Tejas's blog

We're Already Post-AGI

This is a hot take. Not something I'm certain about, but something I think is more likely true than not. Take it as a thought experiment about how we might already be living in the future we keep predicting.

People go on the Dwarkesh podcast and talk about what post-AGI will look like. Universal Basic Income. Humans freed from drudgery. A new era of human flourishing.

I think we're already there. We just don't see it.

The Moving Goalposts

I worked in AI in 2019. Back then, AGI meant a system that could:

  • Understand and generate human language
  • Reason about complex problems
  • Learn from examples
  • Apply knowledge across domains

GPT-4 does all of this. By 2019's definition, we have AGI. We're living post-AGI right now.

But the goalposts moved. Now people talk about ASI—Artificial Superintelligence. AGI got redefined to mean "AI that can do any job a human can do."

The Great Pretending

I look at my friends' parents. I look at most of my friends. I'd estimate 60% are doing jobs that don't need to exist.

There's a guy who manages vendor relationships for a mid-sized company. His job is to have quarterly meetings with suppliers and fill out scorecards. Software could do this today. Not even AI—just regular software with some IF statements.

There's a woman who creates internal training materials that no one reads. She spends months crafting beautiful PowerPoints for compliance trainings that people click through as fast as possible.

There's a team of six people who generate reports. The reports go to managers who generate summary reports. Those go to executives who make decisions based on gut feel anyway.

These aren't bad people. They're not lazy. They show up, they work hard, they feel purpose. But if we're being honest—really honest—their jobs are a form of naturally arising UBI.

The Beautiful Inefficiency

This started before AI. It started when the internet created so much real value that we could afford massive inefficiency elsewhere.

Google makes so much money from ads that thousands of people can work on projects that get cancelled. Facebook prints money while teams build features no one uses. The real economy got so productive that we invented entire industries to keep people busy.

Consulting. Middle management. Compliance. HR. Most of marketing. Large chunks of finance. Not all of these jobs in these fields—but many of them.

We created a system where 20% of people do the real work and 80% do work that feels real but isn't. And that's not a bug—it's a feature.

Why Naturally Arising UBI Works

Top-down UBI always seemed stupid to me. "Here's $1000 a month, now find meaning in your life." That's a recipe for despair.

But naturally arising UBI? Where people have jobs, feel purpose, contribute to something larger than themselves even if that contribution is mostly fictional? That's genius. That's a system that preserves human dignity while distributing resources.

My friend's dad goes to work every day as a "Digital Transformation Consultant." He feels important. He provides for his family. He has stories to tell at dinner. The fact that his job could be replaced by a two-page PDF doesn't matter. The job isn't about the output—it's about the human.

The Post-AGI Reality

So here we are. Living in a post-AGI world where:

  • AI can do most jobs with proper scaffolding (we just haven't built it)
  • 60% of people are already on naturally arising UBI
  • The economy is productive enough to support this
  • People maintain dignity and purpose through "work"

We keep predicting a future that's already here. We keep solving problems we've already solved. We just solved them differently than we expected.

The Uncomfortable Truth

If you look around and think most people you know are doing made-up jobs, you probably agree with me without realizing it. The accountant who reconciles spreadsheets that software should reconcile. The project manager who manages projects that don't need managing. The analyst who analyzes things no one acts on.

We're so good at pretending these jobs matter that we've convinced ourselves they do. And maybe that's the point. Maybe meaning is what we make it. Maybe purpose is what we pretend it is.

What This Means

If I'm right—and this is a big if—then we're worried about the wrong things. We don't need to figure out how to implement UBI. We already did. We don't need to worry about people finding purpose without work. They already find purpose in pretend work.

What we need to figure out is how to maintain this beautiful fiction as AI gets better. How to keep naturally arising UBI natural. How to preserve human dignity in a world where the pretending gets harder.

Because the moment people realize their jobs are made-up is the moment the system breaks. Not economically—we can afford it. But psychologically. The difference between a made-up job you believe in and welfare is everything.

The Discomfort of Knowing

I'll be honest—this whole concept makes me uncomfortable. There's something deeply unsettling about looking at people I care about and thinking their work might be elaborate theater.

My friend's mom is so proud of her job in corporate communications. She works late. She cares deeply. Who am I to say it's "made-up"? The meaning she derives is real, even if the economic value isn't.

And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just another tech bro who doesn't understand how the real world works. Maybe all these jobs I dismiss as "naturally arising UBI" are actually holding society together in ways I can't see.

But I can't shake the feeling. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. The elaborate dance most do to ensure the survival of the beast of an organism we call the US economy.

The Future That's Already Here

We're living post-AGI with naturally arising UBI, maintaining human dignity through elaborate performance. It's messy and inefficient and probably the best solution we could have stumbled into.

The real question isn't when AGI will arrive or how we'll implement UBI. It's how long we can maintain the beautiful fiction that keeps society functioning.