The article is about goal post moving. Please provide a clear and concrete definition of AGI that we can judge your prediction by.

Yup, that's the weird thing about the booster argument. "We finally achieved it, we're no longer important or the dominant species and Sam Altman and Dario Amodei run what's left of the world from their bunker!" Yay?

Either we achieve a post scarcity society, or we become a permanent underclass if not soylent. Those are the only outcomes I believe are possible.

If we don't have access to capital, we will abolish capital altogether.

This still backfire to the oligarchs

The average person will not have any life in all likelihood. That is the end goal of capitalism. However, shortly after everyone dies, the remaining survivors - the likes of Musk, Thiel etc - will find themselves roughly equal and needing to establish a new hierarchy.

I strongly agree. In scientific terms, we already know how to achieve 1G constant acceleration space flight. "All we need to do" from an engineering standpoint to achieve it is develop miniaturized fusion reactors and superconducting electronics. Hell, something approximately as good was achievable since the 1950s with a gargantuan ship that pooped out atomic bombs through a giant shock absorbing pusher plate[0]. Trivial, right? Except it isn't. Both of these projects, which are scientifically feasible, are completely impossible to actually build. They are off the table in engineering terms.

We are so much closer to 1G constant acceleration space flight than we are to AGI. We know, in principle, how to achieve 1G travel. We don't know, in principle how to achieve AGI. Our best guess so far is something along the lines of "emergence" which means "maybe if we do enough matrix math in the right way it'll wake up and become a being with agency and intelligence". Another way to say this is "hopes, prayers, and lots of GPUs".

Let's all get a grip. Without a coherent theory of intelligence, you aren't gonna make one in a lab. That's not how science works, it's not how engineering works. Start at the beginning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...

What’s your definition of AGI?

“Everyone else is doing it” is a childish justification and there’s a line where this becomes fraud and a felony offense. Do you think Elizabeth Holmes should have been allowed to make up claims about their blood testing technology? Is it OK to grossly overestimate Claude’s capabilities when the US military starts using it to determine strike targets?

Screwdrivers and nails are deterministic, AI is probabilistic. That is a significant distinction and why your analogy fails.

It's their job to lie and defraud the public? Why don't you believe there shouldn't be consequences for lying and defrauding the public? Do you believe tech CEOs are above society and decency? Does their wealth make them immune from accountability?

It's gotten so bad that I feel that the majority of HN blog posts on the topic of AI are partially or fully AI-generated. Even the ones that are highly critical of the AI industry. People have just spent so much time next to AI, soaking it in, that they're becoming dependent on it - either because they actually can't write for themselves anymore, or because they care about a topic so little that they can only squeeze out a short paragraph and then ask their LLM to fill in the blanks for what were supposed to be their thoughts. For AI boosters it's somehow even worse.

Your condition is called AI psychosis. Good news is: it's curable!

This argument style is always humorous. The intention is something like “so humans are as bad as AI” when the original question boils down to something like “why would I replace humans with AI?”.

I am unaware of any healthy human who confabulates things as arbitrarily and disastrously as a SOTA reasoning model. It is childish to say stuff like "lawyers always made up court cases" - no they didn't!

? in a professional setting, my coworkers are just randomly gonna make stuff up

Look, I don't spend most of my time online criticizing AI progress. But what does your response even mean? People hallucinating work and solutions isn't commonplace at all, right? What industry do you work in where people hallucinate with frequency?

It's a common joke to reply to something with 'yes' that doesn't make sense for the question asked. When used in place of a number, it just means extremely high, as high as it will go, that no matter what number you need it's a 'yes', and so on.

Yeah right after I posted I thought about editing in that a 3-4 all-programmer team with one person (maybe half-time) acting as basically team secretary was already the best unit for software writing, but bigcos seemed to have trouble forming them without adding a bunch of overhead and making their programmers often blocked or idle for some reason.

It’s just that now if I have an LLM that can talk to my business comms and reporting tools (jira was already mostly for managers to generate reports, not to help the people doing the work, that’s why it sucks so much as a tool for getting actual work done) and my first-pass at programming looks a lot like just writing a programmerly-flavored feature or bug ticket, having other people making useless first drafts of tickets for me to rewrite (and probably have to go clarify them with an SME or stakeholder anyway) and someone dedicated to poking around in Jira in general, is gonna start looking funny even to bigcos, I think.

I think this is a good example of the moving goalposts. The Turing test is not "AI is indistinguishable from human writing 100% of the time", it's whether it is possible at all for a system can be designed where a person can be fooled into thinking they're talking to a human when they're actually talking to a computer in a turn-based text exchange. It is a "there exits..." problem rather than a "for all..." problem.

So I do a lot of client work for F100s and I’ve got some good news and bad.

The bad news is it’s already in the C Suite and they (were) pushing it hard.

The good news is that since Copilot and others have started to charge based on usage a lot of those same leaders have hit the brakes and are now wanting detailed information and usage reporting to figure out where AI actually fits in.

Some have gone even further and slapped a usage limit on individuals or teams and left it at that.

Sanity is around the corner. At least until the next big thing :)

I agree. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. You can have something smarter than you which you use as a tool.

My point was that there's nothing objectively special about our level of intelligence, so it shouldn't be used as a benchmark.

Can you link those videos? What I have seen was impressive but far from "riding a unicycle blindfolded". But with time can be surely done. Also yes, there are likely not many humans who can do it, but most could learn it.

I can't even ride a bike so I got AGI'd about a decade ago

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it will always be used as a tool however smart it gets.

In software, it hasn't replaced all the software engineers (even though it's better and faster than us), it's just meant that we now have more leverage.

We can write more code and work on more projects than ever. I don't see why we would suddenly stop using it like that?