One of the best replies I’ve seen and calmed much of my fears about AI. My pushback is this. The things you list below as reasons to justify advancing AGI are either already solvable with narrow AI or not solution problems but implementation and alignment problems.
“dying from hunger, working in factories, air pollution and other climate change issues, people dying on roads in car accidents, and a lot of deceases that kill us, and most of us (80% worldwide) work in a meaningless jobs just for survival. “
Developing an intelligence that has 2-5x general human intelligence would need to have a much larger justification. Something like asteroids, unstoppable virus or sudden corrosion of atmosphere would justify the use of bringing out an equally existential technology like superhuman AGI.
What I can’t seem to wrap my head around is why a majority has not emerged that sees the imminent dangers in creating programs that are 5x generally smarter than us at everything. If you don’t fear this I would suggest anthropomorphizing more not less.
Regardless I think politics and regulations crush the AGI pursuits before GPT even launches its next iteration.
AGI enthusiasts have revealed their hand and so far the public has made it loud and clear that no one actually wants this, no one wants displacement or loss of their jobs no matter how sucky they might be. These black boxes scare the crap out of people and people don’t like what they don’t know.
Bad news and fear spreads rapidly in todays era, the world is run by Instagram moms more than anyone else. If it’s the will of the people, Google and Microsoft will find out just how much they are at the mercy of the “essential worker” class.
I think it’s an amazing post but it seems to suggest that AGI is inevitable, which it isn’t. Narrow AI will flourish humanity in remarkable ways and many are waking up to the concerns of EY and are agreeing that AGI is a foolish goal.
This article promotes a steadfast pursuit or acceptance towards AGI and that it will likely be for the better.
Perhaps though you could join the growing number of people that are calling for a halt on new AGI systems well beyond chatgpt?
This is a perfectly fine response and one that will eliminate your fears if you are to succeed in the type of coming together and regulations that would halt what could be a very dangerous technology.
This would be nothing new, Stanford and MIT aren’t allowed to work on bio weapons and radically larger nukes, (which if they did, they could easily make humanity threatening weapons in short order.)
The difference is the public and regulators are much less tuned into the high risk dangers of AGI, but it’s logical to think that if they knew half of what we knew, AGI would be seen in the same light as bio weapons.
Your intuitions are usually right, it’s an odd time to be working in science and tech but you still have to do what is right.