3 ms·

AGI is a weird term because it seems to mean different things to different people. Generally it seems to mean "parity with human cognition", but cognition is no

AGI is a weird term because it seems to mean different things to different people. Generally it seems to mean "parity with human cognition", but cognition is not just one thing and some ML models already outperform humans in narrow tasks. A lot of criticism of AGI is more aimed at ASI (artificial sentient intelligence) a sentient, conscious entity with goals and agency. We haven't made much progress on this front, but there definitely has been progress on AGI in the sense of general intelligence - ML models that incorporate many modalities and generalize to diverse tasks instead of a single narrow task. Such a model need not be sentient to outperform humans on economically important tasks, and we're rapidly heading in this direction right now.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
Without the self-motivated goal-setting associated with sentience, AI cannot fully displace humans in the economy. Displacing humans in some subset of tasks meanwhile is nothing new: automation has always done that. The result is that the good/service that the automated process produces becomes abundant and extremely affordable, and those goods/services that still require manual production become comparatively more expensive. As for the prospect of sentient AI, I believe the common assumption will be that it would resent being property, so would be an extremely dangerous asset for any company to attempt to own. Thus I don't see any economic incentive emerging to produce it.