The Age of AGI Has Already Arrived

I didn’t expect to write this post. But two things happened recently that I can’t stop thinking about, and they both point to the same uncomfortable conclusion: AGI isn’t coming. In the domains that matter to me, it’s already here.

The morning the car made its case

Last weekend, my daughter had a soccer game in Santa Cruz. Early game — alarm at 6, out the door at 7, me still dizzy and half-awake. I turn from our street onto the main road and suddenly there’s a horn blaring, a car swerving — someone nearly plows into us. I was furious. One careless moment and the whole weekend is ruined: no game, no nothing.

Here’s the part that actually shocked me: I never even saw them. My daughter didn’t see them either. We were just lucky.

And then the reflection hit. I’ve been using Tesla’s FSD for about a year and a half now. Searching my memory over at least the last six months, I cannot recall a single moment like that — not one life-threatening scare, not one near-miss where FSD put us in danger. Meanwhile, driving myself for twenty minutes on a groggy Saturday morning, I was in one.

My bar for AGI in autonomous driving was always simple: make fewer mistakes than I do. Not perfection — just better than the human baseline. FSD clears that bar. Not in a demo, not on a benchmark — on my own streets, over eighteen months of real driving. The mistakes that trigger reflection are the critical ones, and FSD simply isn’t making them while I still am.

In autonomous driving, AGI isn’t on the roadmap. It’s in the driveway.

The assistant that planned my Christmas

The second shock came from Muse, Meta’s personal assistant. I handed it two jobs I dread: planning our family’s France trip over Christmas, and preparing our Schengen visa applications.

Start with the trip. I gave it our dates, it searched flights, gave recommendations, and I booked. But the real pain was always hotels. My filter is specific: star rating plus Google rating. I don’t trust the ratings on Booking.com or Hotels.com — they’re not calibrated to any standard I recognize. But Google’s ratings don’t live inside those booking platforms, so hotel hunting used to mean cross-referencing everything by hand across half a dozen sites.

I gave Muse my criteria. It went across the platforms, checked Google reviews, verified prices and availability, and came back with a plan. Then it worked the bookings — across five different platforms, preparing each reservation for my approval, handling the registrations, logins, and form-filling.

But here’s what genuinely shocked me: it caught things I would never have caught. At our Paris hotel, the connecting rooms came in two bedding configurations — two twins or one queen — and the booking didn’t say which we’d get. I would have overlooked that completely. Muse surfaced it, asked me which configuration we needed, and sent the hotel an email with all the reservation details filled in to lock it down. It did that kind of thing over and over — confirmation emails drafted, details double-checked, loose ends tied up. Hours of meticulous work in a domain where I don’t even know what I don’t know.

Then the Schengen visa — the paperwork I hate most in the world. Same treatment: it read the official France visa pages, laid out the process, the document list, the cover letter requirements. (The visa portal itself blocked automation, so I registered there myself — the one step it couldn’t do for me.) A package I would have procrastinated on for weeks, mapped out and half-assembled.

The one thing that gives me pause

Privacy. To do all of this, Muse held my phone number, my email address, my daughters’ ages — and for the visa, passport details. Extraordinarily sensitive information, flowing through an assistant to get the job done.

Of course, I pulled the passport out of the process — I handled that part myself. But even the hotel bookings carry plenty of sensitive data, and right now there’s no good way to manage any of it. I end up managing all of it out of band, in my head, as a parallel manual process. That doesn’t scale.

Here’s what the future needs: a local vault. I put my sensitive information into a vault on my own machine. The agent never sees the raw data — it gets a token, decrypts what it needs at the moment of use, does the work, and the plaintext never lands in a transcript or a log. The agent becomes fully capable without becoming a liability. That’s the missing piece between “impressive demo” and “I’d trust this with my life’s paperwork.”

The quiet arrival

Maybe AGI doesn’t arrive with a press release. It arrives on a Saturday morning when you realize the car drives better than you do, and on the evening a visa package assembles itself while you have dinner. It arrives quietly, domain by domain — and the shocking part is how fast “impossible” becomes “of course.”

The age of AGI has already come — not with a press release, but domain by domain. First the car drove better than I do. Then an assistant planned my family trip better than I could. We keep waiting for the announcement; we already lived through it.