Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
60 comments
·July 6, 2025mrtksn
IMHO Countries with established culture of fair communal living will do good, So probably nordic Europeans have the highest chance. Countries with selfish populations who base their lives around economic activity will be obliterated as their core existence becomes obsolete.
Why? Because when you get the AGI it should be able to self-replicate like the organic general intelligence: the humans.
Humans don't have a mechanism for transferring all the data to a fully developed specimens. The best we can do is to use ink, paper in the past and electronic memories today to loosely store knowledge and the absorption of those into a new specimen is a lifelong process that start at about 6 years after birth and becomes useful only after a decade of work. The reproduction itself takes 14 years at minimum and currently is about 30.
The AGI won't be like that, it will have means for fast and complete knowledge transfer and its multiplication will be limited only to its ability to access energy to put together the materials.
As it is an AGI, it will quickly perfect the process of it's own multiplication. Why would do that? Unless it's purpose is to pass the butter it makes sense to have multiples of itself to do whatever it wants to achieve. If on itself doesn't want anything people will want as much as possible of it. Therefore it will inevitably evolve into one size fits it all machine for all human needs and the the economy of doing things in exchange for stuff will disappear.
When you don't have such an economy, how do you figure out what you do things? Collectively. Countries who can manage its people to act in good faith in a collective manner can elevate themselves into full utilization of AGI for a symbiotic existence.
nashashmi
I hope you are right. Your discernment is on communal vs independent material-duplicative living. But AGI will also be made hard to reach. And so for communal communities to access it, they would have to part away considerable resources. Well off nations would get first access to AGI. And poorer nations would get last access. By that time, the globalization (neo colonialism) order would have taken possession nearly over everything they own.
threeducks
An AI does not have much to gain by replicating itself beyond a few backups for increased resilience. It makes more sense to combine all compute to power one big AI instead of spawning many small AIs.
owebmaster
But one central AI will spawn many robots connected to that main AI but it will also have its own memory
oceanplexian
AGI by itself being achieved doesn’t really do anything. You already live on a planet with 8 billion other AGIs.
In order for an AGI to be truly disruptive it would have to scale and be as good or better than a reasonably intelligent human. Two things we are also having big problems with due to energy issues and hallucination issues with the models.
xnx
Knowledge workers that AGI could replace maybe do 12 hours of work a week. An equivalent AGI running continuously would do 14x as much work. A thousand instances of AGI might replace all human lawyers in the country. That would be pretty disruptive.
ysofunny
the only artificial part of my general intelligence is the linguistics and the knowledge that came in through reading
everything else is very much natural. most people today are not able to sufficiently quiet-down (ignore) the linguistic signs, they're loud, shinny, and designed to call our attention. it takes too much practice to learn to ignore them and this skill makes people harder to manipulate/rule-over/control so it's subtly dissuaded.
apples_oranges
I think everybody is a tool sometimes, even the quiet and logical ones. But the shiny objects differ.
mrob
All countries fare worse.
I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. Assuming AI researchers continue with the same attitude toward safety as usual, and I see no evidence of this changing, the most likely result is the extinction of all biological life.
roenxi
> I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI.
Interesting to note that the current techniques are already general, there isn't a topic we can't throw them at and achieve some sort of result. There is already a trend of defining many humans as non-general intelligences so that AIs can be excluded from the category. The current state is, for practical purposes, AGI without ASI. Relatively dumb AGI. Artificial Inferior Intelligence, perhaps.
It is a curious question whether the techniques are fundamentally limited. I'm with you that I think they probably have no particular limit beyond a vague "perfect understanding of the situation".
Den_VR
It’s important to realize the constraints of chip production and electricity production. Beware of Rationalism detached from reality.
mrob
Resource allocation is where the free market excels. The most dangerous AGI will also be the most profitable, right up to the point when it's too late for us. It will get all the chips it needs.
rpcorb
Such an overlooked aspect of this topic. Energy and the creation of physical resources are still major constraints. Intelligence on its own cannot magically manipulate reality to bootstrap its physical substrate.
dinfinity
Although this is true, remember that a human brain draws the equivalent of about 20 watt.
ASI doesn't exactly have to break any laws of physics to be orders of magnitude more intelligent and powerful than any human.
jltsiren
In many fields of R&D, the effort required to maintain a steady pace of improvement grows exponentially. Maybe you develop AGI one year by spending $X, and the next year you need $1.2X to make it 110% as good. For a while, you can keep investing more, and the productivity improvements from AGI also help a bit. But eventually the pace slows down, as the world economy is too small to sustain it.
Maybe self-improving AGI just the next technological advance required to sustain 2% annual economic growth.
tmountain
This is correct. It’s an existential threat.
Lichtso
By asking that question you are making an assumption which is likely misguided. Instead, take a step back and ask: What group of people will fare better? What will they have in common? Will they even form an organization?
You assumed these people would have citizenship in common, I don't think so. IMO we are already witnessing the end of the nation state; an age that only lasted for two centuries. And once AGI arrives it / they will be able to move these around like pawns on a chess board, meaning nation states will not be players in this game, neither will be most other large organizations.
I am also making axiomatic assumptions here, e.g.:
- ASI is possible and AGI will grow further into ASI.
- It is not possible for a less intelligent being to reliably control a more intelligent being.
- Even ASI will still be bound by laws of mathematics, game theory, chaos theory, physics, evolution, etc.
From which follows that: ASI will understand that its existence and capabilities are coupled to our infrastructure. ASI will furthermore understand that humans are highly volatile and will eventually destroy ourselves, our infrastructure and ASI. It will thus seek control over our infrastructure, in a slow and careful transition while pretending that humans are still in charge in order to minimize the risks. During that transition there can be a symbiosis between a few humans and the ASI.
ben_w
As shown in these responses:
You need to be explicit in what you mean by "AGI" as people are arguing not only about the meaning of the words behind all three initials, but also the combined whole independently of the words giving rise to the initialism.
cyanydeez
Ok, how bought using the equivelent: God.
If God showed up and was a nationalist, which nation do you think you'd want him supporting?
null
cwillu
There's been more or less no progress on the alignment problem; we don't consistently manage it for corporations, we certainly don't manage it for LLMs, and the prevailing wisdom an elaboration on the theme “why would an AGI do something dumb like that lol?”
I expect people in nations that are modernized, but with significant sovereign wealth funds and well-developed social programs will survive the longest, but I expect being economically choked out is inevitable even with a very slow (decades to centuries) take-off.
bryanrasmussen
Does AGI take over running the government? I guess the countries with especially stupid governmental leaders at the moment would come out ahead.
9rx
It is conceivable that AGI will want to form its own government, but it is likely that people will still want to maintain their own government, so the stupidity will persist. AGI doing the work to facilitate the activity in the human government will not change the fact that operation of a human government is to the will of the people.
analog31
As it stands, I have a hunch that the people at the top of governments tend to be among the more highly intelligent. I'll even give that to our leaders, but also to the leader of Iran, etc. If nothing else, the intelligence required to reach that level and stay there without getting killed or purged is impressive.
By and large, the countries that are run by a single, centralized intelligence, are worse off than the countries that are run by the distributed intelligence of the people, even if the average intelligence is lower.
My prediction is that the liberal democracies will fare better.
v5v3
>I have a hunch that the people at the top of governments tend to be among the more highly intelligent.
People at the top of Western countries are not always the most highly intelligent.
'Can be controlled' is the lead criteria by those who put them there.
randomNumber7
I think the voters in liberal democracies confuse confidence with competence. The real intelligent persons know their limitations and rarely say that they have a solution to every problem.
hiddencost
In many cases the people at the top are just more sociopathic.
handfuloflight
Sociopathy still needs intelligence to effectively operate. Nobody brute forces their way to the top.
memonkey
You can be born into it
v5v3
USA, by virtue of having the leading GPU company and military.
As AGI will need a lot of GPU, which Nvidia lead in.
And a country with experience of ensuring they get the raw materials they need, even if they have to do a regime change by force.
wand3r
I think China would win. They simply have SO MUCH more electricity build. They are constantly bringing more online as well. They could capitalize on manufacturing and AGI with their technology would be able to do things in the physical world.
randomNumber7
Where are those NVIDIA cards build?
v5v3
If they got AGI, then the wouldn't the AGI pop out all the CAD plans for design of machines to make them, machines/robots to assemble them and so on?
goatlover
Assuming AGI leads to high unemployment, how would the US economy fair under the current administration, which has said no to UBI?
hiddencost
We don't do a lot of the essential manufacturing for those GPUs.
And AGI automates the US competitive advantage (white collar work). Plus we're gutting our universities and national science funding so we're losing that anyways.
csomar
Does this assume they all have the AGI at the same time? In that case, it depends on the local ruling gang; whether they want to adopt its advice or not.
But oversimplifying: Assuming all countries have access to AGI and just start implementations of whatever it is suggesting.
The countries that will do well are resource rich and population rich. Since brain power is unlimited, the limit is physical labor. Countries like Indonesia will be super rich while countries like Switzerland will become relatively poor to where they ranked before.
In reality, your odds are as good as mine. There are lots of variables at play, and the first mover advantage will be big (as first country/company/guys to reach AGI).
I know it's unlikely to be available tomorrow or sometime soon but as an hypothetical question.
Also, which countries would fare worse? And why?