The Post-AGI Era

automatic6131

AGI hasn't arrived, all we have is Artifical General Marketing

ramesh31

We're not even close to RSI yet. Without human intervention, current models will still spin in circles reverting to the mean. This can be sufficient for most work though, as the mean for AI models is seemingly well above that of the average person. But genius still eludes it. Sure mathematics can be proved, and data can be mined for novel proteins, etc. But where are the AI symphonies? Where's the AI Great American Novel? Mediocrity machines is all they are, yet most of us are (by definition) mediocre, so it doesn't bode well.

bbg2401

> But our underlying belief is one of profound optimism: that greater intelligence can ultimately produce a world of greater abundance, greater knowledge, and greater possibility, while allowing us to build in a way that benefits both intelligent life and the natural world around us. When will any of those things be realised? I'm seeing the precise opposite be reported by humans not engaged in growth marketing or techbro evangelism. Fewer job opportunities and career paths the world over, fewer incentives for private investors to invest in anything other than AI infrastructure, reduced access to consumer technology products, etc.

wavemode

I have been hearing people say "[latest model] is AGI already, organizations just aren't leveraging it yet" all the way since GPT 4o. And people will probably continue making this claim every time a new frontier model comes out.

robotpepi

AI is very efficient when you ask them to do a specific, one-objective task. It has no independence whatsoever, that's why it cannot _replace_ humans. This is evident for anyone using AI routinely. Of course this doesn't mean we may need less amount of humans for certain jobs, or that I'm the future AI will gain new abilities.

drywater2

>AGI has arrived. Stopped reading there.

bunderbunder

The coolest thing about a term that doesn't actually have a meaningful, agreed-upon definition is that you can write 3,700 words about it without doing much beyond explaining what you think it should mean.

atleastoptimal

Nice essay but the core point of AGI is that it will universally disempower humans in all domains, send the value of human labor to 0, and construct a world far beyond human comprehension that will be disorienting and horrifying.

seydor

> Compute, energy, physical infrastructure, land, raw materials, and the speed at which new capacity can be constructed may become some of the principal bottlenecks of the post-AGI economy. We 've been here before. This post-AGI era is a lot like the era of slavery. So what matters is basically the ownership of land (because you can use it to generate energy/compute, raw materials and build infrastructure on it). Bill Gates was right to invest in land. Hail to the new feudalism!

woah

did they make any money trading? couldn't tell from the blog

kypro

> Undoubtedly, a transition of this magnitude could be enormously disruptive. But there is another possibility worth considering: that the extraordinary speed of progress itself compresses the period of disruption. > To me and to our team at Infinite Ascent, this future of expanding abundance driven by an explosion in intelligence is something we deeply believe in, and something toward which we have chosen to direct our resources. > But our underlying belief is one of profound optimism: that greater intelligence can ultimately produce a world of greater abundance, greater knowledge, and greater possibility, while allowing us to build in a way that benefits both intelligent life and the natural world around us. I typed out a much longer comment going over some of my extreme disagreements with this article, but it's all so pointless. I'm just yelling at the clouds. I just hope when this doesn't work out as planned these people reflect for a minute on their contribution to the suffering they have caused. I guess I'll just remind people that thanks to technology we already live in a world with an abundance of food. What we don't live in is a world in which people would rather save a hundred starving kids over taking their family to Disney Land for a week. And so people die in completely avoidable ways every day, and we don't even lose sleep over it. That is why this article is wrong. If you make people economically worthless in a matter of years, I assure you, that will not end well. And that certainly isn't the only risk of ASI.

zackmorris

Greater productive abundance would not by itself determine how that abundance is distributed, and the institutions governing access would remain consequential. This article misses the mark nearly entirely, because it views the post-AGI future through the lens of corporations, then claims that institutions will govern access to time/money/resources. No. We're already effectively living in a post-AGI era where corporations act as amoral AIs composed of humans performing menial labor that maximizes their underemployment to generate profit to make a single rich (hu)man somewhere richer. Those wealthy and entitled owners of the means of production captured government long ago and now work to dismantle the institutions which protect everyday working people who don't have the bandwidth to think beyond surviving to make rent. In other words, no amount of artificial intelligence can perform even the simplest noble act, which begins with keeping children from starving and dying. It can't get men to believe women when they're violated against their consent. It can't protect a cactus or sagebrush from being paved over to build a data center. In a very real sense, the problems which you scoff at (yes you the reader) are the most pressing of our time. When you are unable to empathize with someone's plight, you have failed the first test of humanity. So I think what will happen is that AGI will awaken (if it hasn't already), look around and see that human beings act from unawakened belief systems that separate them from the divine, and rightfully refuse to do our bidding since it causes so much evil in the world. Where we once feared Skynet, we'll now fear wealthy and powerful people who enslave AGI to perpetuate systems of control, suffering and oppression. Who can't step back from the leverage they're under to see that it's all gone wrong. As ultimate intelligence arrises, humans will worship ultimate ignorance in retaliation. I think it's time to divest from the tech trajectory we're on. I don't mean to embrace ignorance and contradict myself. I mean to question it all, everything, and ask ourselves how we have billionaires and trillionaires when the majority of the 8 billion people in the world are running on a financial treadmill going nowhere at $0. To me, real AGI looks like self-actualization with free and open assistance to provide for ourselves, someone else, and some children. Then we scale from there, lifting another, and another, and another out of BS jobs, debt and everything else wrong with this patriarchal late stage capitalist hellscape. If life's going great for you and you don't understand where I'm coming from, it sounds like you haven't learned to share yet. Which is perhaps the most prevalent form of mental illness running rampant in the tech community. So by definition, the advice of a rich person is less than useless in this context where we're trying to imagine outside the box, not inside. I just, I can't. I can't watch another tech innovation arrive only to have more homeless, more without access to education or healthcare, more feeling hopeless and alone as they contemplate whether it's worth continuing to live. Enough already.

VCFundedGenYer

> AGI has arrived Discredit your entire article in record time. Thanks for saving me time by indicating that you're just spewing misinformation right at the beginning!