visceral realization that I will be intellectually useless within a year or two. AI is on a super exponential growth curve by any reasonable accounting. Investment in AI is going up exponentially for the largest industrial buildout in human history. That is not hyperbole. The data center buildout already rivals the Apollo program, the Manhattan project, and Interstate Highway buildout, and it's only accelerating from here. Combine that with the exponential improvement of GPU hardware and model performance, and this ends in only one possible condition: cognitive hyperabundance. Call it AGI or ASI or whatever you want to call it. The material reality is that your brain and my brain will be unable to contribute in many ways.
A couple years ago, someone on Reddit coined the term vesperence, which means the wistful nostalgia for the now as you experience the ending of an era. That was sweet and romantic. I have also personally written extensively about how things will change. But it's one thing to intellectually know a truth and another entirely to feel that same truth in your bones. Here's an example. I've often told my audience for a few years now, it's going to get much worse before it gets better. I've read books like The Fourth Turning and Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order, where he studies long-term debt cycles. Both of those cycles are coming to fruition at the ramp up of the fourth industrial revolution. Every turning, every debt cycle, and every industrial revolution in history has reshaped society, often painfully. But now we're living through all three converging at once. The threats we're facing are not just financial or political. We understand recessions and job shocks. That's not new. But what is new to us is the disorientation that comes from the upending of every norm and every rule that the world is supposed to follow: go to school, get a job, buy a house, get married, have children, work, and then retire. That's a norm and it's already ending.
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