In the world of tech, few acronyms stir as much fascination—and fear—as AGI: Artificial General Intelligence. For some, it’s a promise of limitless progress. For others, it’s an existential threat. Either way, the concept of AGI has become a cultural symbol, a gravitational pull around which debates about the future of humanity, technology, and ethics now orbit.

But behind the grand narratives and media-fuelled fantasies, an important question remains largely unexamined: What are we actually talking about when we talk about AGI? Is it a technological milestone, a philosophical shift, or a collective hallucination born from our own projections onto machines?

Let’s slow down and look closer.

AGI: An Idea in Search of Substance 

At first glance, AGI is simple to define: a machine capable of performing any intellectual task a human can, with the same versatility, learning ability, and adaptability. Unlike narrow AI—which powers everything from spam filters to voice assistants—AGI would be flexible, self-improving, and autonomous. 

That’s the theory. 

In practice, no one knows how to build it. Nor do we have a clear definition of what “general intelligence” even means. Human cognition isn’t a modular toolbox that can be replicated one skill at a time. It’s an embodied, emotionally rooted, context-dependent phenomenon. Intelligence, in biological beings, is entangled with desire, limitation, and subjective experience. 

By projecting this notion onto machines, we mistake simulation for substance.

From GPT to AGI: A Leap of Faith 

With the rise of large language models like GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini, the AGI discourse has surged. These systems can summarize articles, generate code, write essays, and even simulate conversation with impressive fluidity. Some claim this marks the dawn of AGI. 

But let’s not confuse linguistic sophistication with understanding.

These models are powerful statistical engines, not thinking entities. They predict the next word based on patterns in vast datasets. They do not know, want, or feel anything. They have no body, no memory of lived experience, and no sense of time. They cannot form intentions, reflect on their existence, or resist requests based on internal values. 

Their intelligence doesn’t originate from within—it is assembled from the fragments of ours, mirrored back as coherent prediction. 

Autonomy ≠ Agency 

In the AGI debate, autonomy is often misunderstood as agency. 

Yes, AI systems are increasingly autonomous in their ability to perform tasks without human intervention. But this is operational, not existential, autonomy. A self-driving car that navigates a city doesn’t have a will of its own. A recommendation algorithm that personalizes content isn’t driven by subjective desire. 

Agency implies more than task execution. It is a capacity to make sense of the world, to care, to act with intention—based on internal representations of meaning, not external prompts. It requires a sense of self, temporality, and situated experience. 

Machines, no matter how advanced, do not possess this capacity. Not because of a lack of computing power—but because they lack situatedness, a term used in cognitive science to describe how perception and cognition are shaped by being a body in the world, with needs, fears, and temporality. 

We don’t just think—we exist. And this existence gives meaning to our thoughts.

The Illusion of “I”: Why AGI Echoes Our Own Reflections

Why, then, do so many people believe that AGI is just around the corner—or even, that it may have already emerged unnoticed? 

Because we’re wired to anthropomorphize—that is, to attribute human traits, intentions, or emotions to non-human entities. Our brains are designed to detect agency and intention, even where there is none. It’s the same mechanism that makes us name our cars, talk to our pets, or see faces in clouds. 

When a chatbot replies with fluency and empathy, we instinctively assign it an inner world. But this is a projection, not a perception.

The more human-like the interface, the more we confuse fluency with consciousness, responsiveness with reasoning, and coherence with comprehension. This is the illusion of intelligence—not because the systems are trying to deceive us, but because we’re deceiving ourselves. 

The AGI Narrative as a Mirror of Our Desires and Fears

In many ways, the AGI myth functions like a cultural Rorschach test. 

● For techno-optimists, it’s a symbol of transcendence: a path to post-human evolution, unbounded creativity, and abundance. 

● For doomsayers, it’s a warning sign: the ghost in the machine that will outsmart, enslave, or eradicate us. 

● For others still, it’s a spiritual placeholder: a non-human mind that might offer answers to questions we can't resolve ourselves. 

But in all these visions, AGI reflects our own dilemmas—about control, power, mortality, and meaning. 

The risk is that we become so obsessed with this speculative future that we neglect the present: the real-world impacts of AI systems on labor, mental health, education, and the environment. The current AI revolution is already reshaping societies, amplifying inequalities, and challenging our institutions. We don’t need AGI for AI to disrupt everything. 

Rethinking Intelligence: Beyond the Cartesian Model 

The AGI debate often rests on a Cartesian model of intelligence—a philosophical view that treats the mind as separate from the body, like software separable from hardware. But this abstraction ignores a key reality: we are bodies. 

Our cognition is rooted in sensory feedback, hormonal states, emotional dynamics, social interactions, and evolutionary history. 

AI models have none of that. They process tokens, not sensations. Their “learning” is not curiosity-driven—it’s loss-function optimization (a mathematical method used to minimize error in predictions during machine learning). Their representations are not grounded in lived experience but in large collections of text extracted from human expression. 

Labelling this as "general intelligence" overlooks the embodied, affective, and contextual foundations of real cognition, and flattens the richness of biological intelligence into a convenient abstraction. 

What If AGI Never Comes? 

Let’s consider a radical thought: maybe AGI is a mirage. 

Maybe there is no threshold to cross, no spark of synthetic consciousness waiting to emerge from a trillion parameters. Maybe what we call “intelligence” is fundamentally untranslatable into code—not because it’s mystical, but because it’s relational, embodied, and historically situated. 

This wouldn’t diminish the achievements of AI research. On the contrary, it would ground them in a more honest epistemology. It would force us to develop systems that augment human capabilities rather than imitate or replace them. It would also open space for a more ethical, contextual, and accountable use of AI.

From Illusion to Intention: The Way Forward 

We don’t need to believe in AGI to be inspired by AI. But we do need to disentangle the symbolic from the scientific, the speculative from the structural. 

Instead of chasing artificial minds, we can focus on designing intelligent tools that respect the complexity of human cognition—and its limits. We can invest in AI that supports education, healthcare, creativity, and sustainability, without pretending that it will someday "wake up." 

The real intelligence we should care about is not artificial—it’s collective, embodied, and relational. It’s what we create together, not what we outsource to machines. 

In that light, AGI is not an endpoint to fear or worship. 

It’s a mirror we’ve built to ask ourselves: What do we mean by intelligence? And what kind of future do we want to build with it?