Visions of utopia are ubiquitous throughout Western history. They've inspired great works of art and literature, motivated countless believers to obey God's commandments and driven some of the bloodiest conflicts in the collective biography of our species.
Utopian visions are also a central feature of the hype around artificial general intelligence, or AGI. In an article titled "Why AI Will Save the World," the tech billionaire Marc Andreessen writes that advanced AI systems will enable us to "take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel." The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, similarly declares that with AGI "we can colonize space. We can get fusion to work and solar [energy] to mass scale. We can cure all diseases." Utopianism is everywhere in Silicon Valley.
