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Comment by eggdaft | Hacker News Reader

A machine that can do anything an average human can do whilst sitting at a computer.

The average human can’t do much of anything while sitting at a computer. I agree with GP that these conversations are tiresome because besides exploration and curiosity, it’s not obvious why we’d practically want to replicate AGI. There are billions of humans out there, and—not to devalue them—most of them don’t have commercially valuable skills in 2024. What I want are specialty AIs that will help me solve commercially interesting problems, and these AIs will little resemble human intelligence.

The average human can do plenty whilst sitting at a computer, far more than a computer can do on its own, and in fact the entire knowledge economy is based on that fact. Fortunately, your assertion about most humans is demonstrably false. If you can entirely automate what they do already, feel free to start a company and capture most of the world’s wealth creation.

Why replicate AGI? Wealth creation determines living standards and AGI would vastly increase wealth creation. That’s one reason.

What you want from AI is a different conversation. I agree the ultimate point of AI research is not necessarily to make AGI as per the above definition. It might be to say understand the universe or greatly accelerate technological progress. That’s a subjective call. But orthogonal to the problem of choosing a good definition of AGI.

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