Editor’s Commentary: Before reading the article below by Tyler Durden from Zero Hedge, it’s important to note that in my humble opinion, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is one of the greatest threats to humanity. I’m not alone in this thinking, but unfortunately the number of people ringing the alarm bells seems to be shrinking at a time when they should be growing.
The reasons for this are many, not the least of which being how easy it is to get enamored by the problem-solving nature of AGI. But with any technological advancement that was intended to make life better, there are always unintended consequences. With AGI, the consequences are far greater than anything we’ve seen.
Let’s look at the example of the internet. Did the internet fulfill its promise of connecting the world? Yes, for the most part. Did it also create a western society that has devolved in nearly every cognitive way as a result to so much access to instant gratification? Absolutely. Has it been turned into safe haven for depravity and crime? Absolutely. As unpopular as it might be to say, I would argue that people were more self-sufficient and society was more moral before the internet changed the world.
AGI’s consequences will be far worse. Keep that in mind as you read this informative piece that leans a little too much in favor of AGI for my liking. I’m publishing it as is, not because I like how it paints AGI but because I trust my audience to be discerning with the information…
When the latest iteration of generative artificial intelligence dropped in late 2022, it was clear that something significant had changed.
The language model ChatGPT reached 100 million active monthly users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs predicted that AI could add 7% to global GDP over a 10-year period, almost $7 trillion, but also replace 300 million jobs in the process.
But even as AI continues to disrupt every aspect of life and work, it’s worth taking a step back.
In this visualization via Visual Capitalist’s Chris Dickert and Sabrina Fortin, the first in a three-part series called The AI Revolution for sponsor VERSES AI, we ask how we got here, where we’re going, and how close are we to achieving a truly thinking machine?
Milestones to Mainstream
The term “artificial Intelligence” was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955 in a conference proposal. Along with Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, and many others, he is often referred to as one of the fathers of AI.
Since then, AI has grown in leaps and bounds. AI has mastered chess, beating Russian grandmaster and former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. In 2016, Google’s AlphaGo beat South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol, 4-1. The nine-year gap in achievements is explained by the complexity of Go, which has 10360 possible moves compared to chess’ paltry 10123 combinations.
DALL-E arrived in 2021 and ChatGPT-4 in early 2023, which brings us to today.
But What is Artificial Intelligence?
There’s a big difference between the Roomba that vacuums your condo and HAL from 2001: Space Odyssey. This is why researchers working in the field have come up with the following ways to classify AI:
Despite a false alarm by one Google software engineer in 2022 and a paper by early GPT-4 boosters, no one really believes that recent generative AIs qualify as thinking machines, however you define it. ChatGPT, for all its capabilities, is still just a souped-up version of autocomplete.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
That was the title of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction classic and basis for the movie Blade Runner. In it, Harrison Ford plays a blade runner, a kind of private investigator who used a version of the Turing Test to ferret out life-like androids. But we’re not Harrison Ford and this isn’t science fiction, so how could we tell?
People working in the field have proposed various tests over the years. Cognitive scientist Ben Goertzel thought that if an AI could enroll in college, do the coursework and graduate, then it would pass. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, suggested that if an AI could enter a strange house, find the kitchen, and then make a cup of coffee, then it would meet the threshold.
A common thread that runs through many of them, however, is the ability to perform at one thing that humans do without effort: generalize, adapt, and problem solve. And this is something that AI has traditionally struggled at, even as it continues to excel on other tasks.
Can Current State-of-Art AI Achieve Thinking Machines?
And it may be that the current approach, which has shown incredible results, is running out of road.
Researchers have created thousands of benchmarks to test the performance of AI models on a range of human tasks, from image classification to natural language inference. According to Stanford University’s AI Index, AI scores on standard benchmarks have begun to plateau, with median improvement in 2022 limited to just 4%.
New comprehensive benchmark suites have begun to appear in response, like BIG-Bench and HELM, but will these share the same fate as their predecessors? Quickly surpassed, but still no closer to an AI like J.A.R.V.I.S. that could pass the Wozniak Coffee Test?
Imagine a Smarter World
VERSES AI, a cognitive computing company specializing in next generation AI and the sponsor of this piece, may have an answer.
The company recently released research that shows how to build an AI that can not only think, but also introspect and explain its “thought processes.” Catch the next part of The AI Revolution series to learn more.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
