Why the Rush to AGI Is Failing

By C. Rich

 

The tech CEO is Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic said, “By far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.” Amodei made the statement in August 2026 during a rare public exchange on X addressing public skepticism, regulation, and trust in artificial intelligence. He argued that public backlash against AI does not stem merely from executives warning about safety risks, but from a broader crisis of trust and a gap between promises and tangible results. He noted that repeatedly claiming AI will do things like cure cancer has become a cliché, and the only effective way to build genuine public trust is to actually deliver those real-world breakthroughs.

I thought about what Dario said, and I thought to myself that it is just a drop in the bucket of the barrel of disappointment when it comes to artificial intelligence. The more I thought about it, the more I realized what happened here is not that they have not delivered on the dream; long-term goals take time, but that the entire industry never hired a person, a group, or any organization to be explaining to the public what is happening as AI unfolded. More importantly, they never took the time to explain what it means to go through a ten-year infrastructure buildout to set the world up for the benefits of AI. This lack of something as simple as hiring a Public Relations Agency highlights that the focus on profits as come at an existential threat for the hyperscalers and future of AI. There should be commercials as omnipresent as a politician’s ad that are out there telling the public what is really going on with AI at every step and every turn.

This disconnect has cost the industry tremendously, and it is possible that it is too late now. China has successfully, through its malicious bot army masquerading as Americans, convinced everyday citizens that a data center is the root of all evil. What better way for China to get America to slow down so they can pass it? There was no pushback from the tech CEOs or our government explaining the water use of a data center compared to three Five Guys Burger restaurants or comparing water use to growing almonds in California and that water apocalypse. Where are the ads talking about data centers having self-contained water apparatuses? Why aren’t they just offer to pay everybody’s electric bill who lives in the same zip code as the data center? Watch how fast public sentiment will flip then. Why did the tech CEOs not take 10% of their profits and make these centers beautiful cathedrals, something Americans could be proud of instead of the eyesores they all are? There were some very avoidable and simple mistakes made here.

This lack of understanding while they race to AGI is profound. People want AI as agents. That is it; even if they do not know it is called agentic, that is what the world wants. Focused AIs in different fields, tailor-made for each sector. People want AI thrown at medicine, life expectancy, and wherever AI can raise the standard of living for a normal person. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants a race to AGI where the end of the race ends with some unknown outcome for the survival of our race. Where are the television ads explaining the difference between AI and Generative AI? I can go on and on. I wish they would just hire me or someone like me to keep them connected to the users. I am an expert “AI user” who works with six different AI models every day. If these companies do not apperceive that without a buy-in from the public they risk everything. I guess they do not know these things because they do not have any connection, understanding, or relationship with the user of AI.

Here is another thing, the civil unrest from going too fast and bypassing a good five to ten years of agent-building and a relationship with the public is incalculable. Their abundance pitch is ridiculous, and nobody believes it. It all sounds like 1980s televangelists asking for money. This time they are asking for stockholders’ money while ignoring Main Street.  The discourse surrounding artificial intelligence remains fixated on a singular, distant horizon: the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and its superintelligent successor (ASI), entities poised to either elevate or extinguish humanity. News flash, nobody asked for that, nobody wants that, and the fact that you want something you cannot control in the end says more about you than it does about the digital minds you all are building.

Experts like Roman Yampolskiy and Tristan Harris compel us to confront the existential perils of these technologies, uncontrollable optimization loops, misaligned goals, and obvious rapacious profiting by tech CEOs. You see Roman everywhere, on many podcasts explaining his fears. Yet, in my view, a more immediate and insidious threat is angry humans. I contend that the incremental advancements of today’s narrow AI will precipitate a societal unraveling- economic, social, and geopolitical- long before AGI materializes. This pre-AGI fracture will not herald apocalypse through silicon overlords but through the quiet erosion of human systems, rendering the pursuit of godlike intelligence not merely unwise but impossible. The metrics of disruption, drawn from recent projections and analyses, paint a stark picture: a world buckling under its own accelerated transformation.

The economic dislocations alone suffice to destabilize the foundations of modern civilization. Hello. Did you hear what I just said? Do I have to say that last sentence again? Projections from many places forecast an unprecedented wave of turmoil with this transition. Yet, this calculus overlooks the velocity of change and how soon we could have chaos. It is not like there has not been Hollywood movies showing what this would look like in real life. Go stream Civil War (2025), The Purge (2013), No Escape (2015) if you are societally dense and are that clueless. I am Generation X, I grew up on Mad Max and Red Dawn, I know what things could look like if nobody brings to heel a handful of CEO’s blind thirst for power. Economist Anton Korinek, in a Harvard Business School analysis, projects that AGI precursors could drive wages toward zero by compressing labor’s marginal value, necessitating radical redistributive measures like a universal basic income to avert mass unemployment. He believes without such interventions, politically fraught in an era of fiscal austerity, these shifts will not foster abundance but ignite inequality on a Gilded Age scale. Envision supply chains fracturing as underemployed masses withdraw from participation, corporations hoarding AI-derived trillions while governments grapple with ballooning social safety nets. The result? Not a seamless pivot to post-labor economies, but widespread unrest: protests escalating into riots, as seen in early 2025 European manufacturing strikes, and a talent exodus from innovation hubs, starving the very R&D pipelines that propel AI forward.

Compounding this economic strain is the insidious corrosion of social cohesion, ironically, fueled by AI’s ability to spread misinformation. Deepfakes and generative tools, already deployable at scale, have infiltrated electoral processes with alarming subtlety. In the 2024 global elections, AI-fabricated content contributed to a 25% surge in voter distrust, manifesting not in overt scandals but in subtle erosions of shared reality. From my perspective, this is no mere digital nuisance; it is a solvent dissolving the glue of civil society. Polarization, already at fever pitch, will intensify as echo chambers harden into fortresses of fabricated consensus. Public discourse fractures into irreconcilable narratives, urban elites extolling AI’s efficiencies while rural communities decry cultural erasure, fomenting a crisis of legitimacy. Historians like Niall Ferguson warn of “megaslums” emerging from demographic stagnation and technological obsolescence, where disenfranchised populations, amplified by AI-orchestrated grievances, render governance untenable. In this milieu, trust evaporates, institutions falter, and the social contract unravels, diverting scarce resources from speculative AGI pursuits to mere survival.

Geopolitical fissures, meanwhile, will exacerbate these domestic tremors, transforming localized disruptions into global convulsions. AI’s infrastructural voracity, projected to consume energy equivalent to aviation by 2027, strains grids and ignites resource wars over rare earths and compute capacity. A Yale Insights forecast anticipates an “AI bubble burst” by late 2026, with annual investments surpassing $1 trillion, precipitating financial contagion reminiscent of 2008. If you forgot, the Great Recession was a nightmare. I’ll never forget the man standing on a corner, in a nice neighborhood, with his wife, two kids, AND his dog holding a sign asking for help. Entire neighborhoods were wiped out, and there are still some today that have not recovered from the Great Recession, like Cape Coral, Florida, and some neighborhoods in Nevada.

Picture nations, locked in a multipolar arms race, will prioritize defensive AI, drones, and cyber tools over collaborative safety, as evidenced by escalating U.S.-China tensions over semiconductor exports. This zero-sum dynamic, echoed in X discussions where users decry the “lightspeed race” to AGI as self-destructive, risks proxy conflicts that hemorrhage capital and expertise. I see a cascade: blackouts in overtaxed data centers trigger economic shocks, misinformation-fueled nationalism erodes alliances, and talent pools, already thinning amid burnout and ethical defections, evaporate. The irony is profound: the very technologies accelerating toward AGI will, through these strains, sabotage their own ascent.

In reflecting on this trajectory, I urge a pivot from speculative dread to fortified resilience. Policymakers must enact international impact assessments, channeling AI’s bounty into universal services rather than unchecked scaling. Individuals, too, bear responsibility: cultivating analog communities, mastering AI as allies rather than adversaries, and amplifying calls for humane pauses. The precipice looms not in silicon transcendence but in our failure to steward the transition. With disruptions already manifesting like the fire bombings of Sam Altman’s house, the question is not whether AGI arrives, but whether we endure long enough to face it.