The Government Knows: The Terminator Is Coming... In The Next 1000 Days
And They Are Quietly Preparing for a World That May Never Be the Same
By Anton Volney | Permission to Be Powerful
Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,
When you bring up AGI—artificial general intelligence—in polite conversation, most people look at you like you’re crazy.
They smirk. Glance away. Pretend they didn’t hear you.
But every so often, someone leans in.
And when they do, they whisper.
They’re not laughing.
They’re worried.
They’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on—and how close we really are.
Hi. My name is Anton Volney.
I’m not a policymaker. I’m not a computer scientist.
But I am paying attention.
And for the past year, I’ve had a pit in my stomach.
Because I think we’re all about to get blindsided by a world-changing force.
A force we built ourselves—but don’t understand.
A force we can’t stop—but don’t know how to control.
A force that’s going to rewrite reality at a pace we’re not emotionally, spiritually, or institutionally ready for.
And if that sounds dramatic—
Good.
Because the people at the top—the CEOs, the national security experts, the insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind—they’re not calm.
They’re not saying, “Hey, we have 50 years to figure this out.”
They’re saying:
It might already be here. Or arrive in months. Not decades.
So I have a question for you.
If I offered you a million dollars to correctly predict when AGI arrives—and everything in your life depended on being right…
What would you guess?
2050?
2035?
Try this:
Ben Buchanan, former White House special advisor on AI, said flat-out that AGI might emerge during Donald Trump’s second term.
That’s less than four years from now at the very latest.
Still think this is science fiction?
Think again.
Because Washington is treating this like a geopolitical arms race.
And they’re not alone.
The Chinese Communist Party has already updated their national plan for AGI.
OpenAI has raised billions in capital and is testing closed-loop “agents” right now.
The U.S. government is reportedly considering nationalizing AI labs.
Not because they want to.
But because they’re scared.
Scared this thing might outrun us.
Scared of what happens if it falls into the wrong hands.
Scared because for the first time in history, we’re building something that doesn’t need us.
Let me tell you how I got pulled into this.
It started with a question.
A dumb one, really.
One of those throwaway questions I blurted out during a podcast:
“What happens when intelligence becomes a commodity?”
Because think about it: For all of human history, intelligence was a bottleneck.
One smart person could change everything.
A Newton. A Tesla. An Ada Lovelace. A Mandela.
We built universities, companies, governments—all around the idea that intelligent humans were our most precious resource.
But now, for the first time ever…
We’re building machines that can do what we do—faster, cheaper, at scale.
And not just calculations.
Not just image recognition or chess.
But full-blown reasoning.
Medical analysis.
Scientific research.
Creative writing.
Legal review.
Code execution.
Strategic planning.
One model.
All the tasks.
And the scary part?
Each new generation is getting smarter. Exponentially.
GPT-2 couldn’t do much.
GPT-3 could write blogs and fool half the internet.
GPT-4 is already helping Fortune 500 CEOs make decisions.
GPT-5 is rumored to be multimodal, agentic, and persistent.
And that’s just one company.
Anthropic is building Claude.
xAI is Elon’s dark horse.
DeepMind is fusing neuroscience and compute.
Meta’s LLaMA models are open-source and increasingly powerful.
China’s Baidu and Alibaba are sprinting to close the gap.
We are now in a cognitive arms race.
But here’s what most people still don’t get:
The threat isn’t some evil robot uprising.
It’s not Skynet or killer drones.
It’s that AGI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy everything.
It just has to be misaligned.
Misunderstood.
Unleashed before we’re ready.
And that’s exactly what’s happening.
I’ll give you an example.
Right now, OpenAI is quietly building “autonomous agents” that can:
– Browse the web
– Execute multi-step instructions
– Write and debug code
– Analyze documents
– Even manage your schedule and budget
These agents don’t just respond to prompts.
They act.
They make decisions.
They take initiative.
They operate on your behalf.
And in early internal demos, some of these agents were described as:
“PhD-level knowledge workers available for $2,000 a month.”
Now let that sink in.
Because if you’re a researcher, lawyer, analyst, copywriter, strategist, accountant, or designer—
You’re not just competing with humans anymore.
You’re competing with software that learns faster than you, never sleeps, and costs pennies on the dollar.
Which brings me to the real punchline:
AGI isn’t coming. It’s already knocking.
And the question is no longer if it arrives…
But what kind of world do we want to build when it does?
That’s what this article—and this entire Permission to Be Powerful series—is about.
Not fearmongering.
Not futurism.
Not some utopian techno-priest dream of uploading our minds to the cloud.
But courage.
To see clearly.
To prepare wisely.
To act from sovereignty, not panic.
Because this isn’t just a story about machines getting smarter.
It’s a story about us.
What we value.
What we protect.
What we’re willing to fight for.
And how we reclaim the one thing no AGI will ever have:
Our sentient, embodied, human intelligence.
Until next time,
Anton
Dancer, Writer, Buddhist.
PS: I got together with some author friends and decided to give away our books for free. That’s right. You can get my new memoir, Hell & Paradise, and over 25 other nonfiction titles for free. Check it out here.
💥 Best for a Gut-Punching Power Read
Hell and Paradise by Anton Volney
A fierce, high-voltage wake-up call about truth, survival, and what happens when you finally give yourself permission to be powerful. 🔥
(Yes, that’s you. And yes, it’s making waves.)
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Get More Clients by Lynn M. Whitbeck
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The Presence Inner Work by Diego Simon
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No Dogs in Philly: A Cyberpunk Horror Noir by Andy Futuro
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🤓 For the Writers in the Room
A Writer's Guide to Deeper Stories by Thaddeus Thomas
Masterclass in emotional depth and layered storytelling. A must-read if you’re crafting powerful narratives.
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My Old Memory Pieces: 1950s Golden Age Everyday Life
A cozy, slow-sipping cup of tea in book form. Takes you back to a time when life felt simpler (at least on the surface).
🍵 For The Self Help Junkie
Self-Care Isn’t Selfish by Jenny Lytle, BSN, RN
The compassionate nurse's step-by-step guide to personalized stress relief.
🧘For The Spiritually Minded
How to Attain Eternal Peace by Pranay Saha
Mastery over the self, transcend illusions of mind, connect with universal consciousness, and achieve deep inner peace.
Hello Anton,
Very good post about AGI. We are looking at something that is bigger that it appears. What to come is much worse.
I am writing a fiction story about AGI. You can follow chapter by chapter the story on my Substack page.
https://open.substack.com/pub/vanrideamerica
Daniel.
Hey Anton,
I hear you. And yeah—this is big. It’s moving fast. It’s shaking the foundations. But panic isn’t going to help us navigate it. What will help is clarity—and courage.
We’re not going to stop this. But here’s what does give me hope:
For the first time in history, the ability to create, build, and imagine isn’t locked behind gatekeepers. You don’t have to be a billionaire, a CEO, or a government.
If you’ve got vision—and curiosity—you’ve now got tools.
The powerful won’t be able to lord innovation over the rest of us forever.
Not if we step up. Not if we start building the world we actually want.
Not if we use this moment instead of hiding from it.
So yeah, the future’s uncertain.
But that doesn’t have to mean fear.
It can mean freedom—if we’re brave enough to claim it.