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It's not crazy to believe that capitalizing* human-level intelligence would reap unimaginably large financial rewards.

*Capitalizing as in turning into an owned capital asset that throws off income.

You could say the same thing about mining asteroids or any number of moonshot projects which will lead to enormous payouts at some future date. That doesn’t tell us anything about how to allocate money today.

We already have human-level intelligence in HUMANS right now, the hack is that the wealthy want to get rid of the human part! It's not crazy, it's sad to think that humans are trying to "capitalize" human intelligence, rather than help real humans.

For what it's worth, I don't think it has to be all bad. Among many possibilities, I really do believe that AI could change education for the better, and profoundly. Super-intelligent machines might end up helping generations of people become smarter and more thoughtful than their predecessors.

Sure, if AGI were controlled by an organization or individual with good intent, it could be used that way or for other good works. I suspect AGI will be controlled by a big corp or a small startup with big corp funding and/or ties and will be used for whatever makes the most cash, bar none. If that means replacing every human job with a robot that talks, then so be it.

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