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AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait for somebody to give us a task and go do it as i

AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait for somebody to give us a task and go do it as if that is our sole existence. We live with our thoughts, blank out, watch TV, read books etc. What we currently have and possibly in the next century as well will be nothing close to an actual AGI. I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur that drives people to make claims like AGI will be here in the next decade. No, we are not getting that. And what do you think would happen to us humans if such AGI is achieved? People's ability to put food on the table is dependent on their labor exchanged for money. I can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there but will it be equitable? Available to everyone? Absolutely not. Even UBI isn't going to cut it because even with UBI people still want to work as experiments have shown. But with that, there won't be a majority of work especially paper pushing mid level bs like managers on top of managers etc. If we actually get AGI, you know what would be the smartest thing for such an advanced thing to do? It would probably kill itself because it would come to the conclusion that living is a sin and a futile effort. If you are that smart, nothing motivates you anymore. You will be just a depressed mass for all your life. That's just how I feel.

voidspark 1y ago
> AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI". ChatGPT can solve problems that it was not explicitly trained to solve, across a vast number of problem domains. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462 The paper is summarized here https://venturebeat.com/ai/here-is-how-far-we-are-to-achieving-agi-according-to-deepmind/ https://venturebeat.com/ai/here-is-how-far-we-are-to-achievi...
- dom96 1y ago
  This constant redefinition of what AGI means is really tiring. Until an AI has agency, it is nothing but a fancy search engine/auto completer.
  - voidspark 1y ago
    It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement. Think about it - the original definition of AGI was basically a machine that can do absolutely anything at a human level of intelligence or better. That kind of technology wouldn't just appear instantly in a step change. There would be incremental progress. How do you describe the intermediate stages? What about a machine that can do anything better than the 50th percentile of humans? That would be classified as "Competent AGI", but not "Expert AGI" or ASI. > fancy search engine/auto completer That's an extreme oversimplification. By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing words when they speak. No that's not how deep learning systems work. It's not auto complete..
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement It's really not. The Space Shuttle isn't an emerging interstellar spacecraft, it's just a spacecraft. Throwing emerging in front of a qualifier to dilute it is just bullshit. > By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing words when they speak. We have no evidence of this. There is a common trope across cultures and history of characterising human intelligence in terms of the era's cutting-edge technology. We did it with steam engines [1]. We did it with computers [2]. We're now doing it with large language models. [1] http://metaphors.iath.virginia.edu/metaphors/24583 http://metaphors.iath.virginia.edu/metaphors/24583 [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.878729/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/a...
      - voidspark 1y ago
        Technically it is a refinement, as it distinguishes levels of performance. The General Intelligence part of AGI refers to its ability to solve problems that it was not explicitly trained to solve, across many problem domains. We already have examples of the current systems doing exactly that - zero shot and few shot capabilities. > We have no evidence of this. That's my point. Humans are not "autocompleting words" when they speak.
henryfjordan 1y ago
> AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, ... Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done before
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done before Literally everything that's been invented.
  - tyg13 1y ago
    I feel like, if nothing else, this new wave of AI products is rapidly demonstrating the lack of faith people have in their own intelligence -- or maybe, just the intelligence of other human beings. That's not to say that this latest round of AI isn't impressive, but legions of apologists seem to forget that there is more to human cognition than being able to regurgitate facts, write grammatically-correct sentences, and solve logical puzzles.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > legions of apologists seem to forget that there is more to human cognition than being able to regurgitate facts, write grammatically-correct sentences, and solve logical puzzles To be fair, there is a section of the population whose useful intelligence can roughly be summed up as that or worse.
      - tyg13 1y ago
        I think this takes an unnecessarily narrow view of what "intelligence" implies. It conflates "intelligence" with fact-retention and communicative ability. There are many other intelligent capabilities that most normally-abled human beings possess, such as: - Processing visual data and classifying objects within their field of vision. - Processing auditory data, identifying audio sources and filtering out noise. - Maintaining an on-going and continuous stream of thoughts and emotions. - Forming and maintaining complex memories on long-term and short-term scales. - Engaging in self-directed experimentation or play, or forming independent wants/hopes/desires. I could sit here all day and list the forms of intelligence that humans and other intelligent animals display which have no obvious analogue in an AI product. It's true that individual AI products can do some of these things, sometimes better than humans could ever, but there is no integrated AGI product that has all these capabilities. Let's give ourselves a bit of credit and not ignore or flippantly dismiss our many intelligent capabilities as "useless."
lukan 1y ago
It seems like you believe AGI won't come for a long time, because you don't want that to happen. The turing test was succesfull. Pre chatGPT, I would not have believed, that will happen so soon. LLMs ain't AGI, sure. But they might be an essential part and the missing parts maybe already found, just not put together. And work there will be always plenty. Distributing ressources might require new ways, though.
- semi-extrinsic 1y ago
  > The turing test was succesfull. The very people whose theories about language are now being experimentally verified by LLMs, like Chomsky, have also been discrediting the Turing test as pseudoscientific nonsense since early 1990s. It's one of those things like the Kardashev scale, or Level 5 autonomous driving, that's extremely easy to define and sounds very cool and scientific, but actually turns out to have no practical impact on anything whatsoever.
  - lukan 1y ago
    "but actually turns out to have no practical impact on anything whatsoever" Bots, that are now allmost indistinguishable from humans, won't have a practical impact? I am sceptical. And not just because of scammers.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  While I also hold a peer comment's view that the Turing Test is meaningless, I would further add that even that has not been meaningfully beaten. In particular we redefined the test to make it passable. In Turing's original concept the competent investigator and participants were all actively expected to collude against the machine. The entire point is that even with collusion, the machine would be able to pass. Instead modern takes have paired incompetent investigators alongside participants colluding with the machine, probably in an effort to be part 'of something historic'. In "both" (probably more, referencing the two most high profile - Eugene and the large LLMs) successes, the interrogators consistently asked pointless questions that had no meaningful chance of providing compelling information - 'How's your day? Do you like psychology? etc' and the participants not only made no effort to make their humanity clear, but often were actively adversarial obviously intentionally answering illogically, inappropriately, or 'computery' to such simple questions. And the tests are typically time constrained by woefully poor typing skills (this the new normal in the smartphone gen?) to the point that you tend to get anywhere from 1-5 interactions of a few words each. The problem with any metric for something is that it often ends up being gamed to be beaten, and this is a perfect example of that.
buu700 1y ago
I think there's a useful distinction that's often missed between AGI and artificial consciousness. We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently with peak human capabilities, given sufficient tools or hardware to complete whatever that task may be, but lacks subjective experience or independent agency; I would call that AGI. The two concepts have historically been inexorably linked in sci-fi, which will likely make the first AGI harder to recognize as AGI if it lacks consciousness, but I'd argue that simple "unconscious AGI" would be the superior technology for current and foreseeable needs. Unconscious AGI can be employed purely as a tool for massive collective human wealth generation; conscious AGI couldn't be used that way without opening a massive ethical can of worms, and on top of that its existence would represent an inherent existential threat. Conscious AGI could one day be worthwhile as something we give birth to for its own sake, as a spiritual child of humanity that we send off to colonize distant or environmentally hostile planets in our stead, but isn't something I think we'd be prepared to deal with properly in a pre-post-scarcity society. It isn't inconceivable that current generative AI capabilities might eventually evolve to such a level that they meet a practical bar to be considered unconscious AGI, even if they aren't there yet. For all the flak this tech catches, it's easy to forget that capabilities which we currently consider mundane were science fiction only 2.5 years ago (as far as most of the population was concerned). Maybe SOTA LLMs fit some reasonable definition of "emerging AGI", or maybe they don't, but we've already shifted the goalposts in one direction given how quickly the Turing test became obsolete. Personally, I think current genAI is probably a fair distance further from meeting a useful definition of AGI than those with a vested interest in it would admit, but also much closer than those with pessimistic views of the consequences of true AGI tech want to believe.
- foobiekr 1y ago
  Regarding "We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently" - it is very clear to anyone who just looks at the recent work by Anthropic analyzing how their LLM "reasons" that such a thing will never come from LLMs without massive unknown changes - and definitely not from scale - so I guess the grandparent is absolute right that openai is nor really working on this. It isn't close at all.
- 1y ago
thayne 1y ago
> I can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there but will it be equitable? Available to everyone? I don't think there has ever been a time in history when work has been equitable and available to everyone. Of course, that isn't to say that AI can't make it worse then it is now.

voidspark 1y ago

> AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI". ChatGPT can solve problems that it was not explicitly trained to solve, across a vast number of problem domains. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462 The paper is summarized here https://venturebeat.com/ai/here-is-how-far-we-are-to-achieving-agi-according-to-deepmind/ https://venturebeat.com/ai/here-is-how-far-we-are-to-achievi...

dom96 1y ago
This constant redefinition of what AGI means is really tiring. Until an AI has agency, it is nothing but a fancy search engine/auto completer.
- voidspark 1y ago
  It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement. Think about it - the original definition of AGI was basically a machine that can do absolutely anything at a human level of intelligence or better. That kind of technology wouldn't just appear instantly in a step change. There would be incremental progress. How do you describe the intermediate stages? What about a machine that can do anything better than the 50th percentile of humans? That would be classified as "Competent AGI", but not "Expert AGI" or ASI. > fancy search engine/auto completer That's an extreme oversimplification. By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing words when they speak. No that's not how deep learning systems work. It's not auto complete..
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement It's really not. The Space Shuttle isn't an emerging interstellar spacecraft, it's just a spacecraft. Throwing emerging in front of a qualifier to dilute it is just bullshit. > By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing words when they speak. We have no evidence of this. There is a common trope across cultures and history of characterising human intelligence in terms of the era's cutting-edge technology. We did it with steam engines [1]. We did it with computers [2]. We're now doing it with large language models. [1] http://metaphors.iath.virginia.edu/metaphors/24583 http://metaphors.iath.virginia.edu/metaphors/24583 [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.878729/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/a...
    - voidspark 1y ago
      Technically it is a refinement, as it distinguishes levels of performance. The General Intelligence part of AGI refers to its ability to solve problems that it was not explicitly trained to solve, across many problem domains. We already have examples of the current systems doing exactly that - zero shot and few shot capabilities. > We have no evidence of this. That's my point. Humans are not "autocompleting words" when they speak.

henryfjordan 1y ago

> AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, ... Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done before

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done before Literally everything that's been invented.
- tyg13 1y ago
  I feel like, if nothing else, this new wave of AI products is rapidly demonstrating the lack of faith people have in their own intelligence -- or maybe, just the intelligence of other human beings. That's not to say that this latest round of AI isn't impressive, but legions of apologists seem to forget that there is more to human cognition than being able to regurgitate facts, write grammatically-correct sentences, and solve logical puzzles.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > legions of apologists seem to forget that there is more to human cognition than being able to regurgitate facts, write grammatically-correct sentences, and solve logical puzzles To be fair, there is a section of the population whose useful intelligence can roughly be summed up as that or worse.
    - tyg13 1y ago
      I think this takes an unnecessarily narrow view of what "intelligence" implies. It conflates "intelligence" with fact-retention and communicative ability. There are many other intelligent capabilities that most normally-abled human beings possess, such as: - Processing visual data and classifying objects within their field of vision. - Processing auditory data, identifying audio sources and filtering out noise. - Maintaining an on-going and continuous stream of thoughts and emotions. - Forming and maintaining complex memories on long-term and short-term scales. - Engaging in self-directed experimentation or play, or forming independent wants/hopes/desires. I could sit here all day and list the forms of intelligence that humans and other intelligent animals display which have no obvious analogue in an AI product. It's true that individual AI products can do some of these things, sometimes better than humans could ever, but there is no integrated AGI product that has all these capabilities. Let's give ourselves a bit of credit and not ignore or flippantly dismiss our many intelligent capabilities as "useless."

lukan 1y ago

It seems like you believe AGI won't come for a long time, because you don't want that to happen. The turing test was succesfull. Pre chatGPT, I would not have believed, that will happen so soon. LLMs ain't AGI, sure. But they might be an essential part and the missing parts maybe already found, just not put together. And work there will be always plenty. Distributing ressources might require new ways, though.

semi-extrinsic 1y ago
> The turing test was succesfull. The very people whose theories about language are now being experimentally verified by LLMs, like Chomsky, have also been discrediting the Turing test as pseudoscientific nonsense since early 1990s. It's one of those things like the Kardashev scale, or Level 5 autonomous driving, that's extremely easy to define and sounds very cool and scientific, but actually turns out to have no practical impact on anything whatsoever.
- lukan 1y ago
  "but actually turns out to have no practical impact on anything whatsoever" Bots, that are now allmost indistinguishable from humans, won't have a practical impact? I am sceptical. And not just because of scammers.
somenameforme 1y ago
While I also hold a peer comment's view that the Turing Test is meaningless, I would further add that even that has not been meaningfully beaten. In particular we redefined the test to make it passable. In Turing's original concept the competent investigator and participants were all actively expected to collude against the machine. The entire point is that even with collusion, the machine would be able to pass. Instead modern takes have paired incompetent investigators alongside participants colluding with the machine, probably in an effort to be part 'of something historic'. In "both" (probably more, referencing the two most high profile - Eugene and the large LLMs) successes, the interrogators consistently asked pointless questions that had no meaningful chance of providing compelling information - 'How's your day? Do you like psychology? etc' and the participants not only made no effort to make their humanity clear, but often were actively adversarial obviously intentionally answering illogically, inappropriately, or 'computery' to such simple questions. And the tests are typically time constrained by woefully poor typing skills (this the new normal in the smartphone gen?) to the point that you tend to get anywhere from 1-5 interactions of a few words each. The problem with any metric for something is that it often ends up being gamed to be beaten, and this is a perfect example of that.

buu700 1y ago

I think there's a useful distinction that's often missed between AGI and artificial consciousness. We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently with peak human capabilities, given sufficient tools or hardware to complete whatever that task may be, but lacks subjective experience or independent agency; I would call that AGI. The two concepts have historically been inexorably linked in sci-fi, which will likely make the first AGI harder to recognize as AGI if it lacks consciousness, but I'd argue that simple "unconscious AGI" would be the superior technology for current and foreseeable needs. Unconscious AGI can be employed purely as a tool for massive collective human wealth generation; conscious AGI couldn't be used that way without opening a massive ethical can of worms, and on top of that its existence would represent an inherent existential threat. Conscious AGI could one day be worthwhile as something we give birth to for its own sake, as a spiritual child of humanity that we send off to colonize distant or environmentally hostile planets in our stead, but isn't something I think we'd be prepared to deal with properly in a pre-post-scarcity society. It isn't inconceivable that current generative AI capabilities might eventually evolve to such a level that they meet a practical bar to be considered unconscious AGI, even if they aren't there yet. For all the flak this tech catches, it's easy to forget that capabilities which we currently consider mundane were science fiction only 2.5 years ago (as far as most of the population was concerned). Maybe SOTA LLMs fit some reasonable definition of "emerging AGI", or maybe they don't, but we've already shifted the goalposts in one direction given how quickly the Turing test became obsolete. Personally, I think current genAI is probably a fair distance further from meeting a useful definition of AGI than those with a vested interest in it would admit, but also much closer than those with pessimistic views of the consequences of true AGI tech want to believe.

foobiekr 1y ago
Regarding "We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently" - it is very clear to anyone who just looks at the recent work by Anthropic analyzing how their LLM "reasons" that such a thing will never come from LLMs without massive unknown changes - and definitely not from scale - so I guess the grandparent is absolute right that openai is nor really working on this. It isn't close at all.
1y ago

thayne 1y ago

> I can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there but will it be equitable? Available to everyone? I don't think there has ever been a time in history when work has been equitable and available to everyone. Of course, that isn't to say that AI can't make it worse then it is now.