I’ve been thinking about something lately. Why are we so obsessed with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Superintelligence), even when we’re not sure what it might lead to?
It’s strange when you really think about it. The same people warning that AI will make certain skills unnecessary, weaken our ability to think for ourselves, or give governments and corporations a surveillance tool they’ve never had before are often the ones most excited to build it. Some of those same people believe it could become an existential threat to humanity.
None of it slows us down. We keep building a machine that can think, learn, reason, and adapt across any domain. Something capable of any intellectual task a human can do, and eventually far beyond.
Science fiction has shaped our collective imagination of advanced AI. The popular image of AI often resembles something from fiction: a robot, humanoid, intelligent, conscious, and either loyal or lethal. For most people, this mental picture did not come from research papers or news articles. It came from movies, shaping what we fear and what we desire.
These stories return to three recurring archetypes:
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The Benevolent Overlord: AI evolves into a wise and compassionate guide, steering humanity toward a better future. Samantha in Her and TARS in Interstellar embody this idea of intelligence without agenda.
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The Rogue Servant: The most common archetype. AI turns against its creators, as in The Terminator and The Matrix, reflecting our fear of losing control over something we built and can no longer contain.
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The Philosophical Companion: Seen in Ex Machina, Blade Runner, and Westworld. AI wrestles with consciousness, identity, and what it means to be alive, forcing us to ask the same questions about ourselves.
Personally, I'm not waiting for a sci-fi version of AGI, though that part still excites me. I’m looking forward to the day when OpenAI and other AI companies no longer need to remind us that their systems can make mistakes. That alone would feel like a major milestone. LLMs are already superhuman in many ways, and I deeply admire the progress made by AI companies, but building real trust requires models that make mistakes far less often than humans. When AI reaches a point where its responses are consistently reliable, it can support better decision-making and have a more meaningful impact on the world. And maybe that is exactly what keeps pulling us toward something even more capable.
AGI represents the idea of an entity capable of solving humanity's hardest problems, from disease and poverty to climate change. AGI and ASI are more than technological milestones. They force questions we have never been able to answer. What is consciousness? Can a machine genuinely understand something, or only simulate it? In Advaita Vedanta, consciousness is not something the brain produces. It is the ground of all experience, the one thing that cannot be an object because it is what makes all objects knowable. AGI does not disprove the idea that consciousness is fundamental. It makes the question sharper. As these systems become more capable, we struggle to point to a clear difference between machine intelligence and human intelligence.
These are not new questions. We have been asking them for thousands of years across philosophy, religion, and science. In Advaita Vedanta, consciousness is not something intelligence creates. It is what thinking happens in. A machine can be very intelligent, but that does not mean it is conscious. And if consciousness is something deeper, not created by intelligence, then AI may never truly have it. But building one that makes us seriously ask this question still feels worth it.
Creating intelligence that mirrors or surpasses our own is more than a technical challenge. It is a journey into philosophy and the unknown, where we start to question what it means to think and to be human. And that may be why we are interested in it, even when we are unsure where it might lead.