Comment by atleastoptimal
21 hours ago
It makes sense though. Humans are coherent to the economy based on their ability to perform useful work. If an AI system can perform work as well as or better than any human, than with respect to "anything any human has ever been willing to pay for", it is AGI.
I don't get why HN commenters find this so hard to understand. I have a sense they are being deliberately obtuse because they resent OpenAI's success.
It doesn’t though, AGI have far greater implications than doing mundane work of today. Actual AGI would self improve, that in itself would change literally every single thing of human civilization, instead we are talking about replacing white collar jobs.
An AGI that can do all that would also necessarily be able to do all white collar work. That latter definition I'd consider a "soft threshold" that would be hit before recursive self-improvement, which I imagine would happen soon after.
The current estimation on the time between this is fairly small, bottlenecked most likely by compute constraints, risk aversion, and need to implement safeguards. Metaculus puts it at about 32 months
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4123/time-between-weak-a...
Sure, but that’s like saying we’re close att infinite life because we’ve expanded our life expectancy.
I don’t really buy into the ”one part equals another”, we are very quick to make those assumptions but they are usually far from the science fiction promised. Batteries and self driving cars comes to mind, and organic or otherwise crazy storage technologies, all ”very soon” for multiple decades.
It’s very possible that white collar jobs get automated to a large degree and we’ll be nowhere closer to AGI than we were in the 70’s, I would actually bet on that outcome being far more likely.
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Not to worry, humanoid, generally useful robots are only a few years away.