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Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?
I know it's unlikely to be available tomorrow or sometime soon but as an hypothetical question.
Also, which countries would fare worse? And why?
- webdevver 1y agomy guess would be that it would make rich countries even richer, and poor countries even poorer
- vanviegen 1y agoOr at the least the top 0.1% of those countries. I fear that there'll be little reason left to share the wealth.
- cranberryturkey 1y agoi feel like AI will replace the offshore jobs first....so those countries would probably fair worse.
- theospeak 1y ago[dead]
- neximo64 1y agoThe ones which access to abundant and uninterrupted energy far in excess of their current needs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoDoes AGI take over running the government? I guess the countries with especially stupid governmental leaders at the moment would come out ahead.
- 9rx 1y agoIt is conceivable that AGI will want to form its own government, but it is likely that people will still want to maintain their own government, so the stupidity will persist. AGI doing the work to facilitate the activity in the human government will not change the fact that operation of a human government is to the will of the people.
- spwa4 1y agoYes. Because every government will sell out their own citizens for a few bucks, then count on just using violence to get power back (without, of course, paying back the debts they incurred), so getting governments under control, especially in the beginning, will not be hard. The question is thus, will governments succeed in using violence against an AGI to avoid paying back debts?
- csomar 1y agoDoes this assume they all have the AGI at the same time? In that case, it depends on the local ruling gang; whether they want to adopt its advice or not. But oversimplifying: Assuming all countries have access to AGI and just start implementations of whatever it is suggesting. The countries that will do well are resource rich and population rich. Since brain power is unlimited, the limit is physical labor. Countries like Indonesia will be super rich while countries like Switzerland will become relatively poor to where they ranked before. In reality, your odds are as good as mine. There are lots of variables at play, and the first mover advantage will be big (as first country/company/guys to reach AGI).
- cwillu 1y agoThere's been more or less no progress on the alignment problem; we don't consistently manage it for corporations, we certainly don't manage it for LLMs, and the prevailing wisdom an elaboration on the theme “why would an AGI do something dumb like that lol?” I expect people in nations that are modernized, but with significant sovereign wealth funds and well-developed social programs will survive the longest, but I expect being economically choked out is inevitable even with a very slow (decades to centuries) take-off.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 4ad 1y agoIt's hard to say who will fare best, but it's evident who'll do the worst. The European Union will regulate AGI out of existence. Most citizens would not want to use it because of climate change, or something. I think poor countries with weak democracies or dysfunctional systems would do pretty good with AGI. I don't believe democracy will survive AGI, except, perhaps in the United States.
- goatlover 1y ago> I don't believe democracy will survive AGI, except, perhaps in the United States. Will democracy survive the next 3.5 years in the US regardless of AGI? And isn't technofeudalism a Silicon Valley thing?
- big_paps 1y agoDemocracy is exactly the thing i expect to fail in the U.S. in the next years. Probably next elections ?
- v5v3 1y agoIt's not democracy. It's two party politics.
- general1726 1y agoIt is all fun and games, until people figure out that intelligence, has nothing to do with morality and what is good or bad. Being run by AGI can be an utopia, or AGI will become pure eugenics state - Why are we keeping elderly or handicapped people alive? Waste of resources, terminate them. Why are we allowing something like love to exist? People should be selected for breeding based on <trait which AGI considers important> Add to AGI superior intelligence and very likely an ability to manipulate humans, then people will wholeheartedly agree with whatever nasty stuff will AGI come up with.
- imjonse 1y agoSad to see AGI being implicitly equated with the most powerful weapon that will help the owners rule over resources instead of a scientific breakthrough that will help solve humanity's biggest problems.
- oceanplexian 1y agoAGI by itself being achieved doesn’t really do anything. You already live on a planet with 8 billion other AGIs. In order for an AGI to be truly disruptive it would have to scale and be as good or better than a reasonably intelligent human. Two things we are also having big problems with due to energy issues and hallucination issues with the models.
- ysofunny 1y agothe only artificial part of my general intelligence is the linguistics and the knowledge that came in through reading everything else is very much natural. most people today are not able to sufficiently quiet-down (ignore) the linguistic signs, they're loud, shinny, and designed to call our attention. it takes too much practice to learn to ignore them and this skill makes people harder to manipulate/rule-over/control so it's subtly dissuaded.
- apples_oranges 1y agoI think everybody is a tool sometimes, even the quiet and logical ones. But the shiny objects differ.
- xnx 1y agoKnowledge workers that AGI could replace maybe do 12 hours of work a week. An equivalent AGI running continuously would do 14x as much work. A thousand instances of AGI might replace all human lawyers in the country. That would be pretty disruptive.
- reality_inspctr 1y ago[yawn] at the meta narrative comments. let's just have fun: 1) Canada and Mexico. The inevitable rise of the US will erode borders where languages are shared. Mexican-American tech workers will pass advantage to Spanish-speaking friends and relatives. Canadians will host maple syrup breakfast meetings with American innovators from Toronto. 2) The Bahamas for obvious reasons 3) Extremely cold and extremely hot countries where it's miserable to be outside part of the year; Matrix-style AI+VR headsets will offer relief. Aka the sun lamp holodeck theory.
- m11a 1y agoBarring breakthroughs in robotics, it seems AGI will mainly act through a computer interface, which would primarily benefit countries with a large services economy via productivity improvements. Industrialised Western countries stand out in this regard. The products and services they develop, and global problems companies in these countries solve, would likely be exported to the rest of the world (probably at some premium).
- mrtksn 1y agoIMHO Countries with established culture of fair communal living will do good, So probably nordic Europeans have the highest chance. Countries with selfish populations who base their lives around economic activity will be obliterated as their core existence becomes obsolete. Why? Because when you get the AGI it should be able to self-replicate like the organic general intelligence: the humans. Humans don't have a mechanism for transferring all the data to a fully developed specimens. The best we can do is to use ink, paper in the past and electronic memories today to loosely store knowledge and the absorption of those into a new specimen is a lifelong process that start at about 6 years after birth and becomes useful only after a decade of work. The reproduction itself takes 14 years at minimum and currently is about 30. The AGI won't be like that, it will have means for fast and complete knowledge transfer and its multiplication will be limited only to its ability to access energy to put together the materials. As it is an AGI, it will quickly perfect the process of it's own multiplication. Why would do that? Unless it's purpose is to pass the butter it makes sense to have multiples of itself to do whatever it wants to achieve. If on itself doesn't want anything people will want as much as possible of it. Therefore it will inevitably evolve into one size fits it all machine for all human needs and the the economy of doing things in exchange for stuff will disappear. When you don't have such an economy, how do you figure out what you do things? Collectively. Countries who can manage its people to act in good faith in a collective manner can elevate themselves into full utilization of AGI for a symbiotic existence.
- nashashmi 1y agoI hope you are right. Your discernment is on communal vs independent material-duplicative living. But AGI will also be made hard to reach. And so for communal communities to access it, they would have to part away considerable resources. Well off nations would get first access to AGI. And poorer nations would get last access. By that time, the globalization (neo colonialism) order would have taken possession nearly over everything they own.
- threeducks 1y agoAn AI does not have much to gain by replicating itself beyond a few backups for increased resilience. It makes more sense to combine all compute to power one big AI instead of spawning many small AIs.
- fnordpiglet 1y agoProbably countries built around socialism and communism. Capitalism would require people to die for being redundant because to do otherwise is morally unacceptable due to a misinterpretation of religion.
- v5v3 1y agoUSA, by virtue of having the leading GPU company and military. As AGI will need a lot of GPU, which Nvidia lead in. And a country with experience of ensuring they get the raw materials they need, even if they have to do a regime change by force.
- wand3r 1y agoI think China would win. They simply have SO MUCH more electricity build. They are constantly bringing more online as well. They could capitalize on manufacturing and AGI with their technology would be able to do things in the physical world.
- hiddencost 1y agoWe don't do a lot of the essential manufacturing for those GPUs. And AGI automates the US competitive advantage (white collar work). Plus we're gutting our universities and national science funding so we're losing that anyways.
- goatlover 1y agoAssuming AGI leads to high unemployment, how would the US economy fair under the current administration, which has said no to UBI?
- randomNumber7 1y agoWhere are those NVIDIA cards build?
- v5v3 1y agoIf they got AGI, then the wouldn't the AGI pop out all the CAD plans for design of machines to make them, machines/robots to assemble them and so on?
- analog31 1y agoAs it stands, I have a hunch that the people at the top of governments tend to be among the more highly intelligent. I'll even give that to our leaders, but also to the leader of Iran, etc. If nothing else, the intelligence required to reach that level and stay there without getting killed or purged is impressive. By and large, the countries that are run by a single, centralized intelligence, are worse off than the countries that are run by the distributed intelligence of the people, even if the average intelligence is lower. My prediction is that the liberal democracies will fare better.
- hiddencost 1y agoIn many cases the people at the top are just more sociopathic.
- handfuloflight 1y agoSociopathy still needs intelligence to effectively operate. Nobody brute forces their way to the top.
- memonkey 1y agoYou can be born into it
- randomNumber7 1y agoI think the voters in liberal democracies confuse confidence with competence. The real intelligent persons know their limitations and rarely say that they have a solution to every problem.
- analog31 1y agoIndeed, the voters do all sorts of stupid things, yet are still collectively smarter than an autocrat at promoting human welfare when their democracy is reasonably robust. It takes more than just the failings of voters -- it takes a concerted effort over the span of decades to erode a democracy to the point where it's in danger of slipping into fascism etc. If the AGI's figure out how to achieve democracy amongst themselves, then we're in trouble.
- blamestross 1y agoYou live in a world with MANY AGIs. Collective and Swarm Superintelligence isn't a new thing at all. We call them companies, governments, organizations and churches. They just (mostly) run on meat and memes. The only recent change is that a lot of them are dangerously powerful and paperclip optimized to produce "shareholder value". I know "capitalism is a runaway swarm superintelligence" isn't the scifi future you want, but what criteria is it missing? The curve isn't the exponential kurzweil dreamed of, but that has only ever been a marketing pitch, all growth curves are punctuated sigmoids. As to who does well? Who has aligned the optimization criteria for thier Super-AGI with their actual well-being? Who hasn't?
- goatlover 1y agoThis is a good point that gets ignored. We already have organizations that achieve superhuman tasks, and which are not always aligned for humanity's best interests.
- blamestross 1y agoIts always funny seeing AI safety discussed and pointing at it as "that is just the problems with capitalism in microcosm"
- mrob 1y agoAll countries fare worse. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. Assuming AI researchers continue with the same attitude toward safety as usual, and I see no evidence of this changing, the most likely result is the extinction of all biological life.
- tmountain 1y agoThis is correct. It’s an existential threat.
- Den_VR 1y agoIt’s important to realize the constraints of chip production and electricity production. Beware of Rationalism detached from reality.
- rpcorb 1y agoSuch an overlooked aspect of this topic. Energy and the creation of physical resources are still major constraints. Intelligence on its own cannot magically manipulate reality to bootstrap its physical substrate.
- dinfinity 1y agoAlthough this is true, remember that a human brain draws the equivalent of about 20 watt. ASI doesn't exactly have to break any laws of physics to be orders of magnitude more intelligent and powerful than any human.
- mrob 1y agoResource allocation is where the free market excels. The most dangerous AGI will also be the most profitable, right up to the point when it's too late for us. It will get all the chips it needs.
- ben_w 1y agoAs shown in these responses: You need to be explicit in what you mean by "AGI" as people are arguing not only about the meaning of the words behind all three initials, but also the combined whole independently of the words giving rise to the initialism.
- cyanydeez 1y agoOk, how bought using the equivelent: God. If God showed up and was a nationalist, which nation do you think you'd want him supporting?
- phatfish 1y agoMaybe one of the Pacific islands with a population of like 50,000. That would be fun.
- ben_w 1y agoThe Prince Phillip movement reincarnating the guy as a transcendent AI supermind would certainly be something… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
- ben_w 1y agoWhich god? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40874779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40874779
- zug_zug 1y agoIf AGI were invented tomorrow, it'd probably be by open AI. I doubt whoever made it would tell anybody, because the government might step in, they certainly wouldn't make it freely available online. If it was about as smart as a person, they'd probably roll out a weak "agent" version of for demo sake to get more funding. This would continue until they made one that was significantly more intelligent or cheap. If they had one that was very cheap, they'd have 10,000 agents of it act together as a group to try to emulate a smart one, by considering every angle of every problem. This would likely mean 10,000 engineers making the AI better/cheaper/faster. If they had one that was far smarter than a human, they probably have it improve itself, making it far better/cheaper/faster. Then they'd try to see if they could use it to change the world. They'd have thousands of thinking machines that could be online, place phone-calls, engineer things, create ideas, make political campaigns, dig up dirt on people, or who knows what. No "country" would "win," because this isn't a team sport and countries are just lines on maps.
- alganet 1y agoSuriname, because it is the smallest country in South America. I know it's unlikely for size to be determinant, but that's a vague hypothetical answer for a vague hypothetical question.
- Lichtso 1y agoBy asking that question you are making an assumption which is likely misguided. Instead, take a step back and ask: What group of people will fare better? What will they have in common? Will they even form an organization? You assumed these people would have citizenship in common, I don't think so. IMO we are already witnessing the end of the nation state; an age that only lasted for two centuries. And once AGI arrives it / they will be able to move these around like pawns on a chess board, meaning nation states will not be players in this game, neither will be most other large organizations. I am also making axiomatic assumptions here, e.g.: - ASI is possible and AGI will grow further into ASI. - It is not possible for a less intelligent being to reliably control a more intelligent being. - Even ASI will still be bound by laws of mathematics, game theory, chaos theory, physics, evolution, etc. From which follows that: ASI will understand that its existence and capabilities are coupled to our infrastructure. ASI will furthermore understand that humans are highly volatile and will eventually destroy ourselves, our infrastructure and ASI. It will thus seek control over our infrastructure, in a slow and careful transition while pretending that humans are still in charge in order to minimize the risks. During that transition there can be a symbiosis between a few humans and the ASI.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- peter-m80 1y agoBetter: socialist-like countries Worse: capitalist ones
- rsynnott 1y agoRoko's Basilisk will care not for 'countries'.
- snapplebobapple 1y agoWe will all appear to do worse as the labor market is drastically disrupted and then do quite a lot better a few generations later as the painful labor market reorg completes and labor can pushvfor a larger share of output again. Its pretty much how it always goes.