Back in Aug 2023 I wrote “It’s not the Machines dummy its our Socio-Economic system” in response to the panic about AI intelligence which in most part was stirred up by the AI Labs; OpenAI, Anthropic and AI researchers. They said the graph is going exponential and Super Intelligence was just around the corner. So they did the rounds of governments and media saying we needed to prepare. I concluded it wasn’t so much the technology we needed to fear but the systems we put the technology in.
The landscape has changed in the 3 years since ChatGPT amazed us. Remember the zero maths skill, could’t count how many r’s in strawberry and the 7 fingered hands, ahh the memories. I published a piece about/by ChatGPT in December 2022 weeks after its release. I have used these systems continuously since then and the mood has shifted. From awe and scepticism to disappointment, confusion and anger. There are many people who are fervently anti AI for many reasons, but for what I can mostly describe as a complete lack of trust in tech firms to do anything good for humanity, and lets face it they don’t have a good track record. So much so that Australia recently banned under 16’s from social media, that which was to bring knowledge, connection across the globe and democracy to dictatorships. Anyway back to AI and where I see us now and in the near future.
There’s been spits and spurts in AI development but I think The AI labs; Google especially but also Anthropic and OpenAI and perhaps the Chinese labs have most if not all the ingredients to accelerate to AGI and maybe beyond.
The ingredients are:
Continuous Learning - In July 2024 @Aiden_Mclau posted about a new model that can learn new skills in its free time, CLM by topology. Later he was hired by OpenAI and the Topology website is no-longer active. Googles AlphaEvolve which autonomously discovers and writes new computer code announced in May 2025 had been finding improvements for Google internally for over a year before that. And only now has it been available to some external users.
Even I have had a crack at designing new continuously learning models using old tech with the new LLM’s. Literally using a tagged metadata memory graph. There are many other ideas and attempts but I believe the big labs are just pulling stuff together at the moment and testing what works best and most efficiently.
World models - Google’s Genie models are an interactive real-time world creator. People think of them as the future of gaming but really they are trying to teach AI about real world physics. The same goes for Sora and all the other video creation models, and note the humanoid robots are also collecting data for the real world. There maybe a little way to go here but close enough maybe good enough with a fast acting heuristic correction system.
I left out memory because to have a properly functional continuous learning system you need memory. But the ingredients are there and research is crazy at the moment, in part because scale is all you need ended up not being true so the field opened way wider. An API for a frontier model with good scaffolding around it and some innovation is now seen as a viable route to AGI. This maybe our saviour
However I believe Google in particular has enough innovation already and they have the compute to test many different ideas. The problem is they are not giving us the best models and OpenAI is trying to make products/money that's where most recent tech goes from world good to world bad.
There’s the other elephant in the room, the huge amount of money invested in AI data centres and on people. OpenAi used to say any money invested in OpenAI was essentially a donation as they saw the end point (AGI) as eliminating the current profit money model. I think many in the AI world still do. The bubble can’t burst yet though as the data centres aren’t all built. If the squeeze does come it will be us who will miss out not the labs.
The US government has been inside OpenAI and I assume Google as they see AI as a “national security” issue. As do many governments around the world. But I have a feeling this is a fear of losing their political power, not a protection of what little power we the people may have.
The CCP is keeping the AI labs in China very close as it does everything as much as central power can in such a large country.
AI is helping to make autonomous drones and submarines a reality. Soon leaders won’t have to worry about citizen pushback before they wage war.
New Economy
Google is making a protocol with Coinbase so AI agents can trade. The Agent Payments Proticol x402 allows AI agents to pay each other. That makes them the tax collector of the AI economy if they monetise the systems that use it. Most trading with AI reduces to nominal value as they will actually have full information and can easily infer the strategy and intention of other agent traders.All traders in the market will know this and revert to nominal fair value in order to make the trade. It’s basically impossible to extract profit in that environment ( https://www.jesaurai.net/society/the-autonomous-clearing-economy-ace-markets-after-profit/). So the main ways to make money is by running the system or putting in gates and tolls and charging for access to legal permissions. There is something else, the real world. Land and Infrastructure (existing and future) becomes extremely valuable in an AI economy because it is real and people still need to live on land and eat food that needs to be transported using energy. This is why Blackrock is buying up infrastructure, Brookfield pivoting from commercial real estate to residential, and in general the corporate buy of residential property in the US has jumped from 7% to 19% between 2000 and 2025.
China should be well placed in this new economy as it's sceptical of market profit anyway. And most infrastructure is state owned already.
We may end up with a choice between the CCP and Google/Private Equity as our overlords and they won’t look much different, the CCP will give members periodic votes to
legitimise rule and Google/Private Equity will have representatives elected periodically to do the same. The state will be used to monitor and control and those at the top will have all the power.
We can do better
My major issue 3 years later is that our leaders are not trying to make an economy where we all share in this new wealth. Where's the UBI? Where’s the equity shares in land and infrastructure? Instead we still have central banks lowering and raising interest rates to control inflation and new laws restricting access to the internet and curtailing protests.
It really does look like our democratic leaders are blind, powerless or not really serving us.
So should we be making noise? Yes. But we need to direct it. As I said back in 2023 it's our socio-economic system not the tech. Our best protection is to have access to the best AI and have our truly direct liquid democratically elected representatives with some random selections to prevent external control (https://hackernoon.com/fluid-decentralization-randomness-and-a-lack-of-manipulation) take control of the natural monopolies, land and these new AI markets so this great technology serves us all.
It is easy to be pessimistic and it really shouldn’t be, we are smart and we want a good future for everyone so I’d like to end on an optimistic note. We could create a ……
…world that feels slower but more awake. The air is cleaner, the noise gentler, the nights darker. People write letters again — or their digital equivalent — small, reflective messages sent across peer networks that shimmer like constellations.
Every person holds a share in the planet’s commons: energy, data, and knowledge. AI keeps the ledgers, but the values are ours.
Longevity came, quietly. The body learned to renew itself, the mind to store more memories. Death retreated into choice. The irony: when people stopped fearing scarcity, they also stopped fearing mortality. Life became long enough, not endless.
We live, now, like the aristocrats of the past dreamed — but without servants, without debt, without guilt. Each person is their own court, their own estate, their own philosopher.
Perhaps that’s all civilisation ever aimed for: to make leisure universal, to give every being the time to wonder, to create and to celebrate.