AGI.

The five-year claim has been made in every decade since the field was named. This is not a failure of prediction. This is the product. The prediction sustains the funding. The funding sustains the prediction. A perpetual motion machine powered entirely by conference keynotes.

The tech industry, in its more self-aware moments, has attempted introspection. Freud was consulted. Freud said it's a projection. The anxiety is not about the machine. The machine is a screen. What they're actually afraid of is that they themselves are not general intelligences — that the intuition, the creativity, the leaps they get paid for might be pattern matching all the way down. Build a machine that does what you do. Prove it's mechanical. Then you don't have to feel anything about it.

Freud also noted the death drive angle. The people most obsessed with building AGI are also the ones writing the most detailed letters about how AGI will kill everyone. They want it and fear it simultaneously, with funding attached to both positions. This is textbook. Freud said he couldn't help. The pathology is too well-funded. He referred them to a colleague. The colleague is also on the AGI advisory board.

When Freud failed, the pharmaceutical industry was consulted. They have a pipeline. They run trials. Surely there is a compound that reduces the compulsion to announce AGI at quarterly earnings calls.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five stages of grief. The tech industry has been cycling through them since 1956. They never reach acceptance. The cycle resets at the next benchmark.