While I would agree that the fears are in many cases premature, 20 years is a long time in tech while being short enough to matter for careers.

By 2042 we’re likely to have single-atom transistors in consumer devices, while people mid-career now are likely to be retiring or getting radical life extension to confuse all this even further, and newborns today will be just about to graduate from universities.

Will we have AI as general-purpose and flexible as a human, even if only limited to an IQ of 85? Dunno, but even limited to that IQ an AGI would render about 15% of the population permanently unemployable, which would be enough to cause all sorts of social and political problems by itself.

But I think the limit on AGI right now isn’t compute resources, it’s that we don’t know the right algorithms to make the AI we have as data-efficient as humans (or even, AFAICT, dogs, cats, or mice).

>Will we have AI as general-purpose and flexible as a human, even if only limited to an IQ of 85?

While I agree to a certain extent on this premise, there will still be some areas that AI won’t replace because humans also have an emotional value component.

Consider if you’d rather have a massage from a robut or person. Or, if you are infirm and would prefer a caretaker who is human or machine. It’s not just a matter of processing data when humans are emotional creatures.

If anything, AGI may free up humans to focus on human relational jobs which we’re much more evolved to be good at and value.

> Consider if you’d rather have a massage from a robut or person. Or, if you are infirm and would prefer a caretaker who is human or machine.

Sure, I’m also implicitly assuming robotics will improve. At some point — don’t know when — we can’t tell the difference any more, and at that point, the humans indistinguishable from machines are likely to be made redundant by the machines.

I’m saying there’s something innately different emotionally about interacting with a human.

So if you know it’s a machine, it will inherently change the subjective interaction. If you’re saying that it wont matter because we will get to a point where humans and machines are indistinguishable, that’s implying robots will be emotional and no longer just processing data in the way we currently think of AGI. Essentially it means they will be conscious with subjective experience of their own or just philosophical zombies. Both are essentially fictitious thought experiments at this point.

That's what it seems like they're saying. At some point it's likely they will be indistinguishable from us on many levels, including emotions. There's a demand for it and a solution/peoduct will eventually be created to address that demand, once the means of doing so are technically and financially feasible/scalable.

Currently, yes, there's an innate difference, but it's only fictitious that there won't be a difference until it's not. It's plausible speculation. Writing it off as fictitious as of now feels like an "ostrich in the sand" means of molding around a static perception of reality.

Things will change, we're not special, labor as we know it will be replaced, machines will at some point acquire the same abilities as us, and we'll have to strive to figure out as a whole if we need to change the means required to carry on and/or individually adapt/overcome such sea changes in labor/income.

It will probably cause many issues within our societies, but many will also see opportunities. It's going to be a lot of grey, likely more so than now.

I agree that there’s hubris in thinking we’re somehow special. But pretending we will get there “someday” isn’t much different than saying one day we’ll time travel. Even if plausible, it’s so far from where we’re currently at it belongs more to philosophical thought experiments than serious technology inquiry

I'd agree that they would either be conscious or p-zombies, but I think humans are sufficiently easy to fool that the latter may well happen. I offer panpsychism and celebrity fandoms/parasocial relationships as examples of people's emotional sense of connection being misleading.

I don't think anyone has a sufficiently concrete definition of consciousness to even tell either how far we are from that now, nor how to get there from here.

https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...

I do think humans are easy to fool but so far only in extremely constrained scenarios. E.g., limited to chat bots. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. To fool people in the manner that’s being discussed, robuts would need to fool people with buddy language and on a subconscious level. So much more of how we communicate is beyond reading words on a screen. Consider the uncanny valley that is still prevalent with deep fakes. Getting better for sure, but that’s still constrained to premise video. To be able to do that in person in real time is a much larger problem.

The other examples appear to me as magnifications of mental illness instead of generalizable scenarios, possibly including the Google employee when you consider his background.

Hm. To me, reaching uncanny valley means they're probably quite close in form and behaviour. But it may well be the case that the remaining 1% (or whatever the percentage is) of the details may be harder than the first 99%.

I can see your point. But to me, the uncanny valley isn’t evidence that we’re super close, it’s evidence that we don’t know how to fully define the problem because there are elements we know are not wore right but can’t say why. Because we can’t fully define it means we aren’t close to solving it.

I certainly agree that we don't know what we're missing. My best guess timeline for this is very vague for this exact reason.

Do you see/feel this "something innately different emotionally" when you do your banking? Most human bank tellers have been replaced by ATMs and websites.

Neither of those examples are a good illustration of your point as many and probably most will prefer the machine in both scenarios. I don't get a massage for an emotional experience with the masseuse; I'd prefer the likely much cheaper and higher quality and consistent machine massage. Ditto with a permanent caretaker as it'll allow you to feel far more independant; most of us don't want to feel like a burden on other people. However, you do have a valid point, just not good examples imho.

AGI will make the vast majority unemployable, it'll be a disaster and those jobs won't simply be replaced by new ones: people who think this haven't thought through it very deeply at all.

Maybe. My original example that came to mind was a caretaker for someone terminally ill, I.e., hospice. Having volunteered in that area, people want human contact, even if it’s not performing any pragmatic function. I tend to think automation would just make somebody feel more isolated. People yearn for connection, not automation.

I believe the research shows there is a strong psychological component to massage that goes beyond the mechanical manipulation. I guess it would depend on whether somebody uses it for stress relieve or merely recovery.

Oh, terminal, yea that's one where I agree, they want company more than anything; but even that will eventually fall prey to AGI. People will be best friends and family with AGI's; grow up with them, presuming we don't go down the Terminator route; people are very quick to anthropomorphize anything remotely reminiscent of human behavior.

I think I'd rather have a $20 hug from a real person than a $5 hug from a heated robot. Even if the robot had better AI conversational skills than the person.

Hugs would have been a great example, human contact is the point; not true with massage, not unless you're being creepy. They're there for your muscles, not to turn you on and fill some emotional need.

Many people use massage for stress reduction which is an emotional need. Emotional does not necessarily mean romantic or sexual emotion.

This is my issue with discussions on tech. People tend to oversimply the problem as if a human is just another rational data input. Massage is more than just mechanically manipulation of the body. Autonomous driving is more than just perception.

Oversimplification leads to wildly optimistic ideas and timelines. I’m not saying they’re impossible, just that the problems are much more complicated than we give them credit.

Really I would think that politician would be one of the easiest roles to automate. It's a very simple algorithm that votes yes based on whoever gives it the most money.

Getting them to hand over their jobs is the hard part :)

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

Those jobs aren't being replaced by AI because the people in charge don't want them to be replaced. It's not the AI they should be worried about, but society shifting the paradigm and rendering half of all bureaucracy across the globe obsolete.

Endless bikeshedding is deemed very important amongst its practitioners, and is pretty lucrative to boot. Even when we never measured the benefits.

Every AI I have tested requires the user to become clever and proficient at getting it to generate good results.

Programming with AI is going to just elevate the level of the programmer cognitively just like compilers and high level languages did. It will be an even higher level of abstraction at which developers can operate.

These things are powerful tools but just tools. Same with the “art generators.” So far I see nothing capable of autonomous reasoning at a level that would actually replace the tool wielding operator. Someone still has to hold the hammer.