Everything a person does with their brain is the target of the AI labs, according to Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. The labs, he says, are racing to automate marketing, writing, illustration, video production and code. Their goal is a system that covers every kind of mental task, called artificial general intelligence, or AGI. In an interview on The Diary of a CEO, he says people need to understand the goal behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.
His evidence starts with the mission statement in OpenAI’s charter. The charter defines AGI as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. Harris reads the mission as the replacement of all forms of human economic labor. He also cites Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, who has described his lab’s plan in two steps: solve intelligence, then use the result on everything else.
Harris explains why the plan starts with intelligence. A secret uncovered in rocketry does not advance biomedical knowledge, energy production or coding, while general intelligence applies to all three and to every other field. All of science and technology came from humans thinking through problems, so automating that thinking, he argues, would speed up progress in every field at once.
A belief follows from that logic, in his account. The first company to automate general intelligence would own the world economy, because AI would then do everything a person is paid to do, and do it better.
He poses the choice a company faces when deciding whom to pay. A human employee brings health care costs, a need for sleep, sick days, family issues, complaints and the chance of a whistleblower. An AI works around the clock at superhuman speed, with no health care bill, no complaints and no whistleblowing. In his telling, every company has an incentive to pay for AI instead of people.
Harris expects the labs to reach AGI, though he calls the timeline unclear. He says he talks with people at the labs, including at the top level, and half of them are friends. A long timeline would bring no relief, in his view, because the change is heading toward society faster than society is prepared to handle. Most people in the industry, by his account, expect AGI within two to ten years at the latest.
