Superintelligence Isn't Enough (www.persuasion.community)

Francis Fukuyama argues that even if AGI or superintelligence arrives, raw cognitive power alone won’t build a new society or unleash the explosive economic growth many expect. He concedes advances—like DeepMind’s AlphaFold and the trend toward self-modifying models—show AI can outthink humans in domains of knowledge, but questions remain about whether LLM-style systems truly possess the abductive, creative reasoning needed for genuine discovery. More fundamentally, Fukuyama contends intelligence is not the binding constraint on growth: material limits, manufacturing constraints, and the need to fabricate and iterate with physical objects block the easy scaling that software enjoys. The essay stresses political and social bottlenecks AI cannot magically overcome. Providing clean water, for example, is often thwarted by finance, unions, business disruption, corruption, and violence—issues a superintelligent planner can diagnose but cannot implement without political buy-in and institutions. Software scales; hardware and infrastructure do not. The implication for the AI/ML community is clear: pursue technical advances, but also prioritize socio-technical integration—deployment engineering, manufacturing, governance, and institutional design—if AI’s benefits are to materialize broadly rather than remain speculative.