Apr 29, 2026 · 48 min · 13 segments
What happens when AI gets smarter than all of us combined? And what happens after that? Akshay Chopra, FinTech Leader, Inventor, Investor, and Author of After Us, has thought about this more…
So let's look at a framework, right? So where we are right now is called artificial narrow intelligence.
where it can do one or two things really, really well, better than humans, like play chess, for example, right? But it's restricted to a few things.
The next step is agentic intelligence, where not only can it compute and process information, it can also literally act in the world, like conduct commerce, as we were just talking about.
The third level would be artificial general intelligence, meaning it is generally better than us on most things we do as humans.
Now, already at this point, there is potential for mass disruption, right? The level above that is artificial superintelligence.
It means its intelligence is so advanced that we sitting here cannot even conceive what its goals, its motivations, its ambitions, its actions will be.
No more than, you know, the bird sitting outside your studio can understand why we are doing a podcast, right? So those would be the four levels.
And the theory is, according to many, that once we reach artificial general intelligence, the leap from AGI to ASI is not going to be a very long one because the model can very quickly keep improving itself exponentially and get to super intelligence.
And it's not just myself, but if I look at some of the greatest minds in the world, far more qualified than me, some estimate that it's in the next 10 to 15 years or less that it can happen.
Others estimate that it's never going to happen or if it happens, it's at least 50 years away.
So there is no general consensus, but there's a lot of talk about when can a super intelligence arrive? And if it does, will it be good, bad, neutral for us?
In your book, you somehow was so worried about humans, you know, societies and so on.
If you have to be very extreme on the impact of superintelligence on humans, how would you define that?
According to, again, Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate, there is a 10 to 15 percent or 10 to 20 percent extinction risk, as he says, for humanity.
If you looked at what Stephen Hawking said at one point, he called it, you know, the greatest existential threat to humanity.
In the book, I took a very different perspective where it's, It is a benevolent AI that has actually risen.
So let's look at a framework, right? So where we are right now is called artificial narrow intelligence.
where it can do one or two things really, really well, better than humans, like play chess, for example, right? But it's restricted to a few things.
The next step is agentic intelligence, where not only can it compute and process information, it can also literally act in the world, like conduct commerce, as we were just talking about.
The third level would be artificial general intelligence, meaning it is generally better than us on most things we do as humans.
Now, already at this point, there is potential for mass disruption, right? The level above that is artificial superintelligence.
It means its intelligence is so advanced that we sitting here cannot even conceive what its goals, its motivations, its ambitions, its actions will be.
No more than, you know, the bird sitting outside your studio can understand why we are doing a podcast, right? So those would be the four levels.
And the theory is, according to many, that once we reach artificial general intelligence, the leap from AGI to ASI is not going to be a very long one because the model can very quickly keep improving itself exponentially and get to super intelligence.
And it's not just myself, but if I look at some of the greatest minds in the world, far more qualified than me, some estimate that it's in the next 10 to 15 years or less that it can happen.
Others estimate that it's never going to happen or if it happens, it's at least 50 years away.
So there is no general consensus, but there's a lot of talk about when can a super intelligence arrive? And if it does, will it be good, bad, neutral for us?
In your book, you somehow was so worried about humans, you know, societies and so on.
If you have to be very extreme on the impact of superintelligence on humans, how would you define that?
According to, again, Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate, there is a 10 to 15 percent or 10 to 20 percent extinction risk, as he says, for humanity.
If you looked at what Stephen Hawking said at one point, he called it, you know, the greatest existential threat to humanity.
In the book, I took a very different perspective where it's, It is a benevolent AI that has actually risen.
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