The Promethean Gap
CrowdSource 3.10.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: what is Artificial General Intelligence?
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What is AGI?
“The Government Knows AGI is Coming” claims the New York Times. According to Ben Buchanan, former AI adviser in the Biden White House, we are on “the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before.”
What is Artificial General Intelligence?
A “canonical definition” by Buchanan: “AGI is a system capable of doing almost any cognitive task a human can do. I don’t know that we’ll quite see that in the next four years or so, but I do think we’ll see something like that …”
Every CEO has a definition:
Palantir CEO Alex Karp defines AGI in his new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, as “a computing intellect that could rival that of the human mind when it comes to abstract reasoning and solving problems.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, on his blog last month: “AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields.”
Microsoft CEO Sadya Nadella, in an interview last month: “Claiming some AGI milestone, that’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking … The real benchmark is: is the world growing at 10%?”
The intellectuals try to go deeper:
Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, alludes to AGI: “non-conscious algorithms … may soon excel human consciousness in recognizing patterns.”
Philosopher Nick Bostrom identifies three types of AI superintelligence in his essential book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
Speed superintelligence: “A system that can do all that a human intellect can do, but much faster.”
Collective superintelligence: “A system composed of a large number of smaller intellects such as the system’s overall performance … outstrips that of any current cognitive system.”
Quality superintelligence: “A system that is at least as fast as a human mind and vastly qualitatively smarter.”
Each of these superintelligences could create the others, according to Bostrom.
The Obsolescence of You and Me
Is the biggest story of our time AGI, or is it the global decline in births? New York Times columnist
says it’s both:
The Promethean Gap. Douthat is possibly alluding to the “Promethean gap” (or “disjunction”), an idea from the unjustly forgotten 20th century philosopher, Günther Anders. From Anders’ 1980 book, The Obsolescence of Human Beings:
[T]oday, computers are built that in one second can not only process a thousand times more data than a thousand workers could process in a thousand hours, but also a thousand times more data than a thousand men could use in a thousand hours. This “Promethean disjunction” … that is, the disjunction that exists between the maximum that we can produce and the maximum (shamefully small) that we can imagine, has now even become a disjunction between what we produce and what we can use. … In fact, we can now provide a third version to our Promethean disjunction … between the maximum that we can produce and the maximum (shamefully small) that we can need.
Existential Gluttony. But why is the Promethean gap a problem? Anders:
[H]umanity now finds itself in the situation of the man condemned to death in The Thousand and One Nights who is told that he will be given a reprieve from his death sentence if he eats one hundred loaves of bread, which are placed before him. He was not capable, of course, of eating one hundred loaves of bread, and he had to face the consequences. Today, however, it is we ourselves who put the one hundred loaves in front of ourselves and who execute the sentence.
Today, a few thinkers see the Promethean gap coming:
“The Obsolescence of Man in the Digital Society.” In a 2021 paper updating Anders’ concept for the so-called “knowledge economy,” French professor Dominique Maillard defines the Promethean gap as existing “between Man as an instrument among other instruments and his ability at encompassing the superior efficiency of the products he churned out.”
The aforementioned Nick Bostrom, in his 2024 book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, asks what humanity might do after all of its tasks are taken over by AI: “do we just — waft away?” He then looks for alternatives to wafting away.
Philosopher and Effective Altruism thought leader William McAskill, in his 2022 book, What We Owe the Future, writes: “from a moral perspective Al takeover looks very different from other extinction risks. … the AI agents would continue civilization, potentially for billions of years to come. It’s an open question how good or bad such a civilization would be.”
Impressive, But Not god
Skeptics believe that the current hype overlooks AGI’s limits.
Reality Is Not Fully Computable. Thus writes tech muckraker
, in an argument applicable to AGI: “That’s the trouble with reality — it’s beyond our comprehension! And that’s something the EAs [Effective Altruists], longtermists, utopians, and eugenicists absolutely cannot seem to accept.”AI Mass Adoption Will Lead to AI Demystification. So argues self-styled “AI skeptic”
: “The more people use AI with some regularity, the more broad familiarity they’ll develop with its specific and and consistent shortcomings; the more people understand how LLMs work from practical experience, the more they can recognize AI as an impressive but flawed technology, rather than as some inevitable and unchallengeable godhead.”
From the Crowd
A fruitful and civil discussion in the comments section to
’s latest piece, “Barbarians at the Gate,” in which Damir describes the scene at a right wing “DOGE Appreciation Party” in DC. First, socialist author asks:
offers an answer to George’s question:How did so many young and presumably intelligent people fall into such meanness and madness? Can it just be hating woke? But you and I hate woke, and we’re not chortling with glee as the barbarians raze civil society.
You don’t quite understand what it was to be young and feel completely smothered under what really did look to be a total woke gleichschaltung.
likes to tell the anecdote about how the Nazis forced their ideology into everything — even the cat fancier magazines had to be about “the superior Aryan Cat” — and especially in schools that sort of [woke] attitude was everywhere with regard to racial, gender, and sex issues. Just about every hobby was forcefully-converged; you couldn’t be in a knitting group without “centering the experience of POC [that horrid neologism]-knitters and the oppression inherent in the excessive whiteness of hobby stores.” The ever-changing speech policing [EDIT: to say nothing of the actual rampant diversion of educational and professional resources and opportunities away from anything that couldn’t claim some special status over white heterosexual male-ness — talk about structural prejudice!] The complete vanishing of traditionally-boyish stories from the YA shelves. And worst of all, the Stasi-esque progressive thought policing and witch-hunts on pre-Elon social media. All delivered with a maximum of smarmy “eat-your-vegetables” condescension designed to infantilize, isolate, and humiliate.I’m an elder-millennial so I only got the beginnings of it in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but it was bad then and from talking to friends’ younger siblings it has gotten significantly worse (though things appear to be swinging back a bit in recent months). That kind of smothering sows quite a lot of resentment, which is now having its own Langston Hughes “raisin in the sun” moment. These kids have lots of memories of punchable lib faces sneering at them, and now their revenge is exploding indiscriminately all over the place. The libs should have read their own literature and realized that it could happen to them too.
Schmendrick goes on to argue that “the vote for Trump is a vote for a brick in the face to the existing system,” while Scialabba counters that the existing system is a plutocracy, and Trump is nothing if not a plutocrat. You will want to read the entire exchange, which starts here.
See you next week!
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On Schmendrick's comments: https://wisdomofcrowds.live/p/barbarians-at-the-gate/comment/99409916