What’s the point of developing artificial general intelligence? In the past five years alone, AI technologies have revolutionized nearly every industry. They’ve become incredibly powerful tools, yet, as AI systems become even more capable, the tendency for people to view them as more than just “tools” will almost certainly increase.
This puts everyone in a strange and unfamiliar situation. We have to decide whether there’s a threshold at which these nascent “intelligences” stop being tools and start being… something else.
To define the goal of building AGI, we need to ask three simple questions:
What are we building? Why, exactly, are we building it? And how are we going to treat it?
There will be no pauses
There can be no argument that machine learning and AI have become a backbone technology on par with electricity and the internet. AI is here to stay.
Advanced machine learning technologies have propelled the fields of astronomy, chemistry, and quantum computing into an unprecedented era of rapid breakthroughs. And an entirely new industry, generative AI, has risen on the strength of ChatGPT’s launch in 2022.
But this progress hasn’t come cheap. The total global spend on artificial intelligence technologies last year was approximately $1.5 trillion, according to Gartner.
Simply put: developing AI is the most expensive endeavor that humanity has ever undertaken. In just 2025 alone, the total global spend for AI exceeded that of the Manhattan Project, International Space Station, Apollo program, and the US interstate highway system combined.
I bring up the money because it serves as an important framework for the ethical discussion of “goals” in the context of developing AGI.
Laypersons might think the goal is to develop autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and machines that equal or surpass humans in most endeavors. But the reality of creating a new modality for intelligence is more complex than just conceiving a list of itemized technological milestones to check off.
To the pure-hearted researcher, the goal of developing advanced AI technologies might simply be to explore the unknown. How intelligent can we make these machines? Where can science take us?
But, to the investor, the goal is entirely different. They want a return on their investment. AI is a business. The researcher wants funding, the advertiser wants clients, the company wants sales, and the consumer wants to feel as though they’re getting something for their time and money.
This leaves little room for what famed German philosopher Martin Heidegger would have called “Gelassenheit,” a fundamental way of viewing entities in which humans just let them be, rather than imposing their will upon them.
Rather than treat AI systems as “tools,” many philosophers view them as “beings.” That doesn’t mean they see them as alive, but as worthy of consideration and respect.
Italian philosopher Silvia Benso, for example, discusses this notion in her seminal book “The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics.” In one of the concluding chapters, she describes non-living “things” as being greater than the sum of their quantifiable identifiers.
Benso writes:
“Things possess a reality in themselves that cannot be postponed or dislocated. Their materiality can be experienced, enjoyed, even accessed, if only through a specific modality of approach that comes into contact without possessing, so that access is never a totalization.”
Viewed through such a philosophical lens, the development of an artificial general intelligence takes on new meaning.
A developmental paradigm that maximizes the ROI for investors may not produce the most useful tools. And one that seeks only to fine-tune AI systems for standardized benchmark testing is bound to overlook emergent behaviors that don’t lead to higher scores. One that anthropomorphizes the system might fail to recognize its inherent utility.
At some point, we all need to ask ourselves where this development is headed. The specific goals we endorse as a global society will undoubtedly shape not only the capabilities of future AI systems, but how we interact with them.
AI, at its most plain, is a mirror. It reflects humanity as we are now and — perhaps through sheer zeitgeist alone — influences how we’ll be tomorrow.
As Benso puts it:
“Behind the mirror there is not a void, but the fullness of the other.”
Get sharper analysis on AGI ethics
Original essays, expert commentary, and curated analysis on the human stakes of AGI.
A veteran AI journalist, Tristan was the creator and managing editor of The Next Web’s “Neural” imprint. He is one of the first and most prolific reporters to cover artificial intelligence as a full-time beat.