AGI might create abundance, but it won’t dispel the incentives for companies and states to amass resources and compete with rivals. Hassabis admits he is better at forecasting technological futures than social and economic ones; he says he wishes more economists would take the possibility of near-term AGI seriously. Still, he thinks it’s inevitable we’ll need a “new political philosophy” to organize society in this world. Democracy, he says, “is not a panacea, by any means,” and might have to give way to “something better.”

But he is also confident that if we eventually build AGI capable of doing productive labor and scientific research, the world that it ushers into existence will be abundant enough to ensure a substantial increase in quality of life for everybody. “In the limited-resource world which we're in, things ultimately become zero-sum,” Hassabis says. “What I'm thinking about is a world where it's not a zero-sum game anymore, at least from a resource perspective.”