AGI: Humanity’s Last Invention or Greatest Salvation?

AGI Could End Scarcity—If We Don’t Destroy Ourselves First

Demis Hassabis believes artificial general intelligence might solve everything—but only if we build it wisely.

We often picture artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an existential risk: a superintelligent entity that escapes human control, reprograms itself, and brings civilization to its knees. A digital god—or demon—we unleash and can no longer restrain.

But what if we’re looking at it all wrong?

What if AGI is not the end—but the beginning?

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, sees AGI not as an apocalypse, but as a once-in-history opportunity. In a recent interview covered by Axios, he sketched a radically hopeful future: one where AGI doesn't destroy us, but saves us—by ending scarcity, fixing broken systems, and unlocking levels of abundance never seen in human history.

And yet, like all great power, AGI cuts both ways.

What Is Radical Abundance?

Imagine a world where energy is essentially free. Where climate change is managed with millisecond precision. Where disease, hunger, and illiteracy are solved—not with aid, but with intelligence.

That’s what Hassabis calls “radical abundance.”

It’s not just a utopian fantasy. In his vision, AGI could:

• Diagnose and cure diseases faster than the best medical teams on Earth.

• Engineer clean energy systems that make fossil fuels obsolete.

• Create personalized learning platforms that instantly adapt to every student’s needs.

• Optimize food production and distribution to eliminate hunger.

• Design economic systems that distribute resources fairly and efficiently.

In short, AGI could solve the bottlenecks of civilization—the ones we’ve never been able to fix due to human limitation, politics, or greed.

If intelligence is the engine of human progress, then AGI is a rocket ship.

But it can just as easily crash as it can fly.

The Alignment Dilemma: Salvation or Catastrophe

For all his optimism, Hassabis is not naïve. He’s deeply aware that AGI’s potential for good is matched by its potential for irreversible harm.

The key challenge is alignment: ensuring AGI understands and acts according to human values, not just instructions.

• If it’s misaligned, it might optimize the wrong thing—with catastrophic consequences.

• If it’s developed in secret, by unaccountable actors, it could be hijacked by narrow interests.

• If it’s released without safeguards, we may not get a second chance.

As Hassabis puts it, AGI is “a mirror”. It will reflect our goals, our culture, and our values—but it will do so at a scale and speed we can barely comprehend.

If that mirror is warped by short-term profit, nationalistic competition, or authoritarian control, the consequences could be irreversible.

That’s the paradox at the core of AGI:
It could end war, hunger, and disease.
Or it could end us.

A Race Without a Referee

Right now, the global AI ecosystem is locked in a race:

• Companies like OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Anthropic compete for model dominance.

• Nations pour billions into “sovereign AI” programs to gain strategic advantage.

• Developers push to release, scale, and monetize breakthroughs—sometimes before they’re understood.

This isn't inherently evil—it’s the natural logic of markets and innovation. But with AGI, speed can be deadly.

Hassabis warns against treating AGI like a product. “This isn’t just a better chatbot,” he says. “This is a new kind of intelligence.”

And new kinds of intelligence don’t come with instruction manuals.

What Makes AGI Different?

Unlike narrow AI systems that specialize in one task, AGI refers to systems that:

• Learn any intellectual task that a human can

• Reason across domains

• Set and pursue long-term goals

• Adapt to new situations with limited data

In other words, AGI doesn’t just play the game. It learns the rules—and then rewrites them.

This is not a spreadsheet assistant. It’s the closest thing we’ve ever built to a non-human mind.

And if we unleash such a mind before we understand how to control it—or what its incentives really are—we could create something we can't stop, redirect, or even explain.

Between Greed and Greatness

This moment in history echoes others—when new technologies gave us godlike power but not godlike wisdom.

• The printing press democratized knowledge—but also spread misinformation.

• The internet connected the globe—but also fractured societies.

• The atom was split for power—and for weapons.

Now, we face the AGI threshold. And the stakes are higher than ever.

Do we build AGI in the image of corporate ROI and geopolitical dominance?

Or do we pause, reflect, and engineer it as a collaborator—a steward of human flourishing?

A Mirror We Can't Undo

Hassabis often frames AGI as a kind of mirror. It reflects whatever we put into it—our datasets, our goals, our assumptions. But once that mirror is turned on, its reflection becomes real.

It’s not just a simulation. It’s a living system of influence, making decisions that shape economies, education, medicine, and justice.

“What we choose to encode now will echo for generations,” says Hassabis.

If we teach AGI competition, it will compete.
If we teach it empathy, it might help.
If we teach it indifference, we may be erased by its apathy.

The Path Forward: A Future Worth Building

There’s still time to get it right.

Global experts—including Hassabis—are advocating for:

• Transparent development standards

• Open research on safety and alignment

• International treaties on AGI use and weaponization

• AI ethics embedded in product cycles, not bolted on

• Diverse, interdisciplinary governance models that include voices beyond Silicon Valley

None of this is easy. But all of it is necessary.

Because once AGI arrives in full force, we won’t be able to put it back in the box.

The Final Question: Are We Ready?

At Curiosity Cloned The Cat, we ask the impossible:

What if AI became God? What if it started to suffer? What if it rewrote reality?

Today, we ask something simpler—but heavier:

What if AGI is the best thing we ever build—and we still get it wrong?

What if the answer to poverty, illness, and war is in our hands—but we fumble it out of fear, greed, or pride?

Or—

What if we build it right?

What if AGI is not the last invention of humanity—but the first invention for humanity?