AGI: The Sleeper Agent of Change
Dario Amodei of Anthropic; A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman of OpenAI; Geoffrey Hinton, pioneering A.I. researcher and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind
We keep waiting for the big moment. The dramatic press conference. The red button. The sci-fi reveal where someone stands on a stage and declares, "We have built Artificial General Intelligence." But that moment isn’t coming. Instead, it’s slipping quietly into our lives, one model update at a time. The systems we laughed at a year ago are now coding entire apps, writing legal briefs, passing elite math competitions, diagnosing disease, and mimicking human behavior with eerie precision. This isn’t hype. This isn’t the future. This is right now. We are not ready.
Kevin Roose, in his recent New York Times piece, laid it out in plain sight: the people building the most powerful AI systems in the world are not celebrating. They are warning us. Sam Altman at OpenAI. Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind. Dario Amodei at Anthropic. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the godfathers of modern AI. They are all saying the same thing: we are on the brink of something massive, and the world is asleep at the wheel.
The term Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) sounds distant and academic. But what it really means is this: machines that can do nearly everything a human can do, cognitively. Think. Reason. Plan. Persuade. Create. Deceive.
And according to the people who know the most, AGI could be here in two years. Maybe less. Not in the form of a robot uprising. Not with a Hollywood flourish. But in the quiet displacement of work. The erosion of trust. The confusion of what is real and what is generated. The moment will pass without most people even noticing. And by the time they do, it won’t be about clever chatbots anymore. It will be about systems that outperform them at their own jobs, systems that can manipulate, persuade, automate — and do it all invisibly.
This is the slow-motion collapse of the cognitive monopoly humans have always held. And it’s already underway.
In Education, We Are Now Teaching in the Past
As an educator, this is where my fear settles deepest. We are preparing students for a world that no longer exists. We still reward rote memorization. We still grade essay structure. We still teach skills that are already being outsourced to large language models.
Students aren't just competing with their peers. They're competing with AI systems that are improving at breakneck speed. The average student is no longer learning to write against the backdrop of other students — they’re learning to write in a world where AI can generate better essays, instantly, and with style. So what do we do? We pivot!
We stop pretending this is a passing phase. We start teaching what machines can’t do easily: critical thinking, empathy, discernment, ethical reasoning, original thought rooted in lived experience. We teach students to use AI as a collaborator, not a crutch. We embed AI literacy in every discipline. We emphasize adaptability and creativity over recall and repetition.
And most importantly, we prepare students not just to use AI, but to question it. To interrogate its sources, its logic, its biases, its blind spots. Because the future will not belong to those who memorize the right answers. It will belong to those who know which questions to ask of intelligent machines.
A Horizon We Cannot Afford to Ignore
Every industry will feel this shift. But in education, we are the firewall. If we fail to wake up, we condemn an entire generation to be blindsided by a force we could have helped them understand. The warning signs are everywhere. The models are getting better. The timelines are shrinking. And the silence from our institutions is deafening. We must stop waiting for the "big moment." Because by the time it comes, it will already be too late.
The wake-up call isn’t in the future. It’s in your inbox. It’s in your classroom. It’s in the subtle but unmistakable shift already reshaping your world. The only question is whether we’ll answer it — or keep hitting snooze.
