What if it never pans out is there infrastructure or other ancillary tech that society could benefit from?
For example all the science behind the LHC, or bigger and better telescopes: we might never find the theory of everything but the tech that goes into space travel, the science of storing and processing all that data, better optics etc etc are all useful tech
And we already seeing a ton of value in LLMs. There are lots of companies that are making great use of LLMs and providing a ton of value. One just launched today in fact: https://www.paradigmai.com/ (I'm an investor in that). There are many others (some of which I've also invested in).
I too am not rich enough to invest in the foundational models, so I do the next best thing and invest in companies that are taking advantage of the intermediate outputs.
In fact I would say that one of the things that goes to values near zero would be land if AGI exists.
Maybe it means a Star Trek utopia of post-scarcity. Maybe it will be more like Elysium or Altered Carbon, where the super rich basically have anything they want at any time and the poor are restricted from access to the post-scarcity tools.
I guess an investment in an AGI moonshot is a hedge against the second possibility?
Notice Star Trek writers forget they're supposed to be post scarcity like half the time, especially since Roddenberry isn't around to stop them from turning shows into generic millenial dramas. Like, Picard owns a vineyard or something? That's a rivalrous (limited) good, they don't have replicators for France.
But if you can simply ask the AI to give you more of that thing, and it gives it to you, free of charge, that fixes that issue, no?
> Notice Star Trek writers forget they're supposed to be post scarcity like half the time, especially since Roddenberry isn't around to stop them from turning shows into generic millenial dramas. Like, Picard owns a vineyard or something? That's a limited good.
God, yes, so annoying. Even DS9 got into the currency game with the Ferengi obsession with gold-pressed latinum.
But also you can look at some of it as a lifestyle choice. Picard runs a vineyard because he likes it and thinks it's cool. Sorta like how some people think vinyl sounds better then lossless digital audio. There's certainly a lot of replicated wine that I'm sure tastes exactly like what you could grow, harvest, and ferment yourself. But the writers love nostalgia, so there's constantly "the good stuff" hidden behind the bar that isn't replicated.
It makes it not work anymore, and it might not be a physical good. It's usually something that gives you social status or impresses women, but if everyone knows you pressed a button they can press too it's not impressive anymore.
I love this one for an exploration of that question: Charles Stross, Accelerando, 2005
Short answer: stratas or veins of post-AGI worlds evolve semi-independently at different paces. So that for example, human level money still makes sense among humans, even though it might be irrelevant among super-AGIs and their riders or tools. ... Kinda exactly like now? Where money means different things depending where you live and in which socio-economic milieu?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
nb I am not endorsing Austrian economics but it is a pretty good overview of a problem nobody has solved yet. Modern society has only existed for 100ish years so you can never be too sure about anything.
And maybe with ASI you've ruined the world too.
Kinda reminds me of the Fallout Toaster situation :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6kp4zBF-Rc
I mean it doesn't even have to be malicious, it can simply refuse to cooperate.
How do we go from a really good algorithm to an independently motivated, autonomous super intelligence with free reign in the physical world? Perhaps we should worry once we have robot heads of state and robot CEOs. Something tells me the current, human heads of state, and human CEOs would never let it get that far.
Why? This seems like your personal definition of what a super intelligence is. Why would we even want a super intelligence that can evolve on its own?
This conclusion doesn't logically follow.
> Fixed motivation thing is simply a program, not AI
I don't agree with this definition. AI used to be just "could it solve the turing test". Anyway, something with non-fixed motivations is simply just not that useful for humans so why would we even create it?
This is the problem with talking about AI, a lot of people have different definitions of what AI is. I don't think AI requires non-fixed motivations. LLMs are definitely a form of AI and they do not have any motivations for example.
I can conceive of an LLM enhanced using other ML techniques that is capable of logical and spatial reasoning that is not conscious and I don't see why this would be impossible.
It is why I find the AI doomer stuff so ridiculous. I am surrounded by less intelligent lifeforms. I am not interested in some kind of genocide against the common ant or fly. I have no interest in interacting with them at all. It is boring.
Of course the extremely unfortunate thing is they actually have a use in nature (flies are massive pollinators, mosquitos... get eaten by more useful things, I guess), so wouldn't actually do it, but it's nice to dream of a world without mozzies and flies
I feel like these extreme numbers are a pretty obvious clue that we’re talking about something that is completely imaginary. Like I could put “perpetual motion machine” into those sentences and the same logic holds.
*Capitalizing as in turning into an owned capital asset that throws off income.
1. AI-driven medical procedures: Healthcare Cost = $0. 2. Access to world class education: Cost of education = $0 3. Transportation: Cheap Autonomous vehicles powered by Solar. 4. Scientific research: AI will accelerate scientific progress by coming up with novel hypotheses and then testing them. 5. AI Law Enforcement: Will piece together all the evidence in a split second and come up with a fair judgement. Will prevent crime before it happens by analyzing body language, emotions etc.
Basically, this will accelerate UBI.
Waymo rides cost within a few tens of cents of Uber and Lyft rides. Waymo doesn't have to pay a driver, so what's the deal? It costs a lot to build those cars and build the software to run them. But also Waymo doesn't want a flood of people such that there's always zero availability (with Uber and Lyft they can at least try to recruit more drivers when demand goes up, but with Waymo they have to build more cars and maintain and operate them), so they set their prices similarly to what others pay for a similar (albeit with human driver) service.
I'm also reminded of Kindle books: the big promise way back when is that they'd be significantly cheaper than paperbacks. But if you look around today, the prices on Kindle books are similar to that of paperbacks, even more expensive sometimes.
Sure, when costs go down, companies in competitive markets will lower prices in order to gain or maintain market share. But I'm not convinced that any of those things you mention will end up being competitive markets.
Just wanted to mention:
> AI Law Enforcement: Will piece together all the evidence in a split second and come up with a fair judgement. Will prevent crime before it happens by analyzing body language, emotions etc.
No thanks. Current law enforcement is filled with issues, but AI law enforcement sounds like a hellish dystopia. It's like Google's algorithms terminating your Google account... but instead you're in prison.
It costs me, the consumer, 2x what Lyft or Uber would cost me.
I paid $21 for a ride on Mon that was $9-10 across Uber and Lyft. I am price inquisitive so I always double check each time.
Consider they are competing against the Lyft/Uber asset-light model of relying on "contractors" who in many cases are incapable of doing the math to realize they are working for minimum wage...
Taking a cut of existing businesses/models (taxi, delivery, b&b, etc).
So it’s not just the products that get cheaper, it’s the materials that go into the products that get cheaper too. Heck, what if the robots can build other robots? The cost of that would get cheaper too.
I hate to break the illusion, but scientific progress is not being held up by a lack of novel hypotheses
This isn't true for the reason economics is called "the dismal science". A slaveowner called it that because the economists said slavery was inefficient and he got mad at them.
In this case, you're claiming an AGI would make everything free because it will gather all resources and do all work for you for free. And a human level intelligence that works for free is… a slave. (Conversely if it doesn't want to actually demand anything for itself it's not generally intelligent.)
So this won't happen because slavery is inefficient - it suppresses demand relative to giving the AGI worker money which it can use to demand things itself. (Like start a business or buy itself AWS credits or get a pet cat.)
Luckily, adding more workers to an economy makes it better, it doesn't cause it to collapse into unemployment.
tldr if we invented AGI the AGI would replace every job, it would simply get a job.
> That still doesn’t make things free but it could make them cheaper.
That would increase demand for it, which would also increase demand for its inputs and outputs, potentially making those more expensive. (eg AGI powered manufacturing robots still need raw materials)
That's obviously nonsense, given that in a finite observable universe, no market value can be infinite.
There's a paradox which appears when AI GDP gets to be greater than say 50% of world GDP: we're pumping up all these economic numbers, generating all the electricity and computational substrate, but do actual humans benefit, or is it economic growth for economic growth's sake? Where is the value for actual humans?
In a lot of the less rosy scenarios for AGI end-states, there isn't.
Once humans are robbed of their intrinsic value (general intelligence), the vast majority of us will become not only economically worthless, but liabilities to the few individuals that will control the largest collectives of AGI capacity.
There is certainly a possible end-state where AGI ushers in a post-scarcity utopia, but that would be solely at the whims of the people in power. Given the very long track record of how people in power generally behave towards vulnerable populations, I don't really see this ending well for most of us.
Even if you automate stuff, you still need raw materials and energy. They are limited resources, you can certainly not have an infinity of them at will. Developing AI will also cost money. Remember that humans are also self-replicator HGIs, yet we are not infinite in numbers.
If there's a 1% chance that Ilya can create ASI, and a .01% chance that money still has any meaning afterwards, $5x10^9 is a very conservative valuation. Wish I could have bought in for a few thousand bucks.
The play here is to basically invest in all possible players who might reach AGI, because if one of them does, you just hit the infinite money hack.
And maybe with SSI you've saved the world too.