Ahmed Medhat@amedhat_
If AGI, then E = I = P.
AGI’s natural trajectory is to bring about a direct equivalence between energy, intelligence, and economic/political power, with a wide span of utopian to dystopian possibilities for how the world will organize itself.
Nations that are able to harness energy, firstly at the fastest rate, and secondarily at the cheapest rate, would become the defacto super powers and supersede any ones that may exist today.
There’s at least 3 scenarios that may shape:
The zero sum scenario
If fossil fuels continue to dominate, the natural incentive structure will be for the most economically/militarily powerful nations to “colonize” the most oil rich nations’ energy assets. As otherwise, these nations have the upper power way more than the privilege of their energy sources had offered them today.
The inequality widening scenario
A conscious decision can be made to strictly make data centers reliant on renewable energy in terms of how the technology is developed from the ground up. This will give an edge to the renewable tech leaders of today but perhaps trigger a widening intelligence gap, or an over-dependence on developed nations to run your daily life wherever you are. Think of the analogue of Africa’s daily electric supply being switched on and off from the US, except that it’s now your decision making supply.
The deliberate interdependence scenario
The world finds the means to maintain a distributed supply chain stack and preserve the comparative advantage principles that capitalism thrives under. Semiconductor leadership in Taiwan, solar energy in Africa, uranium from Kazakhstan, reasoning models and data centers in US and China, and learning data from everywhere.
Much as I’d like it, but It’s very hard to see the third scenario playing out long into the future, as (a) not every one of these elements will have the gravitational pull of the other, and (b) our sense of shared interests and common ground has been in a direction of collapse driven by a poor understanding of how to build social platforms, that could’ve moved things in the opposite direction. Coordination tech is far behind intelligence and energy tech today, and it should’ve never been the case.
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A longer argument for why energy, intelligence and power would collapse onto one.
When AGI arrives, two things will likely happen;
An intelligence-function collapse: AGI will gradually collapse the thousands of variables that shape the world's aggregate global intelligence quotient into a single marker, the energy that operates data centers. Units of energy will become synonymous with units of intelligence that fuel AI to recursively self improve.
An economic-power function collapse: This will be a bit slower due to physical constraints, but as AGI makes it to the physical world, this artificially generated aggregate intelligence will in turn be the single engine of economic productivity.
This comes in contrast to the world today, where aggregate global intelligence isn’t only a function of energy production, and where aggregate economic productivity isn’t only a function of aggregate global intelligence.
By consequence, nations with the highest annual production of units of energy can also be the nations with the highest annual aggregate intelligence and aggregate economic power.
This imposes a choice on the economic/military superpowers of today, either physically control the world’s energy supply, or surrender your economic and military supremacy to those who do own that supply today.
In other words, for the power alpha to remain the productivity alpha, it will have to be the energy alpha around the time that AGI lands.
