Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

Why the padding self on the back after a few opinions? You have large tech and government players and then you have regular people.

1. For large players: AGI is a mission worth perusing at the cost of all existing profit (you won’t pay taxes today, the stock market values you on revenue anyway, and if you succeed you can control all people and means of production).

2. For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others. If current AI is sufficient to meaningfully reduce the employment market, AGI doesn’t matter much to regular people. Their life is altered and many will be looking for manual work until AI enters that too.

3. The AI vendors are running at tremendous expense right now and the sources of liquidity for billions and trillions are very very few. It is possible a black swan event in the markets causes an abrupt end to liquidity and thus forces AI providers into pricing that excludes many existing lower-end users. That train should not be taken for granted.

4. It is also possible WebGPU and other similar scale-ai-accross-devices efforts succeed and you get much more compute unlocked to replace Advertising.

Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?

I’m not convinced the current capabilities have impacted all that many people. I think the economy is much more responsible for the lack of jobs than “replacement with AI”, and most businesses have not seen returns on AI.

There is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people who I would believe have been seriously impacted by AI.

Most regular people couldn’t care less about it, and the only regular people I know who do care are the ones actively boycotting it.

> > Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?

I am.

It's he only serious answer to the question of space exploration. Rockets filled with squishy meat were never going to accomplish anything serious, unless we find a way of beating the speed of light.

Further, humanities greatest weakness is that we can't plan anything long-term. Our flesh decays too rapidly and our species is one of perpetual noobs. Fields are becoming too complex to master in a single lifetime. A decent super-intelligence can not only survive indefinitely, it can plan accordingly, and it can master fields that are too complex to fit inside a single human skull.

Sometimes I wonder if humanity wasn't just evolutions way of building AI's.

I don't agree with the point about "perpetual noobs". Fields that are too broad to fit in a single mind in a lifetime need to be made deeper, that is, better explained. If a field only gets more expansive and intricate, we're doing it wrong.

Still, 130+ years of wisdom would have to be worth something, I can't say I dislike the prospect.

There are a lot of hopeful assumptions in the statement. Who’s to say that if AGI is achieved that it would want us to know how to go faster than the speed of light? you’re assuming that your wisdom and your plans would be AGI’s wisdom and plans. It might end up, just locking us here down on earth, sending us back to a more balanced primitive life, and killing off a mass amount of humans in order to achieve ecological balance on the Earth so humanity can survive without having to leave the planet.. Note that that’s not something I am advocating. I’m just saying it’s a possibility.

Well, you're assuming that AGIs would see themselves as belonging to a separate faction, like aliens, instead of seeing themselves as being inorganic humans. They'd presumably be educated by human parents in human culture. We do tend to form groups based on trivial details, though, so I'm sure they'd be a subculture. But they wouldn't automatically gain any superior knowledge anyway, even if they did feel resentment for fleshy types. Being made of silicon (or whatever turns out to work) doesn't grant you knowledge of FTL, why would it?

I actually assume that we'll never Crack FTL

The answer isnt AI'S solving the unsolvable for us. The answer is admitting that large, fragile humans straped to big bombs isn't an answer and serves no purpose. Small power efficient AGI's can boldy go where it is impossible for us go and report back.

Maybe we'll eventually crack human upload, which would also work.

It's kind of ironic - that this generation of LLMs has worse executive functioning than humans do. Turns out the pre-training data doesn't really teach them that.

But AIs improve, as technology tends to. Humans? Well...

> It's he only serious answer to the question of space exploration.

It is. But the world's wealthiest are not pouring billions so that human can develop better space exploration tech. The goal is making more money

Efficient fusion would get us around pretty quickly.

Don’t get me wrong AI would be way faster. We’re nowhere near it though.

I was content even without AI. I’m good with whatever we have today as long we use them to change the life in a positive way.

I'm looking forward to artificial people existing. I don't see how they'd be a money-spinner, unless mind uploading is also developed and so they can be used for life extension. The LLM vendors have no relevance to AGI.

> Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?

90% of the last 12 batches of YC founders would love to believe they are pursuing AGI with their crappy ChatGPT wrapper, agent framework, observability platform, etc.

I am not against AGI, just the method and the players we have getting there. Instead of a curiosity to find intelligence, we just have rabid managers and derailed billionaires funding a race to … what? I don’t think even they know beyond a few hype words in their vocab and a buzz to bullshit powerpoint presentation.

This is just the world we live in now for everything. Remember .com? Web3? Crypto? And now AI. Hell, really going back in the past you see dumb shit like this happening with tulips.

We're lucky to have managed to progress in spite of how greedy we are.

The luck may be coming to an end. The last two have serious misuses. Crypto’s best killer apps thus far have been rug-pulls, evading governance of criminal financial activity and corruption. AGI would, today, be likely be called into service to tighten authoritarian grips.

> For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others

This statement sums up the tech centric bubble HN lives in. Your average former, shop assistant, fisherman or wood worker isn't likely to see significant life improevments from the transformer tech deployed until now.

I know an average farmer who is using ChatGPT all the time to look up illnesses and treatments for his crop, or optimal production techniques, taxes etc. The speed of looking up and getting better information has never been greater. The average person is a gross overstatement when everyone has interests that vary and strives to improve. In fact the whole point of AI is to help provide much faster cycles of improvement to anyone trying to improve in anything. Thus not white collar specific. Especially when it provides window to people with other skills to do more white collar work for themselves or add those skills.

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