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Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#41

Post by nashashmi »

mrtksn wrote: post #18

IMHO Countries with established culture of fair communal living will do good, So probably nordic Europeans have the highest chance. Countries with selfish populations who base their lives around economic activity will be obliterated as their core existence becomes obsolete. Why? Because when you get the AGI it should be able to self-replicate like the organic general intelligence: the humans. Humans don't have a mech…

I hope you are right. Your discernment is on communal vs independent material-duplicative living. But AGI will also be made hard to reach. And so for communal communities to access it, they would have to part away considerable resources. Well off nations would get first access to AGI. And poorer nations would get last access. By that time, the globalization (neo colonialism) order would have taken possession nearly over everything they own.

Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#42

Post by zug_zug »

If AGI were invented tomorrow, it'd probably be by open AI. I doubt whoever made it would tell anybody, because the government might step in, they certainly wouldn't make it freely available online.

If it was about as smart as a person, they'd probably roll out a weak "agent" version of for demo sake to get more funding. This would continue until they made one that was significantly more intelligent or cheap.

If they had one that was very cheap, they'd have 10,000 agents of it act together as a group to try to emulate a smart one, by considering every angle of every problem. This would likely mean 10,000 engineers making the AI better/cheaper/faster.

If they had one that was far smarter than a human, they probably have it improve itself, making it far better/cheaper/faster.

Then they'd try to see if they could use it to change the world. They'd have thousands of thinking machines that could be online, place phone-calls, engineer things, create ideas, make political campaigns, dig up dirt on people, or who knows what.

No "country" would "win," because this isn't a team sport and countries are just lines on maps.

Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#43

Post by roenxi »

mrob wrote: post #28

All countries fare worse. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. A…

> I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI.

Interesting to note that the current techniques are already general, there isn't a topic we can't throw them at and achieve some sort of result. There is already a trend of defining many humans as non-general intelligences so that AIs can be excluded from the category. The current state is, for practical purposes, AGI without ASI. Relatively dumb AGI. Artificial Inferior Intelligence, perhaps.

It is a curious question whether the techniques are fundamentally limited. I'm with you that I think they probably have no particular limit beyond a vague "perfect understanding of the situation".

Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#44

Post by rpcorb »

Den_VR wrote: post #38
mrob wrote: post #28

All countries fare worse. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. A…

It’s important to realize the constraints of chip production and electricity production. Beware of Rationalism detached from reality.

Such an overlooked aspect of this topic. Energy and the creation of physical resources are still major constraints. Intelligence on its own cannot magically manipulate reality to bootstrap its physical substrate.

Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#46

Post by phatfish »

cyanydeez wrote: post #33
ben_w wrote: post #31

As shown in these responses: You need to be explicit in what you mean by "AGI" as people are arguing not only about the meaning of the words behind all three initials, but also the combined whole independently of the words giving rise to the initialism.

Ok, how bought using the equivelent: God. If God showed up and was a nationalist, which nation do you think you'd want him supporting?

Maybe one of the Pacific islands with a population of like 50,000. That would be fun.

Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#47

Post by v5v3 »

analog31 wrote: post #22

As it stands, I have a hunch that the people at the top of governments tend to be among the more highly intelligent. I'll even give that to our leaders, but also to the leader of Iran, etc. If nothing else, the intelligence required to reach that level and stay there without getting killed or purged is impressive. By and large, the countries that are run by a single, centralized intelligence, are worse off than the c…

>I have a hunch that the people at the top of governments tend to be among the more highly intelligent.

People at the top of Western countries are not always the most highly intelligent.

'Can be controlled' is the lead criteria by those who put them there.

Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#48

Post by memonkey »

handfuloflight wrote: post #34
hiddencost wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases the people at the top are just more sociopathic.

Sociopathy still needs intelligence to effectively operate. Nobody brute forces their way to the top.

You can be born into it

Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#49

Post by mrob »

Den_VR wrote: post #38
mrob wrote: post #28

All countries fare worse. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. A…

It’s important to realize the constraints of chip production and electricity production. Beware of Rationalism detached from reality.

Resource allocation is where the free market excels. The most dangerous AGI will also be the most profitable, right up to the point when it's too late for us. It will get all the chips it needs.

Re: Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

#50

Post by jltsiren »

mrob wrote: post #28

All countries fare worse. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. A…

In many fields of R&D, the effort required to maintain a steady pace of improvement grows exponentially. Maybe you develop AGI one year by spending $X, and the next year you need $1.2X to make it 110% as good. For a while, you can keep investing more, and the productivity improvements from AGI also help a bit. But eventually the pace slows down, as the world economy is too small to sustain it.

Maybe self-improving AGI just the next technological advance required to sustain 2% annual economic growth.

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