""I'm bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. As Sam Altman once said (and again this is fairly humorous): 'AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.' It's a Pascal's Wager, in which we're sure that the values are infinite, but we don't know in which direction. It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything.""
""I am not a skeptic of AI," Dan writes. "I am a skeptic only of the decisive strategic advantage, which treats awakening the superintelligence as the final goal. Rather than 'winning the AI race,' I prefer to say that the US and China need to 'win the AI future.'""
AI is compressing collective time horizons, causing strategic thinking to collapse into ever-shorter durations. Conversations increasingly polarize into utopian or apocalyptic timelines, with leaders fixating on immediate, one-year plans and neglecting longer-term institution-building. The framing of AI as a decisive, singular endpoint encourages Pascalian thinking—treating outcomes as infinitely good or bad—which weakens focus on five- to ten-year problems. An alternative approach treats AI as an input to industrial capacity, to be integrated gradually into factories and systems across decades. The goal shifts from 'winning the AI race' to ensuring the US and China 'win the AI future' through sustained, long-term investment.
Read at Big Think
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