AI simply offers an opportunity to get us there more quickly—to make the logic starker and the destination clearer.
This is the hinge of the ending: the author reframes AI not as a disruptor but as an accelerator of moral destiny. It’s an elegant story, but it rests on the assumption that human values won’t fracture under the pressure of rapid transformation.
The “arc of the moral universe” is another similar concept.
This suggests moral progress is directional. That’s a big philosophical stance. Critics would say moral trajectories aren’t laws of nature and could easily reverse, even with AI.
If all of this really does happen over 5 to 10 years—the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights—I suspect everyone watching it will be surprised by the effect it has on them.
This passage banks heavily on a best-case alignment scenario without acknowledging that even small misalignments or geopolitical conflict could slow things dramatically. It functions more as inspirational rhetoric than probabilistic forecast.