That being said, AGI is not a necessary requirement for AI to be totally world-changing
I think I want various forms of AI that are more focused on specific domains. I want AI tools, not companions or peers or (gulp) masters.
(Then again, people thought they wanted faster horses before they rolled out the Model T)
As long as this is the case though I would expect Altman will be hyping up AGI a lot, regardless of it's veracity.
Notice how despite all the bickering and tittle tattle in the news, nothing ever happens.
When you frame it this way, things make a lot more sense.
I often wonder if it is on purpose; like a slot machine — the thrill of the occasional win keeps you coming back to try again.
This might be because you're a balanced individual irl with possibly a strong social circle.
There are many many individuals who do not have those things and it's probably, objectively, late for them as adults to develop. They would happily take on an agi companion.. or master. Even for myself, I wouldn't mind a TARS.
Sure but literally _who_ is planning for this? Not any of the AI players, no government, no major political party anywhere. There's no incentive in our society that's set up for this to happen.
Or you get something that can actually reason, which means it can solve for unknown issues, which means it can be very powerful. But this is something that we aren't even close to figuring out.
There is a limit to power though - in general it seems that reality is full of non computationally reducible processes, which means that an AI will have to simulate reality faster than reality in parallel. So all powerful all knowing AGI is likely impossible.
But something that can reason is going to be very useful because it can figure things out that haven't been explicitly trained on.
This is a common misunderstanding of LLMs. The major, qualitative difference is that LLMs represent their knowledge in a latent space that is composable and can be interpolated. For a significant class of programming problems this is industry changing.
E.g. "solve problem X for which there is copious training data, subject to constraints Y for which there is also copious training data" can actually solve a lot of engineering problems for combinations of X and Y that never previously existed, and instead would take many hours of assembling code from a patchwork of tutorials and StackOverflow posts.
This leaves the unknown issues that require deeper reasoning to established software engineers, but so much of the technology industry is using well known stacks to implement CRUD and moving bytes from A to B for different business needs. This is what LLMs basically turbocharge.
But given a sufficiently hard task for which the data is not in the training set in explicit format, its pretty easy to see how LLMs can't reason.
"I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics"
But more importantly, most already have enough money to not have to worry about employment.
Not only will AI run the company, it will run the world. Remember: a product/service only costs money because somewhere down the assembly line or in some office, there are human workers who need to feed their family. If AI can help gradually reduce human involvement to 0, with good market competition (AI can help with this too - if AI can be capable CEOs, starting your business will be insanely easy,) and we’ll get near absolute abundance. Then humanity will be basically printing any product & service on demand at 0 cost like how we print money today.
I wouldn’t even worry about unequal distribution of wealth, because with absolute abundance, any piece of the pie is an infinitely large pie. Still think the world isn’t perfect in that future? Just one prompt, and the robot army will do whatever it takes to fix it for you.
Because the first company to achieve AGI might make their CEO the first personality to achieve immortality.
People would be crazy to assume Zuckerberg or Musk haven't mused personally (or to their close friends) about how nice it would be to have an AGI crafted in their image take over their companies, forever. (After they die or retire)
In practice though, they're the ones closest to the money, and it's their name on all the contracts.
If this theory holds true, we'll actually be quite resilient to AI—the rich will always need people to scapegoat.
"Knowledge worker" is a rather broad category.
You can be the king. The people you let live will be your vassals. And the AI robots will be your peasant slave army. You won't have to sell anything to anyone because they will pay you tribute to be allowed to live. You don't sell to them, you tax them and take their output. It's kind of like being a CEO but the power dynamic is mainlined so it hits stronger.
Published in 1971, translated to English in 1981.
If someone can own the whole world and have anything you want at the snap of your finger, you don't need any sort of human economy doing other things that take away your resources for reasons that are suboptimal to you
Or they want to kill everyone else?
Because people won't just lay down and wait for death to embrace them...
Apparently the threshold for low pay and poor treatment among non-knowledge-workers is quite low. I'm assuming the same is going to be true for knowledge workers once they can be replaced an mass.