It seems like a lot of professionals are thinking we will reach AGI within my lifetime. Some credible sources say within 5 years but who knows.
Either way I suspect it is inevitable. Who knows what may follow. Infinite wealth gap growth, mass job loss, post-work reforms, I’m not sure.
A bunch of questions bounce around in my head, examples may be:
- Will private property rights be honored in said future?
- Could Amish communities still exist?
- Is it something we can prepare for as individuals?
I figured it is important to talk about seeing as it will likely occur in my lifetime and many of yours.
Edit: linked AGI wikipedia
i reckon we won’t have a solid consensus about when we first had AGI until at least a decade after it happens. maybe we already do (though i doubt it). How it shakes out on a societal level is hard to say, but so long as the utility functions are being written, explicitly or implicitly, by capitalists, i don’t think it’ll go well.
We are a LOT farther away than 5 years. What you see right now is a lot of hype from venture capitalists over chatbots.
I think any real AGI will have to have some kind of reasoning ability, and I don’t see any sign of that in current AI.
Certainly, some interesting developments have happened, and we’ve realized our old models/thinking about progress towards AGI needed improvement… and that’s real. I think there’s a serious conversation to be had about what AGI would be, and how we can know we’re approaching it, and when it has arrived.
But anybody telling you it is close either has something to sell you, or has themselves bought it.
protestantism for techbros. Boring. No machine will come and save you, just go to therapy instead.
Also the future is built, not predicted.
That at the begining, I thought the principle was to make computer smarter and smarter so that they can reach the level of human brain. But it’s seems they just try to make people dumber and dumber to reach level of current AI.
I was reaching up a GI the other day actually.
If we don’t remove profit motives from the mix, all AGI will be used for is to create the torment nexus. Without the profit motive, I think that AGI would be a novelty at best, and useless at worst.
@BalakeKarbon Content warning: this reply will be long.
What I’m about to say will be probably controversial, but I’ll dive deeper into it nonetheless. Whenever we worry about some “Artificial General Intelligence”, we are starting from a deeper anthropocentric pretense that only we Homo sapiens have the “exclusivity” of something like “intelligence”, when it’s not.
Take crows for instance: Corvus moneduloides (a.k.a. New Caledonian crow) is known to be extremely intelligent. They’re capable of meta-tool usage, using tools for building/improving other tools (1)
(1): For scientific/academic reference: “Direct observations of pandanus-tool manufacture and use by a New Caledonian crow (Corvus moneduloides)”, published in 2004 by University of Auckland authored by Gavin R. Hunt and Russell D. Gray, DOI 10.1007/s10071-003-0200-0.
Sure, no crows sent probes to sidereal space, and crows don’t seem to tinker with fire, either. But what is intelligence, exactly? How intelligence can be defined and measured? And, most importantly, how intelligence/sentience can be distinguished from mere neurological activity driven by highly-complex (yet pretty deterministic) chemical-physical phenomena and, thus, distinguished as “True Will” (okay, this term is far from scientific, it’s actually a Thelemic term)?
Because when you look both deep up and deep down, respectively at the cosmic level and molecular level (As above so below), we’re not that better than biological automatons, ruled by strict laws of physics and biological programming (a.k.a. autonomic nervous system) which is also driven by genetic, environmental, and societal constraints.
Specifically, “societal constraints” gets even more interesting. Derren Brown can be controversial (especially due to how he describes himself as illusionist), but some of his documentaries (especially The Push) perfectly depict how individuals can be easily influenced by a collective of individuals.
Then there’s this interesting scene from the movie The Artifice Girl where Cherry talks to a elder Gareth (her creator) about how she’s constrained by her initial directives: even though she could choose to do something else (ballet), it’s something driven by that very initial programming.
Then there’s a myriad of thinkers who once philosophized about the subject, such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus (especially Myth of Sisyphus), Cioran, among others. Yeah, I mentioned the possibly “top pessimistic” ones and my list is biased in that regard.
My musings are fatalistic and deterministic, but that’s part of what Science currently knows to this day: that we’re made of star stuff (Carl Sagan, Cosmos TV Series) and, just like stars and other celestial bodies, we’re bound to cosmic constraints, such as entropy and passage of time, fundamental forces, chemical reactions, and so on.
Finally, back to neuroscience: what we refer to as “intelligence” seems to be a mere byproduct from synaptic interactions between gazillions of neurons, again, highly influenced by inner and outer factors through the lens of biological senses (and, to quote René Descartes, “our senses deceive us”, pink doesn’t exist as electromagnetic wavelength yet our eyes seem to “see” pink, a VR headset quickly trick our senses into perceiving motion pictures as “reality”, we see faces (Belmez Faces) out of pareidolia as a byproduct of biologically pre-programmed pattern-matching, among other examples I could point out).
So what’s so different between humans and the so-called “AGI”? Especially if such AGI becomes “embodied” just like an Artifice Girl, becoming a physical part of cosmic constraints and transience from spacetime continuum (both things define living beings as beings; currently, AI is “timeless” in the sense that these Markov Chain algorithms have no embodied beingness, but “AGI” would imply something akin to Major Mira Killian from Ghost in the Shell with a “shell”)…
It’s uncanny for Homo sapiens to realize we’re not exclusive as intelligent living beings (that’s why humans constantly crave for trying to control Nature, Cosmos and other humans), and the so-called “AGI”, if such a thing would came into being, would be the ultimate, undeniable realization: our “mind” is a physical illusion (just biological smoke and mirrors) and there’s no such thing as “free will”, for we’re condemned to obey cosmic constraints, from the vastness of continuum all the way down to atomic interactions.
I’m so sorry to sound pessimistic and highly-verbose. I once tried to believe in something out there, but I’ve been long since out of faith as I realized my deterministic nature. As Science allows us to understand the cosmic mysteries, existence itself feels more and more devoid of anima, for whenever we stare at the cosmic abyss, the vast and dark abyss stares back at us and remembers us about our fleeting and deterministic nature as living beings.
You’re hitting a lot of the ideas brought up in this scene from my favorite movie. It’s all so up in the air as far as what the ‘soul’ or ‘intelligence’ really is.
@otacon239 I didn’t know about the movie Waking Life, thanks for mentioning and recommending it! I just read about it (both on Wikipedia and IMDB) and it seems deep and well-written, particularly due to its references to “hard determinism”. I’ll try to watch it eventually (it’s been a while since I’ve watched a movie, I’ve been leaning toward textual works).
It is the first movie I recommend to virtually everyone when I get talking about movies. It’s a damn shame the BluRay was only in print for a short while copies go for $150+ these days if you can even find one for sale. Probably pretty easy to get on DVD though.
made up nonsense
WTF, care to explain what AGI even is?
Not everybody lives in your reality bubble.
You could just Google it. AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence. It’s not the type of Ai that we have today.
There’s a great book about the pros and cons of AGI called “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom that I’d recommend reading if you have any interest in the topic.
I don’t think AGI will exist soon, but if it gets made, they will try to give it human rights.
Never allow them to do this. They will try this to take away people’s rights, just like with corporate personhood. All stories with talking robots are bullshit, the “robots” in there are just mechanical humans, not AGI.
It’s a whole lotta shite to sell you bs.
Most of us have no idea what that is, might be good to link something.
It’s explained in The Matrix.
