The Politics Of Superintelligence

The machines are coming for us, or so we’re told. Not today, but soon enough that we must seemingly reorganize civilization around their arrival. In boardrooms, lecture theatres, parliamentary hearings and breathless tech journalism, the specter of superintelligence increasingly haunts our discourse. It’s often framed as “artificial general intelligence,” or “AGI,” and sometimes as something still more expansive, but always as an artificial mind that surpasses human cognition across all domains, capable of recursive self-improvement and potentially hostile to human survival. But whatever it’s called, this coming superintelligence has colonized our collective imagination.