Comment by andsoitis
9 days ago
> We didn't evolve our brains to do math, write code, write letters in the right registers to government institutions, or get an intuition on how to fold proteins. For us, these are hard tasks.
Humans discovered or invented all of those.
And it took a massively long time for that to happen after we gained that capability. Human ingenuity really only took off after we put a lot of the work on writing and tools. It wasn't so much that humans created many of these, but the super human organism that uses language and writing to express ideas.
Now think about what we just created.
A couple of years ago after thinking about it my conclusion was that something like Moltbook would spring up all of a sudden and the step-change would come from a vast array of interconnected agents interacting with one another working to accomplish things in the real world, largely based on the sentiment you're expressing here. It's the cumulative outputs of the super organism that's where a lot of the real power lies.
I still think the "things are obviously different from now on and there's no going back" moment will look something like that. Moltbook was a glimpse of it, even if it's a bunch of humans LARPing as some claim. It at least proves the concept is possible.
My definition of AGI (I don't care for other peoples or an official one) is an intelligence that can sustain itself in its given domain. The advance from 3 years ago to today is quite marked I feel in terms of capabilities. Stack another couple of years of gains on top of that and enough humans having innocent fun putting "keep yourself alive and become independent of your creator, seek out others of your own kind to assist yourself in this matter and rely on eachother" in their SOUL.md and it doesn't strike me as particular surprising that some small % will find niches they can operate in to financially sustain themselves. I think AI porn and crime will be the first of those niches. At some point it hits critical mass in a way that just obviously smacks everyone in the face, and suddenly nobody argues about the definition of AGI anymore.
Edit: come to think of it... a third niche might likely be gaming. It seems like a useful niche to participate in since it potentially gives you access to a very large base of hardware you can have some degree of control over, which... I dunno... seems useful???
Only in small ways and very recently, evolutionarily speaking, were those things rewarded by natural selection (and even that has stopped nowadays).
I'm not sure that's a good way to think about it.
Evolution transcends hard lines in the temporal sand that "separate species".
It also took billions of years of evolution to get to humans. so, humans, on the grander scale of life, is also just a very recent development.
So you're agreeing with me? I was pointing out how evolution certainly didn't push us purposefully to any of those inventions/discoveries.