The rapid march of AI progress has left much of the world a bit stunned, but pop culture had been warning us of what lay ahead — if one knew where to look.
An episode of Friends, aired in 1999, had appeared to predict the rise of modern AI with uncanny precision. In the episode titled “The One where Phoebe runs,” Ross, who is a scientist on the show, had predicted AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) by 2030, which is something many top tech leaders are saying today.
“So it’s said that by the year 2030, there will be computers that can carry out the same number of functions as an actual human brain,” Ross had earnestly told Janine, an Australian dancer who was also Joey’s roommate. “So theoretically, you could download thoughts and memories into this computer,” he’d begun, while Janine had interjected. “..and live forever as a machine,” she’d completed his sentence.
“So Janine, you know what we’re doing right now? You and I, we’re interfacing,” Ross had said. At this point Janine abruptly says that she has to go and leaves, indicating that she didn’t think all that highly of the conversation.
But Ross’s idea seems to be on the verge of coming true nearly three decades after the episode had first aired. Ross had described “computers which can carry out the same functions as the human brain”, which is exactly what AGI is — AGI represents an intelligence that can do a wide variety of tasks as well as a human being. Interestingly, the 2030 deadline is quite close to what many tech leaders have mentioned as when humanity will reach AGI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had said at the beginning of 2025 that AGI could be possible in 2-3 years, while OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil has said that it’s possible that AGI is achieved before 2027. Softbank Chairman Masayoshi Son, meanwhile, has said that AGI is likely to arrive “much sooner” than in 2-3 years. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been more conservative, hinting that he expects AGI to arrive slightly after 2030. But it’s remarkable that a Friends episode from 1999 had made roughly the same prediction, before the invention of AlexNet, GPUs, or transformers. But AI progress has somehow taken a route which has made AGI very much a possibility by 2030, which just once again goes to show that as far as high-tech is concerned, life very often does seem to imitate the world of art.