Infinity missions

Infinity Missions, efforts aimed at infinite downside or infinite upside, justify spending that ordinary cost-benefit analysis would reject, and private companies are now funding one in the race to build artificial general intelligence. Historically, government-funded missions such as the Manhattan Project, which consumed roughly 1% of the government budget and 0.4% of US GDP, and the Space Race, whose NASA budget peaked at 4.4% of federal spending in 1966, produced lasting technologies. In 2023, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft spent a combined $196 billion, or 0.72% of US GDP, on R&D and infrastructure as they race to build what Gavin Baker describes as a Digital God.