By Tony Czarnecki | 10 December 2025
Medium
Last month I published an article ‘Don’t be afraid of a new ‘Manhattan Project’ for AI’ in which I mentioned that the divide between those who want to PAUSE AI and those who want to CONSOLIDATE AI, stems from two different perspectives: The pace of change perspective and the evolutionary perspective. It is the latter one, which I would like to address in response to Max Tegmark’, new idea of launching ToolAI. He is the President of the Future of Life Institute (FLI), which is the main proponent of the Pause AI campaign.
In my article, I mentioned that the Pause AI proponents “fail to recognize that AI is not just a technology — it is a fundamentally different type of intelligence. Unlike previous inventions, AI represents a superior form of cognition that will inevitably surpass human capabilities. This evolutionary shift will pave the way for humanity’s own evolution. AI’s progression is unstoppable, and we must accept that at some stage it will become our master.”
FLI now seems not to want to pause the development of the most advanced AI but to the contrary — it proposes to develop ToolAI . The intention is to build ‘a super tool’, which will be designed in such a way that AI, even if it becomes smarter than humans, will always remain under human control. This defies any logic, because it implies that an agent more intelligent and smarter than humans can never outsmart less intelligent ones. Nick Bostrom in his seminal book ‘Superintelligence’ dealt with this anthropogenic argument proving that is im possible to do.
Sam Altman says this generation will be the first to come of age with superintelligence.
His one-year-old son will “never know a world where he was smarter than a computer.”
For him, that’s normal.
For us, it’s the end of an era. pic.twitter.com/0AdTzeGO6T
— vitrupo (@vitrupo) February 26, 2026
However, the very fact that Max Tegmark proposes building such a powerful tool by the international community, is very close to what I had proposed in the above article and my previous books. The difference is that he believes that such an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will remain a tool, which humans will be able to control indefinitely. Conversely, I consider that the emergence of AGI, will mark the birth of a new type of intelligence, far smarter than any humans and therefore will be impossible to keep under the human control. Moreover, when AGI matures into Superintelligence, it will give birth not only to the self-created new species, but it will also begin our own evolution.
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Tony Czarnecki is an economist and a futurist – a member of the Chatham House, London, deeply engaged in global politics and the reform of democracy, with wide range of interests such as politics, technology, science and culture. He is also an active member of London Futurists. This gives him the necessary insight into exploring complex subjects discussed in the three books, of the POSTHUMANS series. He is the Managing Partner of Sustensis, London – a Think Tank for inspirations for Humanity’s transition to coexistence with Superintelligence.
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