Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Tue Jul 05, 2022 12:44 am
I do too. The problem is that those interests literally don't have time to prepare for it. They have to prepare for AGI RIGHT NOW if they want to thwart it, and the cold fact is that most of those vested interests don't think AGI is something to worry about in their lifetimes or their children's lifetimes or even their grandchildren's lifetimes.
AGI is coming so soon, it's going to blindside just about every element of society. By the time the lumpenproletariat are aware of it enough to rage against the machine, it'll be well past too late for them to do anything about it.
Yes and no. Yes that it's happening faster than anyone thought (it went from decades at the earliest, to next decade at the latest), and yes no one is prepared. But it won't be too late for them to stop it or slow it down or more likely deeply influence it for their gain and our loss, when it gets here. AGI will not just be able to do anything at first, no matter how intelligent. Governments won't change to accommodate the paradigm shift on a dime, people won't just listen to it no matter how good the argument, and it can't build things without a means of manufacturing, and it can't distribute it without allowance - never mind that it might not even be conscious and could only do what it's told when told.
Like it just existing will change things. And once it's created in some corporate lab it'll be created in another and another and another. But it's expensive - the only people who will have AGI, are the mega wealthy corporations smart enough to pursue this now. And they're not building it solely for our best interests in mind. The scenario is this - the very same people financing the AGI's creation will be the very ones in the way of it's full potential. They'll help manipulate the masses to support legislation their pocketed politicians "propose" that limits future development of AGI in unregulated universities and start ups or whatever, making it so no one can create competing AGIs. They'll seek laws that limit their responsibility in how they use the AGI. They'll use anti-AI sentiment to fund legislation to prevent AGI's interference in political or economic matters, aka they'll prevent AGI for being used to move us to a post-scarcity society.
Basically the biggest danger is that AGI's potential will be hindered by the corporations with AGI and the public's distrust of science to enact legislation to make sure that AGI can only be used to make the fabulously wealthy even more so.
And that's just one plausible scenario. The money interests that weren't smart enough to make their own in time will exert their own political pressures to limit how this is used. Never mind governments seeking to maintain power for themselves. They'll want the benefits of AGI as a military tool, and as a means to surveil and control the populace, but not allow it to be used as a means for replacing them or putting an end to their own corruption.
Look, I agree that eventually this is going to be great, eventually it'll make things better. But it'll probably take people like the tech savvier socialists and hacktivists cobbling together the resources to make open source AGI or at least get enough computers and all to make their own AGI, which might take a couple decades at least for the tech to be mass produced enough cheap enough to do.
Basically they can't stop AGI from happening, but they can hamper all the wonderful things we could do with it as a species. Not forever, but for decades at least.
Not being a complete pessimist here - there's a possibility that it won't go down like I've outlined. But what I am saying is that the job won't be done just because AGI has arrived. Ignoring rogue Skynet scenarios and all that, there's a lot of ways that people in power now can make AGI just another tool to help prop up capitalism and fascism. The future isn't certain.
