Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…
I've been writing code for 20 years. AI has completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business. Nothing is the same anymore, and I feel I will be saying that again by the end of 2026. My productive output as a programmer in software and business have expanded 3x *compounding monthly*.
I'm certainly not holding my breath. In a handful of prompts I got the paid version of ChatGPT to say it's possible for dogs to lay eggs under the right circumstances.
I've long been terrified of the existence of adversarial prompts that can get me to say anything, that dogs can lay eggs, that there are five lights, that here's my bank info
That's the terrifying thing about ASI. It could convince me, using everything the AI has on me, from all of my digital footprint, to do whatever it wants me to to, just by saying the right thing to me in just the right way, by copying the voice of everyone I've ever talked to, and by sending a humanoid robot in a skin suit that looks like them to my house.
I think AGI is a long ways away, and there is a real possibility that once it arrives that it will require so much energy to maintain that humans will be cheaper.
But it's already like that; models are better than many workers, and I'm supervising agents. I'd rather have the model than numerous juniors; esp. the kind that can't identify the model's mistakes.
The problem becomes your retirement. Sure, you've earned "expert" status, but all the junior developers won't be hired, so they'll never learn from junior mistakes. They'll blindly trust agents and not know deeper techniques.
Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…
I think you are missing the point: If we assume that AGI is *not* yet here, but may be here soon, what will change when it arrives? Those changes could be big enough to affect you.
Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…
I've been writing code for 20 years. AI has completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business. Nothing is the same anymore, and I feel I will be saying that again by the end of 2026. My productive output as a programmer in software and business have expanded 3x *compounding monthly*.
Okay. So software engineers are vastly more efficient. Good I guess. "Revolutionize the entire world such that we rethink society down to its very basics like money and ownership" doesn't follow from that.
Now that understanding video and projecting what happens next indicates we're getting past the LLM problem of lacking a world model. That's encouraging. There's more than one way to do intelligence. Basic intelligence has evolved independently three times that we know of - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. All three show at least ape-level intelligence, but the species split before intelligence developed, and the brai…
I don't think those are examples of unique intelligence except perhaps in a chauvinistic, anthropomorphic sense. We only know that we can't get other animals to display patterns we associate with intelligence in humans, however truthfully that's just as likely to be that our measures of intelligence don't map cleanly onto cognitive/perceptual representations innate to other animals. As we look for new ways to challen…
I don't think they have ideas, so I don't think they're intelligent in the sense relevant to AGI. The list of intelligent animals is constantly increasing because doing some feat or other suffices for the animal to qualify. Solving mazes (slime molds), recognizing self in mirror (not dogs). Playing, using tools, reacting appropriately to words, transmitting habits down the generations (the closest thing they have to ideas). This is all imagined to be the precursors along the path to evolving intelligence, which conjures up a future world of complex crow and octopus material cultures. There's no reason to assume they're on such a path. Really all we're saying is that they seem clever. We've already made AI that seems clever, so the animals aren't a relevant example of anything.
The reason we do things is because of our biological needs, really to spread our DNA. AI has no "reason to do things", unless we program one into it. We could do that and have super-capable "worm" malware that would be hard to get rid of. But AI by itself has no "driving force". It does what it's programmed to do, just like us humans. AI can be used in weapons, and such weapons can be hugely lethal. But so is atomic bomb. AI by itself will not "take over". It could be used by some rogue nation to attack another nation. But surely that other nation would then use AI to defend itself. This is just to say I'm not afraid of AI, I'm afraid of people with fascistic leanings.
I don't know about AGI but I got bored and ran my plans for a new garage by Opus 4.6 and it was giving me some really surprising responses that have changed my plans a little. At the same time, it was also making some nonsense suggestions that no person would realistically make. When I prompted it for something in another chat which required genuine creativity, it fell flat on its face. I dunno, mixed bag. Value is p…
I've used it recently to flesh out a fully fledged business plan, pricing models, capacity planning & logistics for a 10 year period for a transport company (daily bus route). I already had most of it in my mind and on spreadsheets already (was an old plan that I wanted to revive), but seeing it figure out all the smaller details that would make or break it was amazing! I think MBA's should be worried as it did some…
Yeah it's really impressed me on occasion, but often in the same prompt output it just does something totally nonsensical. For my garage/shop, it generated an SVG of the proposed floor plan, taking care to place the sink away from moisture sensitive material and certain work stations close to each other for work flow, etc. it even routed plumbing and electrical...But it also arranged the work stations cramped together at the two narrow ends of the structure (such that they'd be impractical to actually work at) and ignored all the free wall space along the long axis so that literally most of the space was unused. It was also concerned about things that were non issues like contamination between certain stations, and had trouble when I explicitly told it something about station placement and it just couldn't seem to internalize it and kept putting it in the wrong place.
All this being said, what I was throwing at it was really not what it was optimized for, and it still delivered some really good ideas.