The Hollow Ladder

Unlike today’s tools, General AI (AGI) won’t just generate text or images. It will learn, adapt, and strategize across domains—replacing not muscle, but mind. That could trigger a civilizational shift greater than the invention of metallurgy, the industrial revolutions, or the Internet. 

The imminent risks:

• Billions of “unwanted humans,” displaced not just from work but from meaning.

• A hollowing of identity—if struggle, effort, and creation are outsourced, purpose evaporates.

Optimists say humans will “move up the ladder.” I ask: what ladder? What domain cannot be commoditized by an AI simulacrum? And even if such a ladder existed, who would train and inspire our children to climb it once AGI removes the very need to create, innovate, or be ambitious? What niches remain—sports, art, or government?

Only if societies deliberately embed value in human contributions in art, industry, science, care, exploration, policy-making, can AGI amplify rather than erase us. But here lies the paradox: global fragmentation makes such design impossible. Nations will diverge, companies will defect, and control itself becomes the next trap—the Grim Fork. More on this in my next post. 

What domain will remain irreducibly human?