The Intelligence Curse: How AGI Makes Us All Obsolete | Luke Drago & Rudolf

Welcome to Limitless. Today we’re joined by Luke Drago and Rudolf, authors of the powerful essay series "The Intelligence Curse." 

Together, we explore a future where artificial general intelligence (AGI) threatens to upend the economic and social contracts that underpin modern civilization. Will AI empower us or make us obsolete? 

We unpack how labor-replacing AI could dismantle the very incentives that once gave rise to liberal democracies, social mobility, and human-centered innovation—and what it might take to build a future worth living in.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 What is the Intelligence Curse
4:29 Resource Curse
8:20 Pyramid Replacement
18:19 Institutional Pushback
21:25 Capital, AGI & Human Ambition
32:00 Liberalism Falls Apart?
36:30 Powerful Actors
41:15 Rentier States
46:19 Human Labor in a AGI World
52:46 Nation States
57:37 Shaping the Social Contract
1:06:23 AI Snake Oil?
1:07:41 Balance of Power
1:08:51 Breaking the Intelligence Curse
1:16:45 Vitalik’s Defensive Accelerationism
1:18:16 Diffusion 
1:19:58 Open-Source AI
1:22:06 Democratization
1:24:06 Who WIns?
1:26:43 Action Items
1:29:17 The Positive Scenario
1:30:21 Closing

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RESOURCES

Luke Drago
https://x.com/luke_drago_ 

Rudolf Laine
https://x.com/LRudL_ 

Intelligence Curse
https://intelligence-curse.ai/ 

Time Op-ed
https://time.com/7289692/when-ai-replaces-workers/ 

Contact Form
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSft2iBV9z1AYsM3TcDnh8z3juc2k4yD0TQTZ91oy37S-KlSSQ/viewform 

AI Snake Oil - Arvind Narayanan
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil 

Vitalik’s Defensive Accelerationism 
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html 

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