Ross Douthat

If everything goes amazingly in the next five or ten years, what is AI for?

And I want to pause you there because one of the.

Interesting things about your framing in that essay, and you sort of return to it, is that these intelligences don't have to be the kind of maximal godlike superintelligence that comes up in AI debates.

You're basically saying if we can achieve a strong intelligence at the level of sort of peak human performance.

Peak human performance, yes.

multiply it to what your phrase is, a country of geniuses.

Right, 100 million.

So you don't have to have

the full machine god.

You just need to have 100 million geniuses.

Right.

So keeping it concrete, you have a world where there's just an end to cancer as a serious threat to human life, an end to heart disease, an end to most of the illnesses that we experience that kill us, possible life extension beyond that.

So that's health.

That's a pretty positive vision.

And talk about economics and wealth.

What happens in the five to 10 year AI takeoff to

So before we get to the hard problem, one more note of optimism then on politics, I think.

And here, it's a little more, I mean, all of this is speculative, but I think it's a little more speculative.

You try and make the case that AI could be good for democracy and liberty around the world, which is not necessarily intuitive.

A lot of people say, you know, incredibly powerful AI.