At an event held at The Conduit in London on 19 February, the former comms and policy advisor for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt made an impassioned call for new economic and societal models, in a future shaped by advanced AI.

Hunter Torricke didn't hesitate to paint a bleak picture of today’s world of limited resources where "12 billionaires in the United States now have greater wealth than 50% of humanity." A world where democracy is increasingly marginalised and inequality rages alongside the fires of unaddressed climate crisis.  

In 2026 alone, he said, companies have comitted more than $600 billion to the construction of AI infrastructure. This is not, Hunter-Torricke stressed laughingly, to acheive the incremental efficiencies we see in our every day work lives, for example the summarising of wordy PDFs.

The big goal among tech elites is to harness Artificial General Intelligence to reverse the future of the world from one of depleting resources to an abundant ‘post-scarcity economy’.  “A future where we are able to unleash such a vast surplus that it sweeps away many of the things that right now animates our societies that really are huge problems,” said Hunter-Torricke.

The difficulty with that lofty sounding goal, is that automation on a massive scale is already here, along with the inevitable job cuts. Witness, he said, the dark factories that work day and night without human supervision at the Xiaomi smartphone factory just outside Bejing. But there is no plan to better distribute the profits that automation brings, or offset the impact on society.

Uprisings such as the burning of the parliament building in Nepal last September will become a common occurence "...if the huge transformational power of that technology economically flows to a small number of people, by a whole generation of young people who have seen their lives and their future prospects absolutely destroyed by elites who failed to take a part in declining living standards."

So the question Hunter-Torricke’s new venture aims to answer is: “How do we give our children and our grandchildren the good life in the age of AI?”

The Center for Tomorrow will produce tools, reports and podcasts and provide networking and leadership training “to help societies make better decisions about technology, disruption, so that the people and the planet can thrive long-term.”

Hunter-Torricke ended on an optimistic note: “This is a monumental struggle…the hardest political and economic and social challenge of our time. We have to do it really fast because the future is arriving so fast. And the next decade is going to be the most disruptive moment in history; it is going to challenge us deeply to our core and our values and our choices as leaders. And yet, in spite of everything I've told you and all the things that could play out, which are not good futures, I am an optimist because what you believe about AI in so many cases really is what you really believe about people. And we have the ability as people to choose really different outcomes in our lives.”

Dex Hunter-Torricke will be joining the keynote panel at MRS Annual Conference ‘Communicating with consumers and the public when societies splinter and culture divides’ alongside Eliot Higgins (founder of BellingCat), Deborah Mattinson (President of MRS) and Kelly Beaver (CEO of Ipsos UK & Ireland) and Elain Rodrigo (Reckitt).