Ask HN: If you had AGI today what is your priority list of problems..?
Ask HN: if you had AGI today what is your priority list of problems for it to crack? Assuming a limited processing capacity.
And if you somehow find yourself in possession of a functioning human-level AGI and you didn't know all those jargon terms already, then the answer is to halt, melt and catch fire, shut down your research project and go study until you're ready to take things seriously.
We have new people (natural GI?) enter the world all the time. Parenting is a thing, a lot of these AGI related questions seem to be from a weird parallel universe that doesn't acknowledge this, or thinks they (AGI) are supernatural beings.
Start with foveated vision, that can't focus well, and tune the AI to minimize surprise, as time goes on, the neural network would begin to figure out how to focus and control eye motion, then eventually head orientation, limbs, etc..
Eventually, you'd end up with an intelligence that inhabits a body, which you could then copy and put in more restrictive environments, but it might be torture?!?!
If you want something capable of driving down a street, you need something that can navigate and interact with the environment at human scale.
An approach that would work, albeit slowly, is the one I outlined. The current model of trying to push something out NOW so we keep the stock price up, clearly hasn't worked, nor is it likely to.
So what's an AGI going to do? You're going to need a whole lot of units running around collecting data and running experiments, they're going to need to be general purpose, built out a common materials, run pretty efficiently, communicate information between each other, operate in pretty adverse conditions...
Humans, you need humans.
We aren't the end all be all, but we are pretty darn good at running around doing things and spreading our knowledge between each other, writing it down into books, improving and spreading that knowledge between yourselves. I think we really underestimate how far along the path we are to self-improvement, and we overestimate how quickly at AI could progress down that path.
What I think is likely is that AI will be a tool, like any other, and our society will just grow and integrate these AI into itself.
I think the real path forward is when we learn how to really start modifying and customizing life to our needs, and that's going to revolutionize humanity in ways that basically makes us unrecognizable to who we are today. And that will be good.
In short, the future will be weird, but we're going to be fine.
AGI is scarier than nukes.
The corporations are not AGIs too https://youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw
If you look at the limiter of human advancement you find that single points of high computational power aren't limiting us.
Instead, it is human ability to be empowered to explore problem spaces, have access to ample resources, and the diversity of our thought and exploration that drives our advancement.
In all places we are limited, AGI isn't a solution that knocks the ball out of the park. The theory of a computer constrained to a box and exponentially growing its intelligence just doesn't seem realistic.
Let the AGI do whatever the heck it wants and see what happens.
Look into seeing if it's possible to build as many of them as possible. Let them lose on the world.
protip: start with paperclips
You're going to have to show pretty conclusively quite a few assumptions to be true before I'd be willing to be scared of it. It's kind of the computer science equivalent to nukes detonating the atmosphere or CERN setting off black holes with their particle accelerator. Theoretically possible, very scary, but almost certain not to happen.
What you can't do with AGI or cheap labor is tell someone "make me a billion dollar business", or "create an app with product market fit". Overall I think people are over-optimistic what AGI can do once its here.
AGI solves robotics. We could use very general-purpose robots rather than specialized, brittle, narrowly-useful machines. Right now the bottleneck is mostly software - that's why Atlas isn't useful, it takes too much engineering to program it to do useful things. if it can learn? and doesn't get bored?
Also, many of the large problems we have (wars, climate change) aren’t intellectual but social, to start with.
* preventing bad-actor AGIs that came after my AGI,
* slowing climate change to 3% rise by 2100 and reversing if possible (I don't think it is before it becomes critical at our current level of technology),
* slowing pandemics/improving health to eliminate distractions from the other problems,
* enabling space colonization for the masses with at least the survival rate of the early U.S. colonies in the 1600s (moon first, then lagrange points, then Mars, then Ceres, then interstellar - each serving as a launching point for the next).
* Climate change
* Malnutrition / access to clean water
* Poverty
* Pandemics
Upvotes and replies would serve as metrics on how well the AGI is progressing.
With only "dumb" AGI? Self-driving cars/trucks, and construction jobs. Mining and manufacturing would come back to the US. With enough construction robots, millions of solar panels/windmills could be constructed, averting climate change.
With superintelligent AGI? Find ways to make politics and cooperation work better. Solve nuclear brinkmanship (without just launching the nukes.) Clean up the prisoner's dilemmas. We're a brilliant species; the one thing holding us back is ourselves.
Otherwise, advanced energy storage, chemical recovery from low concentrations(Phosphates from sewage, metals from landfill ash, etc), and medical advances would probably be my priority.
"Mom isn't gonna die of cancer! We can save her!"
personal assistant / secretary, or a cook / maid (Rosie)