The Most Important Century

The most important century is Holden Karnofsky's name for the claim most likely to provoke immediate resistance, and the one he grounds most carefully against it. Stated baldly—that we could be living in the most consequential century of all time—it sounds like the conceit every generation has been tempted to hold about its own moment. Its force comes from the convergence of two prior arguments: that the current economic regime cannot persist and that explosive growth is a live possibility, and that AI capable of automating progress itself is the most plausible engine of such an explosion, with a meaningful probability of arriving this century. Put them together and the century in which such a transition occurs would, almost by definition, be the hinge on which a very long future turns. In the cycle that began with [YOU] on AI, the thesis supplies the largest possible frame: the amplification already underway is the opening movement of a transition