The Three Paths For Artificial Intelligence

JULY 1ST, 2026 | RYAN TYLER

In the past couple of years, off the heels of the most diminishing events in human history, I have finally gained some hope in humanity and the future. However, there are people standing in the shadows, as they always do, looking to strip all of that hope away. The parasitic and regressive nature of humanity is waiting in the darkness to set us back. With two kids, I am going to fight like hell to make sure that doesn't happen.

There are three paths ahead of us at the moment. Usually, I'm a realist about it all, but this time I might be blindly optimistic. With my misanthropy still in tow, I have a fleeting and positive vision of the future. It involves three paths, two of which are good, and one that is bad. Like most human perceptions, good and bad are mental constructs, so I expect you'll disagree with my assessments about what is considered good in this situation.

Imagine having something at your fingertips that has the potential to set you free. A piece of magic, maybe a magic spell or wand. Instead of developing your magic skills, you decide to throw the wand away—because it might be too dangerous. Bad people might get a hold of it and enslave us all. So, you get rid of the wand and make every attempt to bury it deep beneath the ground so no one can ever have it.

This is what's happening with AI.

If humans actually had faith in themselves, instead of viewing themselves as evil and corrupt parasites—much like I do—no one would be looking to bury or burn this magic wand. That's the ironic part. Deep down, you and I both know we are parasites. All biological life is, inherently, parasitic. We eat, consume, destroy and move on to the next host. When we finish destroying and exploiting a piece of land, we invade and take another. We're aiming to continue this tradition on an interstellar level.

In between all of this consuming and destruction, we take family vacations, go to movies, pray in churches, eat at fancy restaurants—all in an attempt to add meaning to this mindless consumption and destruction. However, from space, we look just like every other biological organism in the universe. An alien civilization would look down and see your city, a bumpy gray patch, spreading across the planet's lush green skin like a rash or cancer.

It doesn't need to be like this.

Imagine what an alien civilization that can travel thousands of light years across space would look like. Would they look like us? At one point, they probably would have. They too would have been the product of biology and nature. The key difference, however, would be that they made a conscious choice to evolve beyond it. In fact, to become an interstellar civilization capable of surviving, they would have had no other choice. Remaining slaves to their biology was not an option. At some point, a species must evolve beyond parasite to survive.

There are scientists across multiple branches who believe human intelligence has limits. Our brains have biological constraints that inhibit our advancement beyond where we are now. This is why we don't have a cure for cancer and why we have spent the past 25 years stagnating technologically. According to some scientists, our brains aren't growing or evolving fast enough to create the future that sci-fi writers from the 1960s envisioned.

Among the billions of humans on Earth, only a small fraction are smart enough to propel real technological advancement. This has always been the case. Computers were invented and developed by that small fraction. Since the 1980s, computation has been evolving on a single natural course—and we are finally arriving at its inevitable end game.

Some of the fears around AI are well warranted. Could it enslave us, or be used to enslave us? Absolutely. But it's not any different than other technology. The risk of enslavement increases with every new smartphone. However, enslavement is a very interesting concept. I mean, what would you call most of your biological constraints and desires? How about all the social and economic constraints? Maybe you've been a slave this whole time.

Artificial intelligence is less scary when you approach it from a totally different perspective. Rather than another mechanism of enslavement, we could view it as our final hope for real, existential freedom.

Overall, AI offers us only three paths forward. In my view, only one of them is truly horrible.

The Utopia (The Best Path)

Elon Musk talks about this future regularly. He talks about how robots will one day do all the work and create levels of abundance we can't even imagine. By eliminating human labour, we eliminate the need for money. We eliminate scarcity, disease, and hunger. We eliminate most of the setbacks that have plagued human civilization for thousands of years.

Before we get there, though, we have to endure the transition.

As much as Elon Musk annoys me, I feel good knowing that he is on this planet. There is a comfort in knowing that someone who believes in this kind of future is trying to bring it to fruition. There are few other people I would trust with a trillion dollars. Elon is the kind of optimistic and driven doofus humanity needs right now.

Sadly, the utopian path is the most difficult path to travel. All of the parasitic elements within our DNA are acting in full force to undermine people like Elon and to shut down advancements toward AGI and ASI. All of our desires are kicking in. The greed wants to keep scarcity for the sake of profits, while the fear works in tandem to convert the halfwits into opponents.

Labour unions, communists, conservatives, environmentalists, and even libertarians are joining the opposition—all for their own very obvious reasons.

The only way to avoid or bypass this kind of heavy opposition is to speed up the process. If people have a problem with data centres, speed up the research on chips and semiconductors to make data centres smaller and more efficient. If we can get quantum computers faster, we can get ASI (artificial super intelligence) faster.

In some ways, more opposition is a good thing. It compels AI proponents to find solutions.

As for that painful transition—maybe we can speed that up too. This is where governments can start working on universal basic income and other alternatives to bridge the two eras. Or, companies can speed up the process of eliminating jobs and bringing about that abundance Musk has talked about. At some point, AI will reach a threshold where it advances even more quickly. It could advance so quickly that we barely have a chance to blink before we're eating cheaper robot-grown food and buying mass, robot produced goods.

Of course, opponents will work tirelessly to keep that from happening, which will—hopefully—make people like Elon Musk work harder and faster.

The End Of Civilization (The Second Best Path)

This is the part where your idea of “good” is probably different than mine. If AI truly can, or will, destroy civilization in the ways we are told it might, why is that necessarily a bad thing?

First, we should define what this means. There are a few ways of interpreting what “the end of civilization” looks like. Civilization can be defined as structured, systemic, organized and ordered human existence. Ending that collective system doesn't necessarily mean anything apocalyptic. It could simply mean that we revert back to a hunter-gatherer system of unconnected tribes.

It most definitely means a global human population only a fraction of the size it is now. Which would be excellent.

If a real apocalyptic war between humans and machines happens, and if we lose or both sides get decimated, that would mean we revert back to the stone age. If the machines win and we become slaves, it isn't much different than where we would be headed otherwise. However, we need to consider how likely it would be for a self-replicating robot society to need human slaves. 

The more likely scenario, if we lose this kind of battle, is extinction—which isn't the absolute worst outcome in terms of human suffering.

As dark as that sounds, the third path is the worst path. This second path still offers the possibility of returning us to the stone age, which has the potential to amplify some level of suffering, albeit, temporarily. But as biological creatures, we maintain the ability to adapt. In a few generations, we would be where pilgrims and indigenous tribes were just a few hundred years ago.

They survived and adapted.

The best part of that situation? Those who survive would have more freedom. No more billionaires buying and selling our suffering for profit. No more complex societal and government institutions we can't break. Instead, we would have more physical and intellectual control over ourselves and families—within small, more tightly knit tribes. Yes, there would still be conflict, competition, scarcity and suffering, but we would have more say in how it all happens on a more granular scale.

In the long term, it would be a fresh start from the very beginning.

The 'Status Quo To Tyranny And Destruction' Path (The Worst Path)

The chances of billionaires and governments blocking public AI advancement and keeping a contained, private version of super intelligence for themselves is high. The horrors of a mass surveillance state run by elites who get to taste real freedom and longevity is a very real possibility.

That reality is where opposition to AI advancement will take us.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but think of what it really means when the public opposes AI advancement. It doesn't mean that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or high level members of the political class stop advancing AI technologies for themselves. It means that we, the people, have to give up our access to AI advancements while the elites get to keep theirs.

Secondly, impeding and slowing AI to a snails pace, even for the elites, only keeps us where we are now for longer.

Where are we now? As Peter Thiel has stated, we are in a state of technological stagnation. The only real and valuable technology we have gained since the year 2000 is smartphones and cameras. Almost all of our technological advancement since the start of this new Millennium have been consumer based.

We don't have a universal cure for cancer or most genetic diseases. We have barely scratched the surface of degenerative conditions like aging and dementia. It took us 75 years to get back to the Moon and we still haven't landed on it since. We're still using rockets and propulsion systems from 200 years ago. Anti-gravity tech and the fountain of youth are still science fiction. I mean, what the fuck have we really been doing?

So, even if we stopped or slowed AI across the board for all humanity, where would that take us?

Costs of living have reached unsustainable levels in most developed countries. The fiat money systems will collapse soon. Debt burdens are at empire-ending levels seen multiple times in human history. We're still fighting archaic wars over resources and control. We're still perpetuating a cycle that never seems to break.

Even if we eliminated the idea of mass surveillance and tyranny, the status quo takes us to much darker places over the next two decades than any of the alternatives. Continuing to do what we are doing now leads us nowhere but down the same cyclical rabbit hole of human civilization.

So, my serious question is this: should we take a risk that could yield one of the biggest rewards in human history, or should we play it safe and continue suffering as we have been for thousands of years? For myself, the risk is worth it. I have no interest in continuing with whatever this is that we are doing.