Why Artificial General Intelligence Will Be Both Revolutionary and Underwhelming

The moment artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrives, human civilization will transform overnight. Or will it? While AGI will undoubtedly revolutionize many aspects of society, history and careful analysis suggest its impact may be both more gradual and more nuanced than many assume. Like previous technological revolutions, AGI will likely be simultaneously transformative and, in many ways, disappointingly ordinary.

To understand why this is likely, we need to examine several key ideas: First, we'll look at how previous technological revolutions have transformed society while leaving many aspects of life unchanged. Then we'll address the common argument that AGI is fundamentally different from previous technologies. We'll explore why even AGI's impact will be uneven and constrained by physical and social realities. Finally, we'll see how this understanding can help us better prepare for the profound but gradual changes ahead.

The Pattern of Technological Revolutions

To understand AGI's likely impact, we must first understand how transformative technologies have historically reshaped society. Consider some of humanity's most profound technological revolutions:

Language allowed humans to share complex ideas and coordinate at unprecedented scales. Yet people still struggled to communicate, fought wars, and faced the same fundamental human challenges.

Agriculture transformed human society from nomadic bands into settled civilizations. Yet people still worked hard, worried about food security, and maintained many of their previous social structures.

The printing press democratized knowledge and sparked revolutionary changes in science, religion, and politics. Yet books remained expensive for centuries, literacy spread gradually, and oral traditions persisted.

Electricity fundamentally altered human productivity and daily life. Yet it took decades to reach most homes, and people still worked during daylight hours and gathered around fires.

Computers and the Internet created entirely new industries and ways of working. Yet most business meetings still happen in person, paper hasn't disappeared, and human relationships remain fundamentally unchanged.

Each of these revolutions transformed society profoundly while simultaneously leaving many aspects of human life remarkably stable. This pattern offers important insights into how AGI might reshape our world.

However, many argue that AGI represents something fundamentally different—a technological leap so profound that historical patterns no longer apply. This perspective deserves careful consideration.

But AGI Is Different — Isn't It?

A common counterargument is that AGI represents a fundamentally different kind of revolution because it's self-improving and self-replicating. The argument goes: Once AGI exists, it will rapidly enhance itself, create better versions, and spread instantly across digital networks, leading to an explosive transformation unlike anything in human history.

This argument, while intriguing, overlooks several crucial constraints that will moderate AGI's immediate impact:

Resource Limitations: Even self-improving systems require physical resources - energy, computing hardware, cooling systems, and network infrastructure. These can't be conjured from thin air or scaled infinitely. Just as biological systems face physical constraints despite being self-replicating, AGI will face real-world limitations.

Physical Action Constraints: Intelligence alone isn't sufficient for many real-world tasks. Building infrastructure, maintaining machinery, performing medical procedures, constructing homes, or fixing power grids all require physical action in the real world. While AGI might excel at determining what physical actions to take, the actual execution of these actions would still face the same physical constraints we deal with today. A superintelligent AGI might instantly know the optimal way to build a bridge or perform heart surgery, but the physical process of doing so would still take time, require materials, and face real-world complications. Even with advanced robotics, physical actions cannot be accelerated indefinitely.

Economic and Social Dependencies: AGI systems will rely on complex economic and social infrastructures. They'll need maintenance, updates, regulatory compliance, and integration with existing systems. These dependencies can't be automated away instantly, even by a superintelligent system. Like any technology, AGI will require significant resources to develop, deploy, and maintain. Just as electricity took decades to reach rural areas, AGI's benefits will likely spread unevenly and gradually.

Network Effects and Legacy Systems: Our world runs on interconnected but often incompatible systems built up over decades. Even if AGI could theoretically improve itself rapidly, it would need to maintain compatibility with these legacy systems and networks, which would moderate the pace of change. Organizations have established procedures, people have ingrained habits, and cultural practices persist even when better alternatives exist.

Human Nature and Social Inertia: Many human activities derive meaning from their human element. People often prefer human doctors, teachers, and artists even when automated alternatives exist. This preference won't disappear with AGI. Human societies change slowly, and AGI will need to work within these existing social structures, at least initially.

Security and Control Mechanisms: Any deployed AGI system will likely have built-in constraints and control mechanisms. These won't simply be arbitrary limitations but essential features for safe and reliable operation, similar to how biological systems have evolved built-in constraints that prevent unlimited growth or replication.

It's worth noting that previous technologies have also had self-amplifying effects:

• Writing enabled the preservation and spread of knowledge, leading to faster knowledge accumulation
• The printing press created feedback loops of literacy and education
• Computers and the internet enabled exponentially faster information processing and sharing

Yet in each case, physical, economic, and social constraints moderated the pace of change. AGI, despite its unique capabilities, will likely face similar moderating forces.

To better understand why AGI won't create an overnight revolution, let's examine a powerful parallel from our present world—one that directly challenges the notion that general intelligence automatically leads to universal transformation.

A More Grounded Parallel: Human Expertise Today

To better understand AGI's likely impact, consider this illuminating parallel: We already live in a world full of human experts in every field. These experts possess general intelligence and deep specialized knowledge. Yet their existence hasn't made other humans obsolete.

Why? Because:

• Expertise is contextual and doesn't always transfer well
• Experts are a limited resource with associated costs
• Many problems require local knowledge and personal relationships
• Different experts often disagree and provide complementary perspectives

AGI will face similar limitations. While it may be extraordinarily capable, it won't instantly replace all human expertise or solve all problems. This parallel helps us understand why even highly capable AGI systems will complement rather than completely replace human capabilities.

These constraints and limitations point us toward an important insight about how AGI will actually transform different aspects of society—not as a uniform wave of change, but as something far more complex and uneven.

The Jagged Pattern of AGI Impact

The constraints we've explored—physical, economic, and social—combine with the varied nature of human expertise to create a fascinating pattern. Just as today's AI capabilities exhibit what experts call a "jagged frontier" - excelling at some tasks while struggling with seemingly simpler ones - AGI's impact on society will likely follow a similarly uneven pattern. Rather than a smooth, uniform transformation across all sectors and activities, we should expect a jagged, unpredictable pattern of change.

Some areas might see rapid, dramatic transformation, while others remain surprisingly resistant to change. For instance, AGI might revolutionize drug discovery overnight while taking decades to meaningfully impact elementary education. It might transform financial trading immediately but struggle to replace plumbers or electricians. This jagged pattern of impact isn't a bug but a feature of how complex technologies interact with even more complex human societies.

Understanding this "jagged impact" principle helps explain why AGI won't create a uniform, instantaneous transformation. Different sectors, industries, and human activities will face different:

• Technical barriers to automation
• Cultural resistance to change
• Physical and resource constraints
• Regulatory and safety requirements
• Economic incentives and obstacles

The result will be a messy, uneven transformation that defies simple predictions and linear projections. This understanding of AGI's jagged impact pattern helps us better prepare for and shape the coming changes.

Having understood the complex and uneven nature of AGI's likely impact, we can now turn to a deeper truth: the real revolution won't be in any single dramatic moment of transformation, but in the profound ways AGI will reshape society over time.

The Real Revolution: Gradual but Profound

None of this means AGI won't be revolutionary. Like previous technological revolutions, it will fundamentally reshape society over time. We can expect:

• New industries and job categories we can't yet imagine
• Transformed educational and healthcare systems
• Novel forms of scientific discovery and technological innovation
• Changed relationships between humans and machines

But these changes will likely unfold over years or decades, not overnight. The revolution will be profound but gradual, transformative but incomplete.

Understanding this gradual but profound nature of AGI's impact leads us to an important question: How should we prepare for such a future?

Preparing for the AGI Future

Understanding AGI's likely impact pattern helps us prepare more effectively. Instead of focusing on dramatic scenarios of instant human obsolescence, we should:

• Develop frameworks for human-AGI collaboration
• Create governance structures that can evolve with the technology
• Invest in education that prepares people for a changing world
• Build systems that distribute AGI's benefits more equitably

Conclusion

AGI will be revolutionary, but not in the way many imagine. Like previous technological revolutions, it will transform society while leaving many aspects of human life surprisingly unchanged. The future won't arrive in a single moment but will unfold gradually, shaped by human choices and constraints.

The challenge isn't preparing for an overnight transformation but understanding how to guide and adapt to a gradual revolution that will reshape society while preserving essential aspects of human experience. The most successful approaches will likely be those that recognize both AGI's transformative potential and its practical limitations.

This balanced perspective allows us to prepare more effectively for AGI's arrival, neither underestimating its impact nor succumbing to apocalyptic fears. The future with AGI will be both revolutionary and surprisingly familiar—just like every technological revolution that came before.