Time to have some light hearted discussion on this lovely evening!
Let's say tomorrow you wake up and watch the morning news, AGI has been achieved. "A company" has open sourced it and everyone has access to it.
What would you do next ?
Of course, realistically it would not be cheap just based on demand, let alone the resources it uses, which I think is the real reason why it won't replace as many jobs as people fear. The answer all along is going to be that humans are cheaper to employ. I suspect that this will be the case for several years as the technology matures and this should give countries extra time to adapt.
It's not even clear we would immediately know it has happened, because this sort of power could corrupt its owners to a degree that they decide what's good for you in your stead, before any public release. Collab with the financial sector and own everything, including your government. Peter Thiel is supplying you with a robot army to match nominal ownership with the means to defend it.
Musk et al. are showing how you can skip a political career or mandate, if you have sufficient money, and openly get away with it. Might as well continue on this path until total control is achieved. Just gotta keep the normies (or bureaucracy) from revolting while you do it.
Not saying this will happen, but it's a plausible timeline IMO (in the case sufficient AGI is achievable before we overstretch ourselves). Doesn't even have to mean life will be shit or end, just that we won't get a say in it. And then you could get an agent to declutter your files or renovate your house, etc.
So I think there is likely to be a military conflict once the technology is achieved and that's how the public will know about it. It might not be a hot war but maybe a cyber war with power grids and information systems being attacked, and this would escalate until whoever AGI is successfully used like an army of virtual hackers to completely destroy the infrastructure of a country. At that point it's more or less like a nuclear weapon and the winner will get to dictate the proliferation of the technology within the new world order.
In short because AGI is a threat at the military level, there is likely to be a race towards it and some kind of conflict as multiple nations might try to prevent the other from acquiring it.
"AGI" just means anything at this point and it is commonly associated to mean:
"Raise more money to achieve AGI that replaces humans at almost any economically valuable task."
That is what it really means. A Christmas present to McKinsey, Accenture and KPMG.
As a regular person, I don't have an executive assistant, but as a digital agent, I'd set it loose on my email, but how do you trust a human with that access in the first place. So there would have to be some thing that gets me to trust it first. But it wouldn't be cheap to run, so how much would I want to spend on a better spam filter? $15/hr? $30/hr? Large GPU instances run far more expensive than that. Which extends to businesses. The jobs of people who work for less than GPU instances cost to run the AGI are safe. At least for now. As long as they're not being annoying.
AGI means only human-grade intelligence, and I've met a lot of people with that. I wouldn't give a random average human a pile of my money and tell them to go wild, so why would i do that with for a digital human-grade intelligence? But maybe this hypothetical AGI is good at day trading. As long as it makes more money than it costs to run, it's an obvious thing to have it do. (Of course, with everyone else running the same bot, the remaining alpha is infinitesimal.) Alas, people that have already been doing this pre-AGI would have an edge over me and my bot, so I don't see how it could actually make money.
Until advanced robotics come around, an AGI is stuck in the digital realm, so it can help me reprogram the misc iot crap I've been meaning to do, or various administrative life tasks for me, but you can already hire a virtual assistant from the Philippines for fairly cheap. If I wanted that I could have that already.
So personally, I don't see my life changing all that much on day 1 of post-AGI humanity. I have an emergency fund, and while that isn't going to last forever, I'm going to be okay for a bit.
That's a myopic view of the situation though. What about the world past me and my needs? AGI could drive cars, but that technology is already here and the sky hasn't fallen. It might, but it's going to take a while. I have friends in other industries that have been devastated in the past few years, and they've survived, though it's been rough at times for them. AGI isn't going to make everyone obsolete overnight any more than cars did for horses.
ASI, artificial super intelligence, is where it gets interesting, because then human thinking is obsolete, just like cars made walking places obsolete. Which is to say, ASI still won't obsolete human thinking, especially while it requires insane amounts of power to run. It'll be related to things that justify the cost, and he limited by the hardware it can run on. If we look at the beginning of the computer era, there was only room for maybe 5 or 6 of those in the US? And now look where we are. So even ASI doesn't scare me on day one.
The day they hook it up to Skynet though, it's time for me to get out of the city and away from population centers and military bases.