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If we get AGI, neoliberalism may look vindicated
by James Gilliland · X · published
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Co-founder @asimov_co ● Posteri Inter Astra Ludant
It pains me to say this, but if we actually “get AGI,” the resulting boom in industrial capacity from robotics and massive society-wide wealth creation will look like a total vindication of neoliberalism.
The discourse about financialization and offshoring being a generational mistake may be replaced by a very different historical interpretation: that the late 20th and early 21st centuries were an enormous capital-accumulation phase, freeing up civilization-scale pools of liquid capital that could ultimately be deployed to accelerate and bring about the most consequential technological phase-change in human history.
In that telling, what looked like deindustrialization and betrayal from inside the period (I grew up in the Rust Belt, I know) becomes the prelude to reindustrialization on an almost unimaginable scale.
None of this is inevitable. The needle has certainly not been threaded. China and x-risk remain enormous contingencies. But if it is, I suspect the future will look back on the last 50 years very differently than we do today.