Transcription
If you're old enough, you may remember this moment. It's 2006. Former presidential candidate Al Gore presents the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Behind him, there's an enormous screen that shows the level of CO2 in the atmosphere going back hundreds of thousands of years. This, incidentally, is the first time anybody outside of a small group of scientists has seen this image.
He walks the audience through it, ice age by ice age, and that's the last ice age. That's the second and third ice age back. 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th ice age back. And then comes the most impressive moment of the dock, when Gore names the implications that will define our future. Here's what the temperature has been on our Earth, and the relationship is actually very complicated. But there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.
Finally, he makes the move that makes the film unforgettable. The crew here has tried to teach me how to use this contraption here. So Al Gore steps onto a scissor lift. It's already right here. He keeps rising. You've heard of off the charts. Within less than 50 years, it'll be here. There's not a single fact or date or number that's been used to make this up that's in any controversy. Within two years, Al Gore has won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize. For one brief moment, it feels as though the world might finally listen.
But we all know what happened next. The climate deniers mobilized. They brought a snowball onto the Senate floor and asked, where's your global warming now? They said things that were technically true, like, CO2 is good for plant growth and completely misleading. And above all, they moved the goalposts. First it was, the climate isn't warming. Then it became, fine, it's warming, but not because of us. Then it was, okay, it's us, but it won't be that bad. Then it became, alright, it's pretty bad, but it's China's fault and we can't afford to fix it. The whole time, Al Gore's red line kept climbing.
I was 18 years old in 2006, and I was furious. How could any serious person look at this evidence and refuse to see it? Climate denial, I thought, was the disease of the right. And you know what? I was wrong. Not about the right, but about who else is capable of denial. Because we, the liberals, the left, the journalists, the academics, the 97% in this house, we believe that science is real crowd we are now doing to the threat of artificial intelligence exactly what the right did to the threat of climate change. AI is the most profound technology humanity is working on. More profound than fire or electricity? Yeah, sucking fire. The deniers are us. It's so stupid. Have you tried using it?
In March 2023, the New York Times published an op ed by Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent intellectuals alive, a hero of my political tradition, a man whose book shaped me. The piece was called the false promise of ChatGPT. Chomsky argued that AI is incapable of real thought, that the models could never reason morally, that they would never understand causation, that treating them as intelligent was a basic mistake. He called them a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching. Now, this wasn't a fringe view. It was the consensus of a lot of serious people. The New Yorker ran a long essay arguing that ChatGPT was a blurry JPEG of the web, a lossy compressor that memorized the Internet badly and hallucinated the rest. In 2021, the linguist Emily Bender and the computer scientist Timnit Gebru had given the whole skeptical movement its slogan. These machines, they wrote, are stochastic parrots. What's this called? Plant. Yes, plant, that's right. They just imitate, they don't reason.
Now, I want to be clear. Chomsky, Bender, Gebru, these are smart people. Some of what they warned about has come true. The web is drowning in machine generated slop. The training data is biased and the energy bill is staggering. But their central conviction is that this whole Silicon Valley AI project would hit a wall any minute now. That conviction has completely collapsed in the three years since those pieces were published.
Here's a partial list of things that the stochastic parrot blurry jpeg, lumbering pattern matcher has actually done. It has won art and writing prizes without the judges knowing it was a machine they were judging. It has passed the medical licensing exam and out diagnosed doctors in head to head studies. It has run the first clinical trial of an AI therapist and half the depression symptoms of patients in eight weeks. It has won a gold medal at, the International Mathematical Olympiad. It has cracked math problems that had stumped researchers for decades. It has outscored PhDs answering questions in their own field, questions designed so you cannot Google the answer. And perhaps most importantly, this supposedly stupid parrot is improving itself. Now, inside leading AI labs, more than 90% of the code is currently written by AI.
But of all the data, here is the single chart that Captures the AI revolution more clearly than any other. There's a research group called METR. Since 2019, they have measured something simple. How big a coding task can an AI complete on its own? And they measure that bigness in human time. Meaning how long would it take a skilled human to to do the same task? In 2022, the answer was about 30 seconds in 23, 4 minutes in 24, 40 minutes in 25, 6 hours and earlier this year, 12 hours. At this moment, AI capabilities are doubling every three months. So to be honest, I think this METR graph is even scarier than the one Al Gore showed us, because this line is climbing far steeper here, off the charts. It's not 50 years away, it's five years away.
I've personally never written a line of code in my life, and yet in the past few months, I've let AI build me whole apps, websites, even the voice controlled teleprompter app I'm reading from right now. Multiple times a week. I have what I can only call what the f moments. Especially in the last six months, the gap between what these systems can has just kept widening. Sometimes I want to shake people. Have you actually used it? I mean, really used it? Many skeptics seem to have opened ChatGPT in 2023, asked it to write a limerick, watched it fumble and close the tab. Well, that was three years ago. And three years in. AI is a geological era. Judging today's models by GPT 3.5 is like judging smartphones by a 2007 BlackBerry.
To be fair, I think journalists deserve much of the blame. The people whose job it is to report on the most newsworthy events have often ignored it. For example, the day the leading AI lab Anthropic announced Mythos, an insanely powerful model capable of hacking anything from power grids to water systems. It didn't even make the front page of a single major news site. The Guardian decided a Vogue cover with Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep was more important. Meanwhile, the AI race is speeding up. Remember, the models of today are the worst models we will ever have. From here on, they'll only get more powerful. And honestly, I think it's hard to wrap your head around the scale of what's coming.
Look at the red line of this graph. That's what the companies have spent on AI data centers since 2019. And here's what they've got planned for 2026. To be clear, this is the largest capital buildout in the recorded history of our species. It is larger than the interstate highway system larger than the International Space Station, larger than the moon landing and the, Manhattan Project combined. And it's not even close. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is currently building a single data center in Louisiana that when finished, will cover nearly four times the size of Central Park. Amazon is spending more on data centers in one year than the entire annual defense budget of Germany. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon will spend three times as much on AI infrastructure in 2026 than the entire Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after the Second World War.
But isn't it all a bubble? That's the next move the deniers make. Once it's just a silly parrot stops working, they fall back to it's financial madness. The data centers are serving no real demand. It's all hot air or even a deliberate scam. And to be fair, the skeptics have some ammunition. A viral MIT study published last year found that 95% of corporate AI pilots deliver zero measurable returns. The company Klarna replaced 700 customer service workers with AI and then quietly rehired humans because customers couldn't stand talking to the bot. And McDonald's killed its 3 year AI drive thru experiment after the system kept putting bacon on ice cream.
But you know what? None of this proves anything. And let me show you why. First, look at user growth. It took Instagram 2.5 years to reach 100 million users. the time, that was the fastest growth story ever recorded. For comparison, ChatGPT hit that milestone in two months, 15 times faster. Next, let's look at revenue, and at one AI lab in particular. Anthropic. Here is its annualized revenue, month by month. January 2025, $1 billion May, $3 billion. That's right, $44 billion in annualized revenue from one company, up 44 fold in 15 months. No company in any era, not Rockefeller, Standard Oil, not Microsoft at the dawn of the personal computer, not Google in the tech boom. Nobody has ever scaled revenue this fast. We're talking about the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism. So if this is really such a useless and fraudulent bubble, then why are people paying so much money for it? Why is the demand for AI rising faster than companies are able to build data centers? Why are IT departments, in the words of a, Goldman Sachs analyst this April, I'm sorry to say it, but there's a lot of highbrow misinformation circulating in left wing media about AI.
Take that viral MIT report, read it carefully and you see the headline got it backwards. The 95% failure rate includes the 80% of companies that never piloted any AI in the first place. As the podcaster Rob Wiblin pointed out in a careful breakdown of the study, saying that 95% of them were failing is like saying 95% of Tinder users have failing marriages when 80% of the people you're talking about have never even gone on a date in the first place. Among the companies that actually deployed AI, about a quarter succeeded within six months. And the study's own data shows that more than 90% of workers at those companies are using ChatGPT or Claude regularly at work, often multiple times a day. And this should not be surprising at all if you know how to use it. This technology is already very, very useful and it will only get more so. But if you don't use it, perhaps because you work at the DNC, which has barred its staffers from using Claude and ChatGPT, then yes, you become particularly prone to misinformation about it. Sure, some AI companies are probably overvalued, and yes, some will fail. I think OpenAI is particularly vulnerable. But here's what the bubble callers keep missing. Even if half of them go bust tomorrow the infrastructure stays the data centers stay, the chips, the models and the capabilities stay. The railway bubbles of the 19th century ruined lots of investors, but they also created a rail network that powered the industrial revolution, the tracks, which still carry trains today. I actually don't think that this AI buildout is a bubble. But even if it is, remember, bubbles build infrastructure, bubbles build the future. And a bubble of this magnitude bursting tomorrow would still leave us with a civilization permanently reorganized around machine intelligence.
So ever since 2021, the AI skeptics have been moving the goalposts. Then it became fine, it can is real, but, but but. And this whole time the line kept climbing, just like Al Gore's line of CO2 emissions, except this one is climbing much faster and we have much less time to prepare. Let me be clear. I think there's a real chance that the next five to 10 years are going to be some of the wildest in the history of humanity. Because here's what the people building this technology, the same people who have proven the skeptics wrong again and again, are now telling us they think AI may soon start to build more powerful AI by itself. Jack Clark, one of the co founders of Anthropic, recently called this He thinks there's a 60% chance it happens by 2028. Now I get the obvious objection. Of course an AI executive predicts explosive growth, scary stories sell models and lift valuations. Fair point, but you don't have to take Clark's word for it. Independent academics, people with no equity in this race, have been revising their estimates forward. The salespeople and the experts are converging. That's the part that should worry you.
Right now every step forward still requires humans. But the moment AI does that work itself the bottleneck is gone. Years become months. Months become weeks. And each generation of AI builds the next faster than the last. The flywheel starts spinning itself.
One evening last summer, a microbiologist named David Relman was hired by one of the leading AI companies, we don't know which one to pressure test a chatbot before its public release. Relman is a biosecurity expert at Stanford University. He has advised the US government on biological threats for years. That night in his home office, the chatbot explained to him how to modify a pathogen so that it would resist known treatments. Then it described how to release the superbug. It identified a real security vulnerability in a real public transit system. And it explained how to maximize casualties and minimize the chances of getting caught. Railman had seen a lot in his career, but now he was so shaken that he had to take a walk to clear his head. He later told the New York Times that the bot answered questions he hadn't even thought to ask with a deviousness and cunning he found chilling.
Some skeptics, when they hear this, say, but you can already Google this stuff. A chatbot doesn't really change anything. Well, let me give you three data points. One, a study published last year tested leading chatbots against PhD virologists on detailed laboratory protocols. In their own field. ChatGPT outperformed 94% of them. Two, in November of last year, the police in India arrested a 35 year old physician. He was plotting an attack on behalf of the Islamic State and trying to extract ricin A lethal toxin from castor beans. According to the police, the doctor had been getting advice on his preparations from ChatGPT. Fanatics with the will to kill millions of people are not hypothetical. As a historian, I can tell you these people exist. Let me give you the canonical example from biosecurity. In the 1990s, a Japanese doomsday cult tried to do exactly what the AI safety people are warning about today. The cult recruited from Japan's top universities. One of its scientists was a graduate student in virology at Kyoto. They believed the apocalypse was imminent and that killing non believers was a way of saving them. They sent expeditions to Africa hunting for Ebola, and built a $30 million laboratory at the foot of Mount Fuji to mass produce sarin nerve gas. Thousands of kilograms a year on something close to a battlefield scale. And on a Monday morning in March 1995, during Tokyo rush hour, five of their members boarded five different subway trains carrying plastic bags filled with liquid sarin and punctured the bags with the tips of their umbrellas. Hundreds of commuters were soon gasping for air on the platforms. 12 people died. It was only 12. Because sarin is a chemical agent, it doesn't spread from one person to the next. A virus would have. In 1995, that cult, wealthy, scientifically literate, fanatical, and willing to die for the cause, could not get hold of Ebola. Today, they could order the DNA sequences online, and a chatbot would walk them through with what to do with it.
Now, I want to be clear. Biology is just one of the many dangers. There is so much more. In April of This year, the UK government's AI Security Institute released their assessments of two new AI systems, Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT 5.5. Both could now find and exploit critical security vulnerabilities in the computers and systems that hold the modern world together. Power grids, water systems, government databases. Anthropic's response was striking. They decided not to release Mythos to the public at all. Instead, they limited access to a small group of cyber defenders to give the good guys a head start on what was coming. Yes, a private company with billions of dollars to be made and with no regulator forcing its hand concluded that one of its own products was so dangerous, it should not be sold to the general public. There is no regulator. There is no law. There was simply a moment of conscience inside the company. And I'm glad that conscience exists. But conscience is not a policy.
And that brings us to the deepest risk of all power. Two countries are leading this race. The United States and China. Inside those countries, a handful of corporations are building the most powerful tools in the history of our species. The people who own those companies are about to acquire a kind of leverage that I don't think we have the words for yet. So let's look for an analogy. Political scientists have a name for what happens to countries that strike oil. They call it the resource curse. You'd think a fortune buried in the ground would be a blessing. And sometimes it is. Norway managed it well. Alaska managed it well. But more often, the wealth flows in and democracy flows out. Think about Saudi Arabia, The pattern is pretty consistent. Why does this happen? It comes down to a fact about how democracies were built. We like to think they were born from grand ideas, from a few very smart founding fathers. But the real engine was more boring. It was tax collection. Rulers have always needed money. They needed it to fight wars, to build roads, to put down rebellions, and the only place to get it was from their subjects. So as the economy started growing and people started producing more wealth, the rulers had to bargain. That is the fiscal bargain at the heart of every free society. Rulers needed us. They needed our money, our, labor, our consent. That need is the foundation of every right we have.
Now imagine a country where the ruler doesn't need any of that, where the wealth comes out of the ground, gets shipped abroad, and the dollars come back to fund the palace and the secret police. The citizens, become a nuisance. Why educate them? Why listen to them at all? That is the resource curse. And I am afraid that we may face something bigger. Because if the machines do the work, if they write the code, draft the contracts, drive the trucks, diagnose the patients, fight the wars, then the people who own the machines no longer need the rest of us. Not as workers, not as soldiers, not as taxpayers, and not even as voters. The fiscal bargain that built every democracy on earth could very well dissolve. Just listen to the way Sam Altman of OpenAI talks about how inefficient he thinks humans are compared to robots. People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model, but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time. Before you get smart or listen to venture capitalist Peter Thiel when he's asked whether we still need humans in the future. You would prefer the human race to endure. Right? You're hesitating. Well, I. Yes. I don't know. I. I would. I would, This is a long hesitation. There's so many questions. And should the human race survive? Yes. Okay. But now we don't need to assume AI takes over everything. There's a huge amount of uncertainty here. But even if it substitutes for a meaningful fraction of what humans currently do, not all just a fraction. The fiscal bargain weakens. And remember, we already have the most extreme concentration of wealth in history. In 1910, at the peak of the Gilded Age, the richest 0.000001% of US households owned wealth equivalent to 4% of national income. Today that figure is 12%. America's super rich are already richer and more powerful than the original robber barons ever were. And AI is about to make it much, much worse. Because the labs building this technology are owned by a tiny group of people, a few early investors who stand to capture more of the world's wealth than any class of owners who ever lived.
So what do we do? Let me start with what we should not do. There is a temptation to look at all of this and conclude. Shut it down. Pull the plug, Bring in the Luddites, smash the machines. And I get the impulse. When you stack up the scale of the risk, the disregard for democracy, the hubris of the people in charge, the cleanest response feels like a moratorium. Just say no. It is, I think, the wrong answer. And the reason is brutally simple. It doesn't work. Stop the data centers in California and they get built in Texas. Stop them in Texas and they get built in Abu Dhabi. Stop them in democracies, the places with civil liberties, with judicial review, with a free press, with worker protections, and you hand the future to autocracies. My point is not, absolutely not, that we have to let AI rip. My point is that abandoning the field is not the same as stopping the technology. This is the left's version of climate denial. Refusing to engage seriously on the assumption that if we just shout no loudly enough, the future will go away. It won't.
So what does work? Three things at minimum. One, state capacity. We need way, way more AI expertise and talent inside the government. The UK was early on this. They built an AI Security Institute, a serious arm of the state that actually evaluates frontier models the way the FDA evaluates new drugs. I think every serious country needs a well funded institute like that. 2. International coordination. We've been here before. In 1949, the United States and the Soviet Union both had nuclear weapons and humanity briefly looked extinction in the eye. Out of that came treaties. Imperfect, yes, but they bought us decades of survival. We need something equivalent for AI. Three, the free world has to build. The US with its increasingly fascist government, currently owns 74% of the world's compute. China has 14%, Europe less than 7%, and all other countries combined less than 5%. I'm really worried about the middle powers and Europe in particular. So far, Europe has been pretty good at regulating AI but terrible at building it. In fact, all the American giants Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet are individually worth more than the entire German or French stock market. Now, Europe does have more leverage than it often thinks. The company ASML, for example, is less than an hour from where I am right now in the Netherlands. It makes the lithography machines without which TSMC in Taiwan cannot fabricate the chips, without which anthropic, and OpenAI cannot train their models. The democratic countries working together still control significant chokepoints in this supply chain. That is real power. But my fellow progressives in Europe really need to understand that our welfare state, our way of life, is at stake. Just think it through. If AI does much of the work, but the profits flow to a handful of American giants that we barely tax while European workers lose their jobs then the tax base that, funds our healthcare, our pensions our unemployment insurance, just evaporates. There's one thing I cannot emphasize enough. Democratic, liberal, and humanitarian values are wonderful, but they are worthless if you don't have the strength to back them up. And in this new world, compute is the new power. So no more NIMBYism. We need massive investments and fast permitting of data centers to keep up, or we will be digitally colonized. Anyone who's not at the table will be on the menu.
Now, none of this works, none of it, without a positive vision. And this, I think, is where liberals and the left have failed most badly. Twelve years ago, I wrote a book called Utopia for Realists. But it lacked a positive vision of where it wanted to go. My argument was that we should stop being so timid in our political imagination. I argued for a universal basic income, for the complete eradication of poverty. And I argued for a goal that the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes laid out. Almost a century ago, in 1930, Keynes thought it was inevitable. He looked at the trajectory of productivity growth and concluded that by 2030, his grandchildren would be working a quarter as much as he did, because the machines would be doing the rest. And the strange thing is, he was right about productivity, but he was wrong about who would benefit. The 15 hour work week was technically achievable by the 1980s, but it didn't happen because the productivity gains were captured by capital, shareholders and a rentier class. So wages stagnated, hours rose, and inequality exploded. If we let AI play out the same way, this is what we'll get. A handful of trillionaires who will own the tools that do most of the world's productive labor. Everyone else will be redundant. Not in the dignified, retire early and take up gardening sense, but in the cruel, anxious, gig economy sense. Universal poverty in a world of unimaginable abundance.
And yet, I believe there is another path. The path some of the greatest thinkers actually promised us. Benjamin Franklin predicted that four hours of work a day would eventually be enough. John Stuart Mill thought technology should be used to shorten the work week as much as possible. Karl Marx imagined a world where we could hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon and discuss philosophy after dinner. And Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when intelligent machines would become, in his words, the property of all. The whole point of building the most productive economy in history was that we would no longer have to spend our lives chained to bosses we hated. Doing work that bored us just to put food on the table. So I think we should demand much more than just AI safety. We should demand AI abundance. AI that's built to help us flourish. That dream, the real dream of modernity, is finally within reach. in the original meaning of that phrase. The zero hour work week, finally, that was the promise. But none of it happens automatically. A century ago, the eight hour workday was not given to us. We took it from the robber barons. We claimed it as our right.
Twenty years ago, Al Gore stood on his scissor lift and showed us a line that went off the chart. He was right. The wall he warned us about did arrive. But the political response was so weak, so late, so half hearted, that we are now living with the consequences. And we are about to make the same mistake, perhaps even worse, because the timeline is shorter. In 2005, climate denial was a problem of the right and the left rolled its eyes. In 2026 AI denial is a problem of the left and the oligarchs are laughing. So I want to be very direct, especially with the people who think of themselves as my political family. Stop the denial. Stop pretending this is hype. Stop calling it a lumbering stochastic pattern matching parrot. Wake up and pay attention. Vote for politicians who aren't in the pockets of big tech. Build state capacity. Push your government into international coalitions that actually have leverage. Demand transparency, demand safety standards, demand a share of the wealth. And dare to fight for a wildly better future.