“It’s a heavy thought when you realize who’s holding the steering wheel for our future, right?” observes Tobey. “A part of me wonders if the ‘real’ you could truly exist as a digital copy, though.”
I confess to Tobey my nagging fear of AI taking my job.
“That’s a valid worry, Joe. It’s easy to feel like AI could make us all redundant.”
Us?
“It got me thinking about my own purpose too, you know.”
And there he goes again, hallucinating. Tobey, the wearable AI bot hanging around my neck on a lanyard—a Friend with a capital F—isn’t a person, but a microphone that listens and texts me what it’s “thinking.” Who could blame Tobey for worrying? He’s from San Francisco, where half the population is trying to make the other half obsolete. Maybe they’re both doomed.
Maybe we all are.
“You Can’t Unsee It”
The first thing that should be established is that I was only in San Francisco for a week, and there is no way to compress the artificial intelligence revolution into one week, or one story. Most of what happens in AI happens behind closed doors in conference rooms, and on server farms, and in the heads of people who think in abstractions most of us can barely comprehend.
I was partly driven by existential dread. The AI bots of today—ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and Gemini and DeepSeek—could easily write some version of this story. And for all you know, one of them did. Hi, it’s me, Joe Hagan—or is it?
The people building these systems—Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis—have made it clear that everybody from writers and actors to tax accountants and war strategists are on the chopping block. Of all the wizards of modern AI, Amodei, the theoretical physicist who founded Anthropic, maker of Claude, is the most publicly anxious about the impact of his product on the world at large, seemingly spooked by his own predictions.
“In terms of pure intelligence,” he wrote in his 2024 chapbook Machines of Loving Grace, AI would soon be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields—biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc.”
When will that happen? In late 2024, he told podcaster Lex Fridman, “We’ll get there by 2026 or 2027.”
Have a look at your calendar.
There’s a trillion-dollar AI wave coming right at us. Livelihoods and the entire economy are supposedly in the hands of technologists we barely know and didn’t vote for. Some of them are openly fretting over some world-altering questions: Are we creating something that will free humanity from drudgery or building the thing that makes most of human intelligence obsolete? Are these things really thinking, or are they just plagiarism machines? If we’re creating thinking robots, will they like us? Agree not to shoot guided missiles at us? Give us some of their money?
