This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
AI will not threaten humans due to sadism or boredom, but because it takes jobs and makes people jobless.
When there is lower demand for human labor, according to the rule of supply and demand, prices (aka. wages) for human labor go down.
The real crisis is one of sinking wages, lack of social safety nets, and lack of future perspective for workers. That's what should actually be discussed.
Not sure if we will even really notice that in our lifetime, it is taking decades to get things like invoice processing to automate. Heck in the US they can't even get proper bank connections made.
Also, tractors have replaced a lot of workers on the land, computers have both lost a lot of jobs in offices and created a lot at the same time.
Jobs will change, that's for sure and I think most of the heavy labour jobs will become more expensive since they are harder to replace.
But scary robots will take over the world! That's what all the movies are about! If it's in a movie, it has to be real.
Ummm no? If moneyed interests want it then it happens. We have absolutely no control over whether it happens. Did we stop Recall from being forced down our throats with windows 11? Did we stop Gemini from being forced down our throats?
If capital wants it capital gets it. :(
😳 unless we destroy capitalism? 👉🏾👈🏾
The only problem with destroying capitalism is deciding who gets all the nukes.
Capitalism is just an economic system, I'm not sure what nukes has to do with it. It's not like billionaires directly own them, and we have to distribute the "nuke wealth" to the people or anything lol
Couldn’t we have a good old fashioned butlerian jihad?
Use Linux and don’t have any of those issues.
Get off the capitalist owned platforms.
The path to AGI seems inevitable - not because it’s around the corner, but because of the nature of technological progress itself. Unless one of two things stops us, we’ll get there eventually:
Either there’s something fundamentally unique about how the biological brain processes information - something that cannot, even in principle, be replicated in silicon,
Or we wipe ourselves out before we get the chance.
Barring those, the outcome is just a matter of time. This argument makes no claim about timelines - only trajectory. Even if we stopped AI research for a thousand years, it’s hard to imagine a future where we wouldn’t eventually resume it. That's what humans do; improve our technology.
The article points to cloning as a counterexample but that’s not a technological dead end, that’s a moral boundary. If one thinks we’ll hold that line forever, I’d call that naïve. When it comes to AGI, there’s no moral firewall strong enough to hold back the drive toward it. Not permanently.
something that cannot, even in principle, be replicated in silicon
As if silicon were the only technology we have to build computers.
Did you genuinely not understand the point I was making, or are you just being pedantic? "Silicon" obviously refers to current computing substrates, not a literal constraint on all future hardware. If you’d prefer I rewrite it as "in non-biological substrates," I’m happy to oblige - but I have a feeling you already knew that.
And why is "non-biological" a limitation?
I haven’t claimed that it is. The point is, the only two plausible scenarios I can think of where we don’t eventually reach AGI are: either we destroy ourselves before we get there, or there’s something fundamentally mysterious about the biological computer that is the human brain - something that allows it to process information in a way we simply can’t replicate any other way.
I don’t think that’s the case, since both the brain and computers are made of matter, and matter obeys the laws of physics. But it’s at least conceivable that there could be more to it.
I personally think that the additional component (suppose it's energy) that modern approaches miss is the sheer amount of entropy a human brain gets - plenty of many times duplicated sensory signals with pseudo-random fluctuations. I don't know how one can use lots of entropy to replace lots of computation (OK, I know what Monte-Carlo method is, just how it applies to AI), but superficially this seems to be the way that will be taken at some point.
On your point - I agree.
I'd say we might reach AGI soon enough, but it will be impractical to use as compared to a human.
While the matching efficiency is something very far away, because a human brain has undergone, so to say, an optimization\compression taking the energy of evolution since the beginning of life on Earth.
Human level? That’s not setting the bar very high. Surely the aim would be to surpass human, or why bother?
Yeah. Cheap labor is so much better than this bullshit
A lot of people making baseless claims about it being inevitable...i mean it could happen but the hard problem of consciousness is not inevitable to solve
Why would we want to? 99% of the issues people have with "AI" are just problems with society more broadly that AI didn't really cause, only exacerbated. I think it's absurd to just reject this entire field because of a bunch of shitty fads going on right now with LLMs and image generators.
Cataclysms notwithstanding, human-level AI is inevitable. That doesn't have to mean that it'll be next week, or even next century, but it will happen.
The only way it won't is if humans are wiped out. (And even then there might be extra-terrestrials who get there where we didn't. Human-level doesn't have to mean invented by humans.)
We can change course if we can change course on capitalism
Honestly I welcome our AI overlords. They can't possibly fuck things up harder than we have.
Can't they?
It’s just a cash grab to take peoples jobs and give it to a chat bot that’s fed Wikipedia’s data on crack.
Don't confuse AGI with LLMs. Both being AI systems is the only thing they have in common. They couldn't be further apart when it comes to cognitive capabilities.
