Living on the Frontier
29 September 2026

We live in a brave new world with AGI (or whatever you want to call it). Aren’t we lucky!? It is better to live in exciting times than boring times, at least IMO.

Everything will change. The changes will be slower than the many of the loudest people fear, but fast enough to matter a lot in our lifetimes and definitely our childrens’ lifetimes. Exhibit A on the slowness of change is the current (Sep. 2026) Labor Force Participation Rate for employment-age Americans. We are a few years into human-level+ AI and we still have near-all-time-high employment.

As a relatively young country, we have lived in exciting times - and not that long ago! “Frontier” used to mean something quite different than “AI lab”. The "frontier" was a real place where the most ambitious and dynamic Americans chose to live lives of greater risk and reward.

If you don’t want things to change, sorry! But you aren’t in charge. Nobody is in charge. We live in a complex world with billions of other people.

Technological progress is possible and it will continue... somewhere. Hopefully it continues in America! Proposals for a coordinated slowdown are a distraction from this simple reality. There are too many smart people in the world to assume that progress can be slowed down with any combination of foreseeable mechanisms.

If not in the US, technological progress will happen in China, and/or India, and/or Singapore, and/or Ireland, etc. It will probably happen in multiple places, and that competition would be a good thing.

Our choice is: as a country, do we want to play to our historic strength and live on the frontier, or do we want to cede the frontier to others? One option lets us innovate and control our destiny to the extent that any humans in the future will ‘control’ anything. The other option cedes the frontier to others who are younger, braver, and more ambitious than us, and we will end up in the future they build.

I understand that change will be hard for many and dislocation costs will be real. Let’s work on these problems - social problems, emotional problems, employment problems, and other problems not yet invented or anticipated. Let’s use AI - and not AI - to solve these problems. But let’s be real with each other about the choices that are actually available to us. Technological progress will continue. It will likely accelerate.

Copyright 2025-2026 Parker Caldwell