Andy Mills: "Acceleration Is Salvation" — and Why AI Might Be the Last Invention.
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Andy Mills, creator of The Last Invention podcast, explores I.J. Good's 1965 concept of an "intelligence explosion"—and explains why "AGI" is a deceptively harmless term for a world-changing event. The central problem? Modern AI acts like a black box, often producing results that shock even its designers with no clear explanation of how they got there. Plus: A rebuttal to "spheres of influence" thinking, and why carving up the world is a bad strategy.
Produced by Corey Wara | Coordinated by Lya Yanne | Video and Social Media by Geoff Craig
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Transcript
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| 0:41.5 | Mike Pesca.com. |
| 0:47.0 | It's Tuesday, January 6th, 20206th from Peachfish Productions. |
| 0:51.5 | It's the gist. |
| 0:52.3 | I'm Mike Pesca. |
| 0:53.4 | For some reason, January 6th puts me in the mind |
| 0:55.8 | of Donald Trump and themes of amorality and transactionalism and maybe not having the best interests |
| 1:01.9 | of all of his people or even this hemisphere or the world's people at heart. So the reason I actually |
| 1:07.8 | bring this up is not the date, but sometimes the best thing that you, |
| 1:12.3 | the audience can hear is actually, I got to admit, not something I said, but something I've |
| 1:16.3 | been thinking about. |
| 1:17.5 | The idea of spheres of influence, you've been hearing this bandied about ever since before, |
| 1:23.3 | but certainly ever since the Venezuela extraction mission. |
| 1:27.3 | And David Frum, on his own podcast, was talking about the idea that, you know, Russia could get theirs and China gets theirs and we keep bars and who cares? |
| 1:36.5 | Well, I think From in this somewhat extended clip, I think he really explains almost the entirety of why this is a bad ideal, an idea, take it away from. |
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