Human Life in a Post-AGI World - Google DeepMind Talk
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Human Life in a Post-AGI World
Talk at Google DeepMind | July 8, 2026
Thank you all for having me in to what is now my third talk at London DeepMind, but I’ve never spoken at DeepMind to so many philosophers before. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the problem of the ship of Theseus. The planks are replaced. At what point is it the same ship? This is a possible starting point for thinking about just the meaning of life in what some of you call a post-AGI world. I’m not convinced the AGI concept is well-defined, but the notion that there’s strong AI that’s very powerful, I’m completely willing to accept. I’m not a Gary Marcus sort of denialist at all. I just think it’s a continuum rather than a discrete point.
So what will lives be like? What will be the sources of meaning? I think in a funny way, there’ll be a surfeit of meaning for quite a long time. We’ll be drenched in meaning. It will exhaust us. So you read accounts of life in a post-AGI world, and somehow we’re sitting around twiddling our thumbs. Maybe you pick up a flute and play it, or you walk over and pet a sheep. Maybe in some very distant future, but that’s not how I imagine it.
I think what we will need to do for quite a long time is in essence rebuild all human institutions. This will be the most ambitious task humanity has ever undertaken. And like the ship of Theseus, you can debate at what point you have a new ship. It’s a common point, you know, Derek Parfit, other philosophers. The molecules in the human body, they turn over something like once every seven years. At the end of the seven years, are you the same person? Well, this is all going to be accelerated.
So the first question I wonder is simply like, how good a job are we going to do at this?
Rebuilding every institution
So I think of the UK, and in particular England, as maybe the most successful country ever, but certainly in the top tier, has had a profound, incredible impact on the world, the Industrial Revolution, amazing novels. I don’t need to go on here. You all know the story. And if you ask yourself the question, well, if you had to rebuild the UK today, you know, could you do as good a job as the people who built what we got to? And if you all feel a bit nervous about this prospect, I fully understand.
If I think of my own country, well, there’s New York City, which I consider to be quite a marvel. But you go to some other towns like Buffalo, New York, maybe none of you have been there. But in Buffalo, New York, any building, say before 1940, is just gorgeous, marvelous, like a nice building in London from the 18th or 19th century. Any building after, like World War II in Buffalo, is just horrible and ugly and terrible, and it’s parking structures and ugly banks. And okay, so people tried to rebuild Buffalo, and they just completely botched it. And this is in the United States, a wealthy country, what we would all consider a successful country, a country, at least then, still somewhat today, is good at building things. You know, it’s not that we failed to do this in Chad, Africa. We failed in the United States.
So the notion that we’re now entering this period where everything needs to be rebuilt, including this company, I assume, right? A lot of the things you do now with humans will be done with AI. Presumably many of them are already.
I was just in Paris with my wife. And as you probably all know, in the 19th century, Haussmann tore down most of the medieval parts of Paris and rebuilt them with these wider boulevards. I’m not here to debate if you prefer that or the elder Paris. The point is, this has happened many times in human existence. I think we know many times it’s gone well, and many times it hasn’t gone well, no matter what your particular aesthetic or practical judgments may be.
We just passed the 250th anniversary of the U.S. breaking away from you all here. We built something pretty amazing. If we had to do it again today, if we had to rewrite our constitution today, I would run away screaming. Today, when constitutions are rewritten, they seem to be 250 pages. Back then, we had a nice short one. Slavery aside, which we did get rid of, has lasted pretty well. So just the dramatic stakes for the world will be so high.
So like I live near Washington, D.C. D.C., as you know, is surrounded by this belt of non-profit institutions. Some are lobbies, some are think tanks, some are charities. I think you’d all agree with me if you work here, those will need to be rebuilt in some way. So I saw Institute for Progress advertising for a job where there’s basically they want to hire one person, and that one person with agents will do sufficient work to be equal to what used to be one whole think tank. Whether they can do that today, you can debate. But if not today, in a year or two, I actually think they can probably do it today. At least once, you know, a few new things come...