Defining AGI: Solution/Abundance/Apocalypse/God

Abstract

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) has changed from a scientific aim to a moving goalpost of industrial AI ambitions. As far as the AI industry is concerned, it is simultaneously the most consequential invention in human history and a manageable, iterative technology. But what is AGI, aside from a future promise? This paper identifies four rhetorical registers through which AGI is defined, in the words of those giving it shape. In doing so, we base ourselves on the AI industry’s own discussions of AGI, including the 2026 India AI Impact Summit, AI companies’ blog posts, and journalistic coverage. Taken together, these source materials are treated as institutionalized performances of a collectively held sociotechnical imaginary through which AGI is stabilized and reproduced. As such, AGI is positioned as the next supposedly inevitable threshold on the road to superintelligence, imbued with the promise to solve all problems (a techno-solutionist register), bring prosperity (techno-utopian), pose an existential threat to humanity (techno-apocalyptic), and become no less than god (techno-theological). These rhetorical registers together capture AGI as an ineluctable sociotechnical imaginary, as it is being spoken into existence.