James Carter

I think we're entering a civilizational rupture that nobody can predict. Not me, not the labs, not governments. I don't know how much people realize how fast we're moving. Look at what Anthropic's new model did during testing. It solved two open problems in theoretical physics, both on black holes. One of the calculations was laid out in 2003 and nobody had ever finished it, because it was too laborious. It formalized the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 30 hours, with a thousand agents that organized themselves. The first attempt took 11 days. It wrote an operating system that boots on a laptop, starting from an empty folder, in 8 days. It designed three electronic devices, boards, enclosures and software included. All three worked without a single electrical modification. It found a new method to predict the structure of viral capsids, the shells used to deliver gene therapies. And on robot control, it more than doubled the previous version's score. All of that in a single announcement, on a Monday. I think discoveries are going to stack up so fast that they'll produce an abundance we've never known: energy, health, materials, food. And with it a phase of immense joy, the joy of a civilization realizing that scarcity was never a law of nature. Except that joy is going to land in a world order that's cracking everywhere, and that was designed by Malthusians. People convinced that resources are finite, that there are too many of us, and that the job of an enlightened elite is to manage scarcity on everyone else's behalf. To me, Bill Gates is the most famous face of that worldview: a man nobody elected, who has weighed on the planet's health, agriculture and climate policies for twenty years. The degrowth crowd is the militant version. They don't even want to manage scarcity anymore, they want to organize it. Abundance is the worst possible news for that worldview. If energy becomes nearly free and diseases fall one after another, nobody needs anyone to ration anything for them. So I don't think they'll fight it. I think they'll try to capture it. In the name of safety, climate or public health, we'll be told this power is too dangerous to be left in everyone's hands. We already saw the movie during Covid: the permission slips, the passes, the QR code to go get a coffee. Now imagine the same logic with an AI that can see everything, trace everything and decide everything in real time. Orwell never imagined a tool like that. The technology is winning on its own. The question of the next ten years is who abundance will belong to. We are living through the greatest civilizational revolution in human history. It's happening right now, and most people are looking the other way.