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Comment by kylebenzle | Hacker News Reader

1. AGI doesn't even exist and Sam Altman and I agree on one thing, GPTs will not get us there. Saying AGI is a risk is like saying the sun exploding is a risk.

2. Nuclear conflict is real, it's astounding Pakistan or Russia hasnt used the bomb yet but they will when the US backs them into a corner.

3. Climate change? At this point, who cares? We know it's happening and happening VERY slowly so we have PLENTY of time to get ready. Theres no real risk other than failing to move away from the cost in the next 100 years. International shipping and big ag are the largest polluters by far and those ain't stopping.

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Fear of AGI is not based on Altman’s latest brews. Look at the progress curve of AI in general is one way to get a feeling for it. The other one, which I prefer, is looking at existing AIs for which we thought human ingenuity was top notch and how they are beating us left and right. Strategy, creativity, cunning, all human notions that are being slaughtered. Slowly, but surely.

It is “just” a matter of combining. I think it’s an “engineering problem” by now. Which is not to say that it will happen soon, just that if we set our minds to it it won’t be that big of a deal.

I'm patiently waiting for my sysadmin job to be automated away. AGI, its time to deliver! I'm waiting. Should have happened yesterday?

The only AI remotely generic enough for that exists for like 2 years. Give it a few more, you might just get your wish.

Maybe.

AGI by 2030 is not a reach statement at all anymore.

The LLM's we have today weren't supposed to show up until 2030 at the earliest and 2050 more realistically. If you go back 10 years and read what people were writing about AI progress, you will find that they were _completely_ off the mark. It's prudent to assume a very liberal timeline for AI progress, based off whats been happening now.

10 years ago we just had another AI hype. I want to see delivered promises & my job automated before i change my mind.

Every promise has over delivered by a decade or more, so don't worry, you'll likely have your legs up 20 years faster than promised.

We're still in the same AI hype as 10 years ago. You just stopped noticing for a while. It really hasn't stopped since AlexNet back in 2012.

Personally, since I first started to learn about Neural Nets in the 90's, I've always predicted that they would bring AGI around the time they matched human brains in complexity and compute power. Back then, assuming Moore's law meant that would be between 2030-40.

Now, there was always the prospect of a serious breakdown of Moore's Law, which might delay it, but since that didn't happen (compute power just moved from CPU's to GPU's), we're now approaching the final stretch. Human brain scale neural nets are already being planned, if not already being built in secret.

The fact that you can now ask an LLM in a chat like fashion is absolutely irrelevant to you?

Not an achievement at all?

Talking to an ai?

Generating any image you like?

Etc.?

I'm loving this absolutely breathless parroting of "AGI in the next 5 years" and yet: we don't even know what general intelligence is. We don't know how/why/where consciousness arises. It's not even a clearly defined concept. But here we have "Workaccount2" prophesizing the rise of general intelligence :D

Please enlighten us sensei, what is actually General Intelligence, and how will you know it's here?

I realize my reply is a bit flippant, but it's tiring to see how certain are people about something that nobody truly understands.

Ironically I often post the exact same sentiment that you are sharing. But you are conflating two different things.

AGI doesn't require consciousness. We likely will have no idea whether or not the first AGI computer is conscious or not. What we will know though, is that it is solving novel problems that humans struggle with, and from the outside the only way to discern it isn't another human is because it is way to smart to be one.

I strongly suspect that the first computers which actually are conscious (AGI or not), whenever that happens, will have to fight a heavy uphill battle to prove it. And there will always be a group of people who will never believe an AI (is it even artificial at that point?) is conscious.

I didn't say that AGI requires consciousness, just that we don't understand what intelligence truly is, along with consciousness (which appears to be a form of intelligence).

And I'm not particularly keen of the reasoning: "it is solving novel problems that humans struggle with", because a pocket calculator can solve problems that humans struggle with. A computer can play chess better than a human can, does it mean it's an AGI?

Wikipedia has an entire article for helping to understand what "AGI" refers to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

AGI has nothing to do with consciousness, unless consciousness is for some reason required to attain it (which doesn't seem like it's the case).

AGI simply means that we can create a type of machine that can do any kind of mental task that a human can, at least at a human level.

Consciousness appears to be a form of intelligence. Is it required for general intelligence (whatever that means)? We don't know. Would humans be classified as having general intelligence if we weren't conscious? In any case, I perhaps worded that poorly. I wasn't saying that consciousness is the same as intelligence, it was just an example of how little we actually understand intelligence.

> AGI simply means that we can create a type of machine that can do any kind of mental task that a human can, at least at a human level.

What does this even mean? What is human level? The ability to write a symphony? Or the ability to calculate 2+2=4? These are such poorly defined metrics that I don't understand how can we then start throwing around very precise (and short!) timelines for attaining it.

The statement: "we'll send a human mission to Mars in the next 5 years" is 10x more believable than this breathless AGI hype, because at least the former is well defined.

> I wasn't saying that consciousness is the same as intelligence, it was just an example of how little we actually understand intelligence.

I would say that current AI's do have a kind of intelligence. It's just not generic enough that we label it AGI.

Add an ability to form, optimize an execute plans while also increasing the physical world model, and we're getting really close.

Both of these abilities are already being developed.

25 years ago, I did a back-of-the envelope calculation during a party and came up with roughly 2040. I didn't know that Kurzweil had already predicted 2029. Once I heard about it, I felt Kurzweil was over-optimistic, and stuck to 2040. Recently, though, it has started to seem that AGI before 2029 is more likely than 2040 or after.

I don’t know what “sysadmin” is today anymore, but we don’t need AGI to get rid of that.

Well, also, plastic waste getting dumped in water ways, and in the USA, steel and coal waste being dumped into the Ohio (causing a huge dead zone in the Gulf). There are serious pollution problems everywhere, and I kind of hate the climate change narrative for taking people’s eyes off of those problems.

AI is already developing enzymes that can break down plastics. Put them on bacteria, and that plastic may stop being a problem quickly.

Which is great until plastics that we want to keep using start getting eaten by bacteria.

sure. we may have to chose whether or not plastics should be biodegradable. Cant have your cake and eat it, too.

Wood is biodegradable, but wood houses work anyway. Ditto cotton. So long as you keep things dry they don’t tend to rot.

Exactly. Plastic will be the same at some point. Natural selection would probably lead to plastic-eating bacteria anyway. DeepMind's enzymes are just a way to speed it up.

Hey, aren't you the user who was trolling I'm that one thread about someone making an app? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199670

Oh well, some concerns around AGI might be attempts at marketing and attracting attention, though some caution probably isn't too bad to have. AGI might become a thing, it's just that there's no guarantee that it will happen in our lifetimes. On the other hand, even LLMs will put some folks out of a job.

Relations between nuclear powers are anyone's guess but there's no reason why Russia couldn't be forced to back off, as opposed to "being backed into a corner". Wouldn't be the first proxy war and most likely won't be the last.

I care about climate change, there are certainly others. No idea whether much of a change will be made in our current course, but there's no reason to be super dismissive. If anything, recycling, eating a bit less meat or doing lots of the other common recommendations improves my own quality of life, even if the legislature that goes after the big corporations is nowhere to be seen yet. No reason not to make the world a better place, or ar least try to, in whatever ways are viable, like donating towards planting trees or something like Wren.

> happening VERY slowly

> failing to move away from the cost in the next 100 years

Unless you're a time-traveler from the 50s who has somehow managed to post here, there is no excuse for this type of disinformation these days.

Mentioning higher sea levels is also a red herring; massive agricultural yields collapse will be an issue long before (like, this century) sea levels become a major problem.

More than this, we have now reached levels of atmospheric changes that put actual near-term Human extinction (not to mention that of most sea and land species) on the table.

This doesn't seem to agree with IPCC predictions. What's your source?

Despite the IPCC being very conservative/optimistic in their scenarios, this is in fact in line with their reports; admittedly my comment above might be badly worded - when I said "near-term", I meant "in the upcoming two centuries or so".

The IPCC reports say we might reach 4C, 5C or even more; based on the historical record, such a major change in such a short time - several orders of magnitude faster than previous CO2e-gases-linked mass extinction events - likely cannot be adapted to by the majority of species (there will of course also be a few evolutionary winners), resulting in potential extinction. I also quote the latest draft report from that same IPCC, leaked about two years back by concerned involved scientists to newspapers before the usual step where political stakeholders are allowed to reword the parts they deem too disturbing or against their interests:

"Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems," it says. "Humans cannot."

There is lots of space on earth that would be a lot more hospitable to humans if 5C warmer. Like the central eurasian steppe.

You can't grow food for a large population when average planetary temps are at +5C. It doesn't mean it's locally always +5C warmer than it used to be; it means you're seeing insane temperature swings in a matter of days, constantly - in both directions, it just so happens that the average is +5C.

Not to mention, at +5C it is all but certain shallow methane hydrate deposits (those stabilized by temperature, not pressure) all over the world are now outgassing CH4; not to mention several other similar tripwires, and likely not all of which we've even identified.

Edit: I can't seem to be able to reply to your comment below, not sure why. You're absolutely wrong about those Siberia figures, and they're not supported by current scientific consensus.

If you farm a siberia that's 5 degrees warmer and more humid (also in ipcc data), you can maybe feed 10 billion just from there.

What's the soil quality over there?

Much of the soil in Russia that will warm is indeed acidic and largely inexploitable, which I suspect is what you were getting at; to their credit though, they picked an area that isn't (IIRC). Not that it changes much.

Most soil can be used for some type of farming with some help from fertilizers. Temperature and access to water is more critical. Higher CO2 also increases crops, in isolation.

We're also talking about a time span of 100-300 years. Keep in mind how much more efficient farming is now compared to even the 1950's.

average is an average, you're forgetting about extremes.

it only takes a few days (or hours) of above wet bulb temperatures to kill humans who live in and around the tropics today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

So people will move out of those worst affected areas.

Exactly. Hundreds of millions of them.

Sure. That could happen. Or there could be wars/conflicts resulting in some of those not having anywhere to go.

Still, this scenario is quite different from human extinction, which is what I was responding to further up.

The IPCC also consistently underestimated sulphur in the atmosphere because if you look at this and previous years we've reached their 2030-2035 goal of warming this year.

> GHG emissions will lead to increasing global warming in the near term, and it’s likely this will reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2035.

https://climatechampions.unfccc.int/the-ipcc-just-published-...

> Global temperatures have been exceptionally high over the past three months – at around 1.6C above pre-industrial levels – following the peak of current El Niño event at the start of 2024.

> The past 10 months have all set new all-time monthly temperature records, though the margin by which new records have been set has fallen from around 0.3C last year to 0.1C over the first three months of 2024.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-climate-2024-off-to...

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