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Why I don't think AGI is imminent

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Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#201

Post by verzali »

BobbyJo wrote: post #98
materielle wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years. Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society. Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007. I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.

As a young adult in 2007, what cliff were we close to? The GFC was a big recession, but I never thought society was near collapse.

We weren't that far away from ATMs refusing to hand out cash, banks limiting withdrawals from accounts (if your bank hadn't already gone under), and a subsequent complete collapse of the financial system. The only thing that saved us from that was an extraordinary intervention by governments, something I am not sure they would be capable of doing today.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#202

Post by stack_framer »

I'm seeing a 404 page. I assume this is unintentional, but it's making a funny point: How could AGI possibly be imminent and we still have 404 pages?

Regardless, I agree with this article whose body eludes me: AGI is not imminent, it's hype in the extreme. It's the next fusion. It's perpetually on the horizon (pun intended), and we've wasted trillions on machines that will never reach it.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#203

Post by pydry »

foo42 wrote: post #187
materielle wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years. Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society. Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007. I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.

I worry that if the reality lives up to investors dreams it will be massively disruptive for society which will lead us down dark paths. On the other hand if it _doesn't_ live up to their dreams, then there is so much invested in that dream financially that it will lead to massive societal disruption when the public is left holding the bag, which will also lead us down dark paths.

It's already made it impossible to trust half of the content i read online.

Whenever i use search terms to ask a specific question these days theres usually a page of slop dedicated to the answer which appears top for relevancy.

Once i realize it is slop i realize the relevant information could be hallicinated so i cant trust it.

At the same time im seeing a huge upswing in probable human created content being accused of being slop.

We're seeing a tragedy of the information commons play out on an enormous scale at hyperspeed.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#204

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

hi_hi wrote: post #63

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…

If AGI is already here actions would be so greatly accelerated humans wouldn’t have time to respond.

Remember that weather balloon the US found a few years ago that for days was on the news as a Chinese spy balloon?

Well whether it was a spy balloon or a weather balloon but the first hint of its existence could have triggered a nuclear war that could have already been the end of the world as we know it because AGI will almost certainly be deployed to control the U.S. and Chinese military systems and it would have acted well before any human would have time to intercept its actions.

That’s the apocalyptic nuclear winter scenario.

There are many other scenarios.

An AGI which has been infused with a tremendous amount of ethics so the above doesn’t happen, may also lead to terrible outcomes for a human. An AGI would essentially be a different species (although a non biological one). If it replicated human ethics even when we apply them inconsistently, it would learn that treating other species brutally (we breed, enslave, imprison, torture, and then kill over 80 billion land animals annually in animal agriculture, and possibly trillions of water animals). There’s no reason it wouldn’t do that to us.

Finally, if we infuse it with our ethics but it’s smart enough to apply them consistently (even a basic application of our ethics would have us end animal agriculture immediately), so it realizes that humans are wrong and doesn’t do the same thing to humans, it might still create an existential crisis for humans as our entire identity is based on thinking we are smarter and intellectually superior to all other species, which wouldn’t be true anymore. Further it would erode beliefs in gods and other supernatural BS we believe which might at the very least lead humans to stop reproducing due to the existential despair this might cause.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#205

Post by clejack »

rfv6723 wrote: post #199
FloorEgg wrote: post #175

https://archive.is/D4EYW For anyone seeing 404

The skepticism surrounding AGI often feels like an attempt to judge a car by its inability to eat grass. We treat "cognitive primitives" like object constancy and causality as if they are mystical, hardwired biological modules, but they are essentially just high-dimensional labels for invariant relationships within a physical manifold. Object constancy is not a pre-installed software patch; it is the emergent realiza…

If human biological intelligence is our reference for general intelligence, then being skeptical about AGI is reasonable given its current capabilities. This isn't biological narcissism, this is setting a datum (this wasn't written by chatgpt I promise).

Humans have a great capacity for problem solving and creativity which, at its heights, completely dwarfs other creatures on this planet. What else would we reference for general intelligence if not ourselves?

My skepticism towards AGI is primarily supported by my interactions with current systems that are contenders for having this property.

Here's a recent conversation with chatgpt.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69930acc-3680-8008-a6f3-ba36624cb2...

This system doesn't seem general to me it seems like a specialized tool that has really good logic mimicry abilities. I asked it if the silence response was hard coded, it said no then went on to explain how the silence was hard coded via a separate layer from the LLM portion which would just respond indefinitely.

It's output is extremely impressive, but general intelligence it is not.

On your final point about functional replacement not requiring biological mimicry. We don't know whether biological mimicry is required or not. We can only test things until we find out or gain some greater understanding of reality that allows us to prove how intelligence emerges.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#206

Post by [deleted] »

myegorov wrote: post #141
znnajdla wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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*.

>My productive output as a programmer in software and business have expanded 3x compounding monthly . In what units?

[deleted]

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#207

Post by znnajdla »

waterTanuki wrote: post #144
znnajdla wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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*.

Are you working for 3x less the time compounding monthly ? Are you making 3x the money compounding monthly ? No? Then what's the point?

Yes and yes.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#209

Post by znnajdla »

myegorov wrote: post #141
znnajdla wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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*.

>My productive output as a programmer in software and business have expanded 3x compounding monthly . In what units?

Tasks completed in my todo list software I’ve been measuring my output for 5 years. Time saved because I built one off tools to automate many common workflows. And yes even dollars earned.

I don’t mean 3x compounding monthly every month, I mean 3x total since I started using Claude Code about 6 months ago but the benefits keep compounding.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#210

Post by optimalsolver »

jltsiren wrote: post #62
hi_hi wrote: post #11

How will we know if its AGI/Not AGI? (I don't think a simple app is gonna cut it here haha) What is the benchmark now that the Turing test has been blown out of the water?

Until recently, philosophy of artificial intelligence seemed to be mostly about arguments why the Turing test was not a useful benchmark for intelligence. Pretty much everyone who had ever thought about the problem seriously had come to the same conclusion. The fundamental issue was the assumption that general intelligence is an objective property that can be determined experimentally. It's better to consider intelli…

Why is LLM-generated writing so obvious?
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