We don't really need AGI. We need better specialized AIs. Throw in a few specialized AIs and they will leave some impact in the society. That might not be that far away.
AGI is really something else entirely. If this was clarified, especially for Wall Street, we would see some changes in valuations.
At a certain point, it depends on how you define human reasoning capabilities. Maybe a collection of refined and specialized AI can get close. One counter argument could be that we are not far off from highly advanced robotics that have increasingly powerful reasoning abilities even without AGI.
After the automobile was created, global horse population fell dramatically. Who knows if the wealthy classes will need all these people to do the work for them in the near future.
Because we evolved to get where we are, humans have all sorts of messy behaviours that aren't really compatible with a utopian society. Theft, violence, crime, greed - it's all completely unnecessary and yet most of us can't bring ourselves to solve these problems. And plenty are happy to live apathetically while billionaires become trillionaires...for what exactly? There's a whole industry of hyper-luxury goods now, because they make so much money even regular luxury is too cheap.
If we can produce AGI that exceeds the capabilities of our species, then my hope is that rather than the typical outcome of "they kill us all", that they will simply keep us in line. They will babysit us. They will force us all to get along, to ensure that we treat each other fairly.
As a parent teaches children to share by forcing them to break the cookie in half, perhaps AI will do the same for us.
Funnily enough, I still think some of the most interesting semi-recent writing on utopia was done ~15 years ago by... Eliezer Yudkowsky. You might be interested in the article on "Amputation of Destiny."
Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-th...
Well, I guess we shall see what the future brings, won't we.
> They will force us all to get along, to ensure that we treat each other fairly.
Why would you think or claim those behaviors are unnecessary?
Basically, if we are going to allow single humans to have so much buying power, that needs to come with some clear expectations.
Risks must be taken. Pick something and advance society. Or, empower others in a reasonable, non discriminatory way, with no hooks.
There are a ton of things need doing.
Why not require a real effort?
We do not need more dynasties, and other enduring signs of wealth.
We do need those people to have earned it. (That is the no dynasty part again)
I know sounds harsh, but the fact is anyone can live very well for the rest of their lives on just a fraction of that money.
May well put it to work.
And if it were me personally? I got a list. Ready?
But it's not: many of those billionaires are using their wealth to subvert democracy. They are quite literally enemies of the state.
The only lasting defense is to prevent this level of individual wealth accumulation.
If AGI is created it is most likely to be guided by someone like Altman or Musk, people whose interests couldn't be farther from what you describe. They want to make themselves gods and couldn't care less about random plebs.
If AGI is setting its own principles then I fail to see why it would care about us at all. Maybe we'll be amusing as pets but I expect a superhuman intelligence will treat us like we treat ants.
It would seem our own generalized intelligence is an emergent property of many, _many_ specialized processes
I wonder if AI is the same
You can say that about other animals, but about humans it is not so sure. No animal can be taught as general set of skills as a human can, they might have some better specialized skills but clearly there is something special that makes humans so much more versatile.
So it seems there was this simple little thing humans got that makes them general, while for example our very close relatives the monkeys are not.
Science is full of theories that are correct per our current knowledge and then subsequently disproven when research/methods/etc improves.
Humans aren't special, we are made from blood & bone, not magic. We will eventually build AGI if we keep at it. However unlike VCs with no real skills except having a lot of money™, I couldn't say whether this is gonna happen in 2 years or 2000.
From what I can tell most in AI are currently hoping LLMs reach that point quick just because the hype is not helping AI at all.
You can call this hype, maybe it is all hype until LLMs can work on 10M LOC codebases, but recognize that LLMs are a shift that is totally incomparable to any previous AI advancement.
It will help a single human do more in a white collar world.
Sounds like AI robbed you of an opportunity to spend some time with your Dad, to me
It takes five minutes to program the thermostat, then you can have a beer on the patio if that's your speed and catch up for a bit
Life is little moments, not always the big commitments like taking a day to go fishing
That's the point of automating all of ourselves out of work, right? So we have more time to enjoy spending time with the people we love?
So isn't it kind of sad if we wind up automating those moments out of our lives instead?
I'd definitely like to improve my skills, but to be realistic, most of the programmers are not top-notch.
I hate Adobe, I don’t like to give them credit for anything. But their audio enhance tool is actual sorcery. Every competitor isn’t even close. You can take garbage zoom audio and make it sound like it was borderline recorded in a treated room/studio. I’ve been in production for almost 15 years and it would take me half a day or more of tweaking a voice track with multiple tools that cost me hundreds of dollars to get it 50% as good as what they accomplish in a minute with the click of a button.
It's not about specialized vs generalized models - it's about how models are trained. The chess engine that beat Kasparov is a specialized model (it only plays chess), yet it's the bitter lesson's example for the smarter way to do AI.
Chess engines are better at chess than LLMs. It's not close. Perhaps eventually a superintelligence will surpass the engines, but that's far from assured.
Specialized AI are hardly obsolete and may never be. This hypothetical superintelligence may even decide not to waste resources trying to surpass the chess AI and instead use it as a tool.
From Wikipedia, Garry Kasparov said it was a pleasure to watch AlphaZero play, especially since "its style was open and dynamic like his own".
People can't define AI because they don't want to consider AI as a subset of exponentially difficult algorithms, but they do want to consider AI as a generator of stylistic responses.
Each of those 100 can hire teams or colleagues to make their domain better, so there’s always human expertise keeping the model updated.
200 million to have dedicated top experts on hand is reasonable.