The Age of Abundance. For real?

The 20% Flight: Why We Are Being Forced onto a Plane We Didn’t Book

Imagine standing at the boarding gate of a brand-new, ultra-sleek commercial airliner. The airline representative smiles warmly and makes an announcement:

"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. This jet is equipped with revolutionary technology. It will get you to your destination ten times faster than any previous flight in human history. It is a true marvel of engineering. However, our leading safety scientists estimate there is about a 20% chance the plane will suffer a catastrophic failure mid-flight, destroying the aircraft and everyone on board. Please have your boarding passes ready."

What do you do?

You don’t just walk away; you run. You grab your family, you warn the other passengers, and you ask how a company was ever allowed to roll this machine onto the tarmac in the first place. A 20% chance of failure, or even a 10% or 5% chance, is a statistical nightmare. For context, commercial aviation currently operates at a fatal accident rate of about one in 13.7 million flights. If airlines operated at 20%, society would ban flying by sunset.

Yet, when it comes to the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), we are actively boarding this plane. In the AI community, this metric is known as P(\text{doom}), the probability that an unaligned superintelligence will cause human extinction or civilizational collapse. Even among moderate, mainstream AI scientists, a P(\text{doom}) of 10% to 20% is considered a highly realistic, "acceptable" estimate.

So why are we treating a 20% risk of civilizational collapse differently than a 20% risk of a plane crash?

To understand the madness of the modern AI race, we have to look at the only two scenarios where a human being would actually look at a 20% crash rate and say: "Give me a ticket."

Scenario A: The Luxury Ticket (When We Say Absolute NO)

For the vast majority of our lives, our risk tolerance is governed by simple utility. If you are living a relatively stable, peaceful life, you do not take existential gambles.

If you are flying from New York to London for a business meeting or a family vacation, the baseline expectation of your life is preservation. The reward of getting to London a few hours faster does not outweigh the ultimate penalty of death.

Under normal circumstances, you do not board the 20% flight because you have everything to lose and only minor convenience to gain.

This is where the vast majority of humanity stands regarding AI. Most people are busy trying to live quiet, meaningful lives, you know like loving their families, enjoying simple routines, and finding beauty in the "sublime ordinary" of a slow afternoon. We do not need a god-like machine to optimize our lives (The Age of Abundance, they call it. We will all be rich.) at the risk of ending them. For us, the tech industry’s pitch is Scenario A: they are offering us a luxury, high-speed ticket we never asked for, packaged with a terrifyingly high risk of disaster.

Scenario B: The Escape Flight (When We Say YES)

There is, however, one specific situation where a rational person would willingly board a plane with a 20% chance of crashing: when the ground they are currently standing on has a 90% chance of collapsing.

If you are trapped in an active war zone, or on an island rapidly being swallowed by a volcano, and a rescue plane lands with a faulty engine and a 20% chance of falling out of the sky, you climb aboard. Why? Because the risk of staying is far worse than the risk of leaving. In this scenario, the 20% crash rate is actually a massive upgrade in your odds of survival.

This is the hidden psychological trick that AI "techno-optimists" and tech founders use to justify their timelines. They paint a picture of the present world as a burning house. They argue that humanity is currently facing a 100% guarantee of slow death via climate change, untreatable diseases, economic collapse, or geopolitical war.

To them, AGI is the desperate escape flight. They argue that yes, building a superintelligence might have a 20% chance of killing us, but staying on our current human trajectory has a 100% chance of failure. In their minds, the gamble is justified because they believe they are rescuing us from a sinking ship

...In their minds, the gamble is justified because they believe they are rescuing us from a sinking ship.

It’s a comforting narrative for them. It allows billionaires to play the role of messiahs instead of reckless gamblers.

But if they truly believed this plane was our only hope for survival, you would expect them to be the first ones buckled into their seats. Instead, the very same tech elites pushing the throttle forward on AGI are quietly buying up remote land in New Zealand and building ultra-luxury, underground bunkers.

They aren't planning to board the 20% flight with the rest of us. They are building a Plan B. They know the plane might fall out of the sky, and if it does, they intend to watch the crash safely from behind reinforced concrete blast doors, surrounded by years of stockpiled rations. They are forcing humanity into a high-stakes gamble while ensuring their own survival if the bet fails.

Look around you. The seatbelt sign is illuminated. The cabin doors are sealed. The engines are roaring to life, and the pilots are arguing over whether the wings will hold together.

No one asked to see our boarding passes. No one asked if we wanted to go. We are already on the tarmac, hurtling down the runway, praying that the 20% statistic doesn't apply to us, while the architects of the flight watch us from the safety of the terminal.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas