A 90% Chance of AI Saving Humanity

What abundant intelligence could mean for health, work, justice, and belonging.13 min readJust now--Press enter or click to view image in full sizeThe recent headlines about AI come with a number that’s difficult to ignore: A 10% chance of ending humanity. In September, CNN covered warnings from AI researchers, including one who put the risk above 10% within the next decade.Those judgments deserve serious attention. But a conversation that gives so much imagination to our extinction should give at least as much to the lives we will get to keep.What about the other 90%?That number isn’t a measured probability of salvation, and surviving advanced AI doesn’t automatically deliver a better civilization. It’s a question about the future we intend to build. My conviction is that AGI will make material life easier, expand human freedom, and give us the means to address problems we have spent generations treating as permanent.That conviction sits outside much of the current mood. Pew Research Center’s 2026 findings show that 52% of American adults feel more concerned than excited about AI, while only 9% feel more excited than concerned.

I understand the anxiety.

I also think we are bringing an unusually selective memory to the conversation, judging an emerging intelligence while overlooking the world human intelligence has already built.The future starts with a look in the mirrorPress enter or click to view image in full sizeBefore we decide that AI is too dangerous, biased, or morally compromised to help us, we need to look in the mirror. We have organized societies around inherited advantage, sent people into wars, tolerated preventable suffering, and made access to basic necessities depend on systems many people cannot navigate.Human judgment deserves the same scrutiny we apply to machine judgment, especially when the comparison concerns who receives care, who gets heard, and whose life is allowed to improve.AI learns from the record of humanity, including our discoveries, arguments, stories, prejudices, and attempts to understand ourselves. Its behavior also reflects the choices made in training and deploying it. When something ugly appears in that reflection, we should ask what we have taught, rewarded, and allowed to persist. We should also recognize the beauty in building intelligence from the accumulated work of people who will never meet one another.I see AI as a continuation of an old human ambition. Across religious traditions, people have imagined beings with greater knowledge, the ability to relieve suffering, and answers to questions beyond individual understanding. That desire reveals something about us: we know our limits, and we keep reaching beyond them.“Humans are the ultimate adaptation machine, but so many people focus on all of their limitations rather than their potential.” — Tom BilyeuArtificial intelligence gives that search a practical direction, turning generations of accumulated knowledge into systems we can question, test, and improve.For me, there is something beautiful about humanity creating an intelligence capable of helping us become more humane.

AGI is our strongest prospect for building a broadly capable, humanlike intelligence whose abilities can be directed toward the greater good.

We will have to earn that outcome through the way we build and distribute it, but the ambition itself deserves enthusiasm.That belief also shaped my work helping write SB 970, later reintroduced as SB 11, to protect people’s image and likeness from misuse. My broader idea was multifaceted: make it harder for bad actors to exploit someone’s identity through public policy, then make it easier for people to give proper permission through licensing.

I explained the need for protection in my testimony on SB 970.Intelligence in service of lifePress enter or click to view image in full sizeThe first signs already extend beyond conversation.

In a 2026 study published in Nature, the AI system Robin generated hypotheses, proposed experiments, and analyzed laboratory results in research on dry age-related macular degeneration.Scientists carried out the experiments, and promising candidates showed activity in laboratory tests. This was early therapeutic research, with the work of demonstrating patient benefit still ahead, but it shows AI participating in the process through which useful knowledge becomes possible.AGI will extend that capacity across more fields. Better reasoning, faster discovery, and more accessible expertise will improve our ability to treat disease, design infrastructure, coordinate resources, and build things that are currently too expensive to attempt. Those advances will still need energy, materials, laboratories, construction, and institutions that put them to use.

DiamandisThese advances will also reach beyond human medicine.

Nanotechnology is already giving us particles small enough to be delivered directly into plant tissues, and researchers have shown nanoparticles helping plants maintain photosynthesis and improve yields under heat stress.As AI accelerates this research, it will help us develop more precise ways to support living systems.

AI will help humans, plants, and animals live longer, healthier lives.The psychological consequences will be just as important.

We often talk about human behavior as though it emerges from a fixed nature, independent of the conditions in which people live. Yet a person who expects tomorrow to be safe faces a different set of decisions from someone who expects everything to collapse. Change those conditions at scale, and we will change the lives that develop within them.Who are we without our jobs?Press enter or click to view image in full sizeWork is where many people will first feel that change. Ask someone who they are, and they will often tell you what they do for money. A profession gives them income, a recognizable place in society, and a story about how their past led to their present.When a machine performs the skill at the center of that story, the adjustment reaches much deeper than a paycheck.Zack Kass, the former Head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI, has described an “identity displacement crisis.” His TEDxMiami talk, “The Future of Living,” explores the broader opportunities of an AI future, and his vision of a new renaissance resonates with me.The challenge will be helping people carry their sense of worth into a world where professional usefulness occupies less of their identity.“We need to stop confusing human value with economic value.

We want some authorship over our lives, the experience of being capable, and meaningful connections with others.Employment currently bundles those needs into one role, but our reasons for learning, creating, and caring will outlast the arrangement that makes us earn a living.People already play instruments without expecting a career, improve at sports without expecting a salary, and cook for someone they love because the experience matters to them. AGI will give those motivations more room by reducing how much of life must be organized around economic necessity. More of our effort will go toward things we value enough to choose.That future must become tangible in ordinary life. Lower production costs need to reach people through affordable essentials, access to powerful tools, and a meaningful share in the wealth automation creates.A person who loses their income while their rent keeps rising needs security before a lecture about freedom. Making abundance widely accessible is part of the work of building an AI future worth wanting.I’ve also shared proposals with Sam Altman on universal basic income and data centers.

A person stealing to eat has a motive that disappears when food becomes reliably available. Meeting that need removes a reason for the crime before anyone needs to investigate it. This is the kind of prevention AGI will help us pursue, by making necessities easier to produce and support easier to reach.There is already evidence that access to resources changes criminal involvement.

Researchers studying young people with disabilities removed from Supplemental Security Income found a roughly 60% increase in charges for income-generating offenses.