Waking up at 7am on weekends?

I never claimed it will.

Couldn’t we all just get along…?

You don’t seem very interested in sticking to the topic, do you? This conversation has been all over the place, complete with ad-hominems, concern-trolling, red herrings, strawmen, gish galloping - as if you’re trying to break some kind of record.

It’s pretty clear you’ve built up a cartoon-villain version of me in your head and now you’re fighting that imagined version like it’s real. I made a pretty simple claim about AGI, you’ve piled an entire story on top of it, and now you’re demanding I defend views I don’t even hold.

I’ve been trying to have a good-faith conversation here, but if this is what you’re going to keep doing, then I’ll just move on.

That doesn’t have anything to do with my claim about the inevitability of AGI.

So do you think Dyson Spheres are inevitable too?

I’m less certain about that than I am about AGI - there may be other ways to produce that same amount of energy with less effort - but generally speaking, yeah, it seems highly probable to me.

First you were implying that today’s AI would bring about AGI

I’ve never made such a claim. I’ve been saying the exact same thing since around 2016 or so - long before LLMs were even a thing. It’s in no way obvious to me that LLMs are the path to AGI. They could be, but they don’t have to be. Either way, it doesn’t change my core argument.

people you hold so dear

C’moon now.

My argument is that we’ll incrementally keep improving our technology like we have done throughout human history. Assuming that general intelligence is not substrate dependent - meaning that what our brains are doing cannot be replicated in silicon - or that we destroy ourselves before we get there, then it’s just a matter of time before we create a system that’s as intelligent as we are: AGI.

I already said that the timescale doesn’t matter here. It could take a hundred years or two thousand - doesn’t matter. We’re still moving toward it. It does not matter how slow you move. As long as you keep moving, you’ll eventually reach your destination.

So, how I see it is that if we never end up creating AGI ever, it’s either because we destroyed ourselves before we got there or there’s something borderline supernatural about the human brain that makes it impossible to copy in silicon.

If you’re just gonna keep ignoring every single point I make and keep rambling about unrelated shit, then there’s nothing left to discuss here. If you actually had an argument, you would’ve made it by now.

We are not “moving towards AGI” in any way with any modern technology

So that means you believe AI research is completely frozen still or moving backwards. Please explain.

Comparisons to faster-than-light travel are completely disingenuous and bad faith - that would break the laws of physics and you know it.

You can also keep your red herrings to yourself. I’m discussing ideas here - not people.

Are we not moving toward AGI? Because from where I stand, I only see three scenarios: either AI research is going backwards, no progress is being made whatsoever, or we’re continuing to improve our systems incrementally - inevitably moving toward AGI. Unless, ofcourse, you think we’ll never going to reach it which I view as a quite insane claim in itself.

If we’re not moving toward it, then I’d love to hear your explanation for why we’re moving backwards or not making any progress at all.

Whether we’re 5 or 500 years away from AGI is completely irrelevant to the people who worry about it. It’s not the speed of the progress - it’s the trajectory of it.

I still think they deserve some credit for at least trying to do the right thing. I don’t envy the position they’re in.

Everyone’s rushing toward AGI. Trying to do it safely is meaningless if your competition - the ones who don’t care about safety - gets there first. You can slow things down if you’re in the lead, but if you’re second best, it’s just posturing. There is no second place in this race.

Anthropic founders are former OpenAI employees who left specifically because they disagreed with OpenAI’s stance on this kind of stuff and they wanted nothing to do with it. If this is just a PR stunt then I don’t see why they would’ve left OpenAI in the first place.

In Finland you can take your driving lessons with automatic but then your license applies to automatic cars only.

2004 Toyota Corolla with manual transmission.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who left largely due to ethical and safety concerns about how OpenAI was being run. This is just them sticking to their principles.

We could’ve never invented LLMs and I’d still be equally worried about AGI. I’ve been talking about it since 2016 or so - LLMs aren’t the motivation for that worry, since nobody had even heard of them back then.

The timescale is also irrelevant here. I’m not less worried even if we’re 500 years away from it. How close to Earth does the asteroid need to get before it’s acceptable to start worrying about it?

Nobody’s saying AGI is here right now - it’s a concept, like worrying about an asteroid wiping us out before it actually shows up. Dismissing it as “fake” just ignores the trajectory we’re on with AI development. If we wait until it’s real to start thinking about risks, it might be too late.

In neuroscience and philosophy, when people talk about consciousness, they’re typically referring to the fact of experience - that it feels like something to be. That experience has qualia.

Nowhere is it written that this is a requirement for general intelligence. It’s perfectly conceivable to imagine a system that’s more intelligent than any human but where it doesn’t feel like anything to be that system. It could even appear conscious without actually being so. Philosophical zombie, so to speak.

No, it doesn’t. It’s a reasonably safe assumption that something that intelligent is probably also conscious - but it doesn’t have to be.

We also don’t need to understand consciousness in order to create it in our systems. If consciousness is just an emergent feature of a high enough level of information processing, then it would automatically show up once we build such a system whether we intend it or not.

Hell, in the worst case we might create something we assume isn’t conscious - but it is - and it could be suffering immensely.

Where does it say that AGI needs to be consciouss?