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I also don't understand it. If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. The entire structure of the modern economy and the so

• tim333 2y ago
  I think it would be much less dramatic than that if you mean human level abilities by AGI. Initially you might be able to replace the odd human by a robot equivalent probably costing more to begin with. To scale to replace everyone levels would take years and life would probably go on as normal for quite a while. Down the line assuming lots of ASI robots, if you wanted them to farm or build you a house say you'd still need land, materials, compute and energy which will not be unlimited.
• deleted 2y ago
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• lawrenceyan 2y ago
  What you're talking about is something in the vein of exponential super intelligence. Realistically what actually ends up happening imo, we get human level AGI and hit a ceiling there. Agents replace large portions of the current service economy greatly increasing automation / efficiency for companies. People continue to live their lives, as the idea of having a human level AGI personal assistant becomes normalized and then taken for granted.
  • brigadier132 2y ago
    I think you underestimate what can be accomplished with human level agi. Human level agi could mean 1 million Von Neumann level intelligences cranking 24/7 on humanity's problems.
    • lawrenceyan 2y ago
      Yeah, I think you're probably right after further consideration and trying some new models today.
    • mentos 2y ago
      Or cranking on super intelligence. What’s the minimum coefficient of human intelligence necessary to boot strap to infinity?
      • scarmig 2y ago
        Infinity intelligence is a very vague and probably ill-defined concept; to go to an impossible extreme, if you're capable of modeling and predicting everything in the universe perfectly at zero cost, what would it even mean to be more intelligent? That is a hard limit on intelligence, but neural networks can't even reach that. What is the actual limit? No one knows. Maybe it's something relatively close to that, modulo physical constraints. Maybe it's right above the maximum human intelligence (and evolution managed to converge to a near optimal architecture). No one knows.
        • astrange 2y ago
          > if you're capable of modeling and predicting everything in the universe perfectly at zero cost As far as we know, it's impossible to model any part of the universe perfectly, although it usually doesn't matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
    • TaylorAlexander 2y ago
      Only if there are no hardware limits, which seems highly unlikely.
      • unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
        Right, the comments are assuming an entrepreneur could conjure an army of brains out of nothing. In reality, the question is whether those brains are so much cheaper they open avenues currently unavailable. Would it be cheaper to hire an AGI or a human intern?
  • andyjohnson0 2y ago
    > Agents replace large portions of the current service economy greatly increasing automation / efficiency for companies. > People continue to live their lives Presumably large numbers of those people no longer have jobs, and therefore no income. > we get human level AGI and hit a ceiling there Recently I've been wondering if our best chance for a brake on runaway non-hard-takeoff superintelligence would be that the economy would be trashed.
    • lawrenceyan 2y ago
      People will move from the service economy to the entertainment economy powered by Youtube, Tiktok, Mr. Beast, and others. Half-joking. In seriousness, something like a UBI will most likely happen.
      • astrange 2y ago
        The point of UBI or other welfare systems is for people we don't /want/ working, children and the elderly. It's impossible to run out of work for people who are capable of it. As an example, if you have two people and a piece of paper, just tear up the paper into strips, call them money and start exchanging them. Congrats, you both have income now. (This is assuming the AGI has solved the problem of food and stuff, otherwise they're going to have to trade for that and may run out of currency.)
  • dayvid 2y ago
    If we can get human level AGI we will definitely get exponential super intelligence
    • trashtester 2y ago
      Every sigmoid ends somewhere. ASI will have limits, but the limits are surely so far beyond human level that it may as well be exponential from our point of view.
  • dyauspitr 2y ago
    If you can get a truly human level AGI, with enough resources it will get to super intelligence by itself.
  • khafra 2y ago
    Looking back at the history of artificial cognition machines, how many of them hit a ceiling at human-level capabilities? - A simple calculator can beat any human at arithmetic - A word processor with a hard disk is orders of magnitude better than any human at memorizing text - No human can approach the ELO of a chess program running on a cheap laptop - No human polymath has journeyman-level knowledge of a tiny fraction of the fields that LLMs can recite textbook answers from Why should we expect AGI to be the first cognitive capabilities that does not quickly shoot past human-level ability?
    • lawrenceyan 2y ago
      Yeah so, I just tried a new experimental LLM today. Changed my mind. Think you’re right. At the very least, these models will reach polymath comprehension in every field that exists. And PhD level expertise in every field all at once is by definition superhuman, since people currently are time constrained by limited lifespans.
• neaanopri 2y ago
  Yeah, and if we get the second coming of Christ, the elect will be saved, and the rest will be damned.
• TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  > If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. The entire structure of the modern economy and the society surrounding it collapses overnight. Increasingly this just seems like fantasy to me. I suspect we will see big changes similar to the way computers changed the economy, but we will not see "capital as we know it become basically worthless" or "the modern economy and society around it collapse overnight". Property rights will still have value. Manufacturing facilities will still have value. Social media sites will still have value. If this is a fantasy that will not happen, we really don't need to reason about the implications of it happening. Consider that in 1968 some people imagined that the world of 2001 would be like the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when in reality the shuttle program was soon to wind down, with little to replace it for another 20 years.
  • bobthecowboy 2y ago
    > Property rights will still have value. Manufacturing facilities will still have value. Social media sites will still have value. I was with you on the first two, but the second one I don't get? We don't even have AGI right now, and social media sites are already increasingly viewed by many people I know as having dubious value. Adding LLM's to the mix lowers that value, if anything (spam/bots/nonsense go up). Adding AGI would seem to further reduce that value.
    • TaylorAlexander 2y ago
      Well we will find out. I think the audience has value to advertisers, and I suspect that basic mechanic will continue in to the future. > social media sites are already increasingly viewed by many people I know as having dubious value I think we have all been saying this for 15 years but they keep getting more valuable.
• torginus 2y ago
  Honestly this is a pretty wild take. AGI won't make food appear out of thin air. Buildings wont just sprout out of the ground so everybody will get to live in a mansion. We would probably get the ability to generate infinite software, but a lot of stuff, like engineering would still require trial and error. Creating great art would still require inspiration gathered in the real world. I expect it will bring about a new age of techno-feudalism - since selling intellectual labor will become impossible, only low value-add physical or mixed labor will become viable, which won't be paid very well. People with capital will still own said capital, but you probably won't be able to catch up to them by selling your labour, which will recreate the economic situation of the middle ages. Another analogy I like is gold. If someone invented a way of making gold, it would bring down the price of the metal to next to nothing. In capitalist terms, it would constitute a huge destruction of value. Same thing with AI - while human intelligence is productive, I'm pretty sure there's a value in its scarcity - that fancy degree from a top university or any sort of acquired knowledge is somewhat valuable by the nature of its scarcity. Infinite supply would create value, and destroy it, not sure how the total would shake out. Additionally, it would definitely suck that all the people financing their homes from their intellectual jobs would have to default on their loans, and the people whose services they employ, like construction workers, would go out of business as well.
  • phs318u 2y ago
    > which will recreate the economic situation of the middle ages Indeed. Or as I’ve said before: a return to the historical mean.
  • trashtester 2y ago
    I would be super surprised if we're not going to see robots everywhere by 2040. Because if AI has one "killer app", it's to control robots. Dark pun intended.
• BobbyJo 2y ago
  > If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless I see it as capital becoming infinitely more valuable and labor becoming worthless, since capital can be transmuted directly into labor at that point.
  • convolvatron 2y ago
    if agi is commoditized and labor is useless, what does anyone need capital for? paying ad time on monopolized social media channels?
    • stirlo 2y ago
      For the physical infrastructure that the AGI (and world population) uses. Capital will still be needed to purchase finite land and resources even if all labour (physical and services) is replaced.
    • morgante 2y ago
      Commoditized doesn't mean 0 capex. Literal commodities can in fact be very capital intensive (ex. offshore oil rigs). In this case, you need capital to stockpile the GPUs.
      • trashtester 2y ago
        I've put some of my savings in commodities (mines, etc)..... If ASI and the ability to build robots becomes generally available and virtually free (and if the exponential growth stops), the things that retain their value will be land and raw materials (including raw materials that contain energy).
  • dyauspitr 2y ago
    Labor will never become worthless until you have physical robots with AGI and the dexterity to do what an average human can.
    • khafra 2y ago
• trashtester 2y ago
  > If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. If ASI is reached but is controlled by only a few, then ASI may become the most important form of capital of all. Resources, land and pre-existing installations will still be important, though. What will truly suffer if the ASI's potential is realized, is the value of labor. If anything, capital may become more important than before. Now this MAY be followed by attempts by governments or voters to nationalize the AI. But it can also mean that whoever is in power decides that it becomes irrelevant what the population wants. Particularly if the ASI can be used to operate robotic police capable of pacifying the populace.