Ask HN: Are you preparing for a post-AGI world? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you preparing for a post-AGI world?

4 pointsbrap4 comments

Personally I’m not a big believer in AI changing the world entirely in the near future, but many are.

I just came across this tweet by Logan Kilpatrick (Google):

>If you are not planning for the price of intelligence to go to zero, the next 3-5 years are going to incredibly disruptive to your business / life. https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1864508209769390238

Now, obviously, these guys are often just hype farming and this should be taken with grain of salt. But it got me thinking.

Most of us here are programmers, eng managers, or generally just people working with our brains. How are we supposed to prepare for a hypothetical future where our brains are no longer needed? Whether it’s 3 or 30 years down the road, it’s probably coming, so what then?

Are you preparing? If so, how?

In the 1980s we were told that the future of personal transportation was flying cars. Similar flying car predictions had been made since the 1950s. Go watch "Back to the Future, Part 2" to see what people imagined: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096874/

And . . . we still don't have flying cars. It has not happened and might not ever happen.

>> Whether it’s 3 or 30 years down the road, it’s probably coming, so what then?

The same goes for AGI--until it happens I have no reason to believe that it will happen.

If it actually does happen, it would be so disruptive that I am not sure there is anything that a person could do to prepare for it.

That's Vernor Vinge's singularity, almost.

You could go into energy production of some kind. Chatbots and robots still gotta eat. Robots are advancing quickly, so pivoting to manufacturing/manual labor might not buy you much time.

Out of all the possible futures to prepare for, no, I'm not preparing for the one that some hype farmer is squawking about on a billionaire's dead propaganda site, based on a theoretical technology that doesn't even exist.

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