The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Thirty-five years later, countries that were freed are still learning how to be free. Children born into democracy still carry their parents' Soviet reflexes. The infrastructure of fear takes generations to dismantle, even after the system that built it is gone.
That's how long humans need to adapt to a world that changes once.
Now imagine we compress a century of change into a decade.
Cure most cancers. Eliminate infectious disease. Double human lifespan. Not eventually,by 2035. The math checks out. A country of geniuses in a datacenter, working in parallel, routing around the constraints that slow human researchers down.
It's probably possible. The biology might actually work that way.
But we're not just racing to build it. We're racing to build it first.
Because the same intelligence that could cure disease could perfect surveillance. The same systems that could eliminate poverty could eliminate dissent. An authoritarian state with super-intelligent AI doesn't just control information, it predicts behavior, optimizes propaganda, identifies dissidents before they know they're dissidents.
The technology that could free us could also lock the door forever.
It's not that the breakthroughs are bad. It's that humans aren't built for decades of change compressed into years. We need time to grieve what's obsolete. Time to rewrite the stories we tell about what matters. Time to figure out who we are when the constraints that shaped us disappear.
The future arrives faster than we can prepare for it arriving.
And we don't all get to choose which future.
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Inspired by Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei