Toby Walsh's 'God AI': Past Tech Automated Muscles, AI Automates Decisions
TobyWalsh · x · 2026-10-28
In an excerpt from his new book God AI, AI researcher Toby Walsh examines the fears and existential risks surrounding AGI. His core argument: earlier waves of technology automated human muscles, but AI threatens to automate decisions themselves — the essential difference from every past technological revolution.
The piece also draws on the Pessimists Archive's catalog of historical panics about new technologies to weigh which current AI anxieties are old scripts repeating and which represent genuinely new risks.
More from AGI Musings
- Report: OpenAI's unreleased internal model Astra billed as start of the AGI era, internal AGI possible by year-end — haider1 · 2026-10-28
- Researcher: huge theorem verifying bug-free shows math literature is pristine training data — rbhar90 · 2026-10-28
- Reddit essay: AI is shattering the last human illusion that intelligence is ours alone — Hope999991 · 2026-10-28
- Bindu Reddy: a dozen AI models will handle all mundane white-collar work in six months — bindureddy · 2026-10-28
- Freeman Dyson's JASON anecdote: elite minds failed badly in wet labs — a lesson for AI — rbhar90 · 2026-10-28
- AI is the ultimate aggregator: information plus actions at universal scale — signulll · 2026-10-28