A slightly different angle on this - perhaps AGI doesn't matter (or perhaps not in the ways that we think).
LLMs have changed a lot in software in the last 1-2 years (indeed, the last 1-2 months); I don't think it's a wild extrapolation to see that'll come to many domains very soon.
Even if it doesn't, you will be indirectly affected. People will flock to trades if knowledge work is no longer a source of viable income.
The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc
Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society.
Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007.
I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.
The GFC was a big recession, but I never thought society was near collapse.
Most of all, AI will exacerbate the lack of trust in people and institutions that was kicked into high gear by the internet. It will be easy and cheap to convince large numbers of people about almost anything.
Whenever i use search terms to ask a specific question these days theres usually a page of slop dedicated to the answer which appears top for relevancy.
Once i realize it is slop i realize the relevant information could be hallicinated so i cant trust it.
At the same time im seeing a huge upswing in probable human created content being accused of being slop.
We're seeing a tragedy of the information commons play out on an enormous scale at hyperspeed.
The rest of the world has mostly been experiencing industrialisation, and was only indirectly affected by the great crash.
If there is a transformation in the rest of the world the west cannot escape it.
A lot of people in the west seem to have their heads in the sand, very much like when Japan and China tried to ignore the west.
China is the world's second biggest economy by nominal GDP, India the fourth. We have a globalised economy where everything is interlinked.
In that sense Western countries have proven that they are intellectualy very nimble.
Even if you accept the idea that gay sex is a sin, the entire basis of Christianity is that we are all sinners. Possessing wealth is a failure to follow Jesus's commands for instance. You should be complaining a lot more if the prime minister is rich. Adultery is clearly a more serious sin than having the wrong sort of sex, and I bet your country has had adulterous prime ministers (the UK certainly has had many!).
I think Christians who are obsessed with homosexuality as somehow making people worse than the rest of us, are both failing to understand Christ's message, and saying more about themselves than gays.
If you look at when sodomy laws were abolished, countries with a Christian heritage lead this. There are reasons in the Christian ethos if choice and redemption for this.
Why would that be a contradiction? Gay people can't be Christian?
The internet made it so that you can share and access information in a few minute if not seconds.
Smart phones build on the internet by making this sharing and access of information could done from anywhere and by anyone.
AI seems occupies the same space as google in the broader internet ecosystem.I dont know what AI provides me that a few hours of Google searches. It makes information retrieval faster, but that was the never the hard part. The hard part was understanding the information, so that you're able to apply it to your particalar situation.
Being able to write to-do apps X1000 faster is not innovation!
Just about the time it hit the mainstream coincidentally, is when the enshitification began to go exponential. Be careful what you wish for.
It took one September. Then as soon as you could take payments on the internet the rest was inevitable and in _clear_ demand. People got on long waiting lists just to get the technology in their homes.
> no new advances in technology
The reason the internet became so accessible is because Moore was generally correct. There was two corresponding exponential processes that vastly changed the available rate of adoption. This wasn't at all like cars being introduced into society. This was a monumental shift.
I see no advances in LLMs that suggest any form of the same exponential processes exist. In fact the inverse is true. They're not reducing power budgets fast enough to even imagine that they're anywhere near AGI, and even if they were, that they'd ever be able to sustainably power it.
> the current state is upending jobs
The difference is companies fought _against_ the internet because it was so disruptive to their business model. This is quite the opposite. We don't have a labor crisis, we have a retention crisis, because companies do not want to pay fair value for labor. We can wax on and off about technology, and perceptrons, and training techniques, or power budgets, but this fundamental fact seems the hardest to ignore.
If they're wrong this all collapses. If I'm wrong I can learn how to write prompts in a week.
It's the classic "slowly, then suddenly" paradigm. It took decades to get to that one September. Then years more before we all had internet in our pocket.
> The reason the internet became so accessible is because Moore was generally correct.
Can you explain how Moore's law is relevant to the rise of the internet? People didn't start buying couches online because their home computer lacked sufficient compute power.
> I see no advances in LLMs that suggest any form of the same exponential processes exist.
LLMs have seen enormous growth in power over the last 3 years. Nothing else comes close. I think they'll continue to get better, but critically: even if LLMs stay exactly as powerful as they are today, it's enough to disrupt society. IMHO we're already at AGI.
> The difference is companies fought _against_ the internet
Some did, some didn't. As in any cultural shift, there were winners and losers. In this shift, too, there will be winner and losers. The panicked spending on data centers right now is a symptom of the desire to be on the right side of that.
> because companies do not want to pay fair value for labor.
Companies have never wanted to pay fair value for labor. That's a fundamental attribute of companies, arising as a consequence of the system of incentives provided in capitalism. In the past, there have been opportunities for labor to fight back: government regulation, unions. This time that won't help.
> If I'm wrong I can learn how to write prompts in a week.
Why would you think that anyone would want you to write prompts?
99% of people only ever use proprietary networks from FAANG corporations. That's not "the internet", that's an evolution of CompuServe and AOL.
We got TCP/IP and the "web-browser" as a standard UI toolkit stack out of it, but the idea of the world wide web is completely dead.
After enlightenment^WAGI: chop wood, fetch water, prepare food
Many people slowly losing jobs and can’t find new ones. You’ll see effects in a few years
But I don't know that I accept the core assertion. If the engineer is screening the output and using the LLM to generate tests, chances are pretty good it's not going to be worse than human-generated tech debt. If there's more accumulated, it's because there's more output in general.
It seems to me that prompting agents and reviewing the output just doesn't.... trigger the same neural pathways for people? I constantly see people submit agent generated code with mistakes they would have never made themselves when "handwriting" code.
Until now, the average PR had one author and a couple reviewers. From now on, most PRs will have no authors and only reviewers. We simply have no data about how this will impact both code quality AND people's cognitive abilities over time. If my intuition is correct, it will affect both negatively over time. It remains to be seen. It's definitely not something that the AI hyperenthusiasts think at all about.
In mine it is the case. Anecdata.
But for me, this was over two decades in an underpaid job at an S&P500 writing government software, so maybe you had better peers.
It's not just me though. Loads of people subjectively perceiving a decrease in quality of engineering when relying on agents. You'll find thousands of examples on this site alone.
In what units?
I don’t mean 3x compounding monthly every month, I mean 3x total since I started using Claude Code about 6 months ago but the benefits keep compounding.
Firefox introducing their dev debugger many years ago "completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business"
You get the idea. Yes, the day to day job of software engineering has changed. The world at large cares not one jot.
In the meantime, I've had to continuously hear talk about AI, both in real life (like at the local pub) AND virtually (tv/radio/news/whatever) and how it's going to change the world in unimaginable ways for the last...2/3 years. Billions upon billions of dollars are being spent. The only tangible thing we have to show is software development, and some other fairly niche jobs, have changed _a bit_.
So yeah, excuse my impatience for the bubble to burst, I can stop having to hear about this shit every day, and I can go about my job using the new tools we have been gifted, while still doing all the other jobs that sadly do not benefit in any similar way.
There is zero evidence that LLMs have changed software development efficiency.
We get an earth-shattering developer productivity gamechanger every five years. All of them make wild claims, none of them ever have any data to back those claims up.
LLMs are just another in a long, long list. This too will pass. (Give it five years for the next gamechanger.)
What I don't buy is the "in two years there will be no more concept of money or poverty because AI has solved everything" argument using the evidence that these tools are really good at coding.
Are you making 3x the money compounding monthly ?
No?
Then what's the point?
You're not fooling anyone
>Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not).
Do you have any insight into what those changes might concretely be? Or are you just trying to instil fear in people who lack critical thinking skills?
I think what you are trying to say is can we define AGI so that we can have an intelligent conversation about what that will mean for our daily lives?. But you oddly introduced your argument by stating you didn't want to explore this definition...
Has it runaway yet? Not sure, but is it currently in the process of increasing intelligence with little input from us? Yes.
Exponential graphs always have a slow curve in the beginning.
Will there still be ice cream after Tuesday? General societal collapse would be hard to bare without ice cream.
That's Trump's economy, not LLMs.
Remember that weather balloon the US found a few years ago that for days was on the news as a Chinese spy balloon?
Well whether it was a spy balloon or a weather balloon but the first hint of its existence could have triggered a nuclear war that could have already been the end of the world as we know it because AGI will almost certainly be deployed to control the U.S. and Chinese military systems and it would have acted well before any human would have time to intercept its actions.
That’s the apocalyptic nuclear winter scenario.
There are many other scenarios.
An AGI which has been infused with a tremendous amount of ethics so the above doesn’t happen, may also lead to terrible outcomes for a human. An AGI would essentially be a different species (although a non biological one). If it replicated human ethics even when we apply them inconsistently, it would learn that treating other species brutally (we breed, enslave, imprison, torture, and then kill over 80 billion land animals annually in animal agriculture, and possibly trillions of water animals). There’s no reason it wouldn’t do that to us.
Finally, if we infuse it with our ethics but it’s smart enough to apply them consistently (even a basic application of our ethics would have us end animal agriculture immediately), so it realizes that humans are wrong and doesn’t do the same thing to humans, it might still create an existential crisis for humans as our entire identity is based on thinking we are smarter and intellectually superior to all other species, which wouldn’t be true anymore. Further it would erode beliefs in gods and other supernatural BS we believe which might at the very least lead humans to stop reproducing due to the existential despair this might cause.
Strong agentic AIs are a death sentence memo pad (or a malevolent djinn lamp if you like) that anyone can write on, because the tools will be freely available to leverage. A plutonium breeder reactor in every backyard. Try not to think of paperclips.
And as for the Chinese spy balloon, there was never any risk of a war (at least not from that specific cause). The US, China, Russia, and other countries routinely spy on each other through a variety of unarmed technical means. Occasionally it gets exposed and turns into a diplomatic incident but that's about it. Everyone knows how the game is played.
https://gizmodo.com/for-20-years-the-nuclear-launch-code-at-...
My usual way of thinking about it is AGI means can do all the stuff humans do which means you'd probably after a while look out the window and see robots building houses and the like. I don't think that's happening for a while yet.
Now, I do not in the least believe that we have created AGI, nor that we are actually close. But you're absolutely right that we can't just handwave away the definitions. They are crucial both to what it means to have AGI, and to whether we do (or soon will) or not.
Its core thesis was: Every era doubled the amount of technological change of the prior era in one half the time.
At the time he wrote the book in 1970, he was making the point that the pace of technological change had, for the first time in human history, rendered the knowledge of society's elders - previously the holders of all valuable information - irrelevant.
The pace of change has continued to steadily increase in the ensuing 55 years since.
None, as I don't develop LLM's.
I wasn't saying I think they will succeed, but I think it is worth noting their AGI ambitions are not as grand as the term implies. Nonetheless, if they achieve them, the world will change.
> and you will care if/when it arrives.
Yeah, it really doesn't matter if AGI has happened, is going to happen, will never happen, whatever. No matter what sort of definition we make for it, someone's always doing to disagree anyway. For a looong time, we thought the Turing test was the standard, and that only a truly intelligent computer could beat it. It's been blown out of the water for years now, and now we're all arguing about new definitions for AGI
At the end of the day, like you say, it doesn't matter a bit how we define terms. We can label it whatever we want, but the label doesn't change what it can DO
What it can DO is the important part. I think a lot of software devs are coming to terms with the idea that AI will be able to replace vast chunks of our jobs in the very near future.
If you use these things heavily, you can see the trajectory.
6 months ago I'd only trust them for boiler plate code generation and writing/reviewing short in-line documentation.
Today, with the latest models and tools, I'm trusting them with short/low impact tasks (go implement this UI fix, then redeploy the app locally, navigate to it, and verify the fix looks correct).
6 months from now, my best guess is that they'll continue to become more capable of handling longer + more complex tasks on their own.
5 years from now, I'm seeing a real possibility that they'll be handling all the code, end to end.
Doesn't matter if we call that AGI or not. It very much will matter whose jobs get cut, because one person with AI can do the work of 20 developers
Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before?
<looks out of window> <checks news websites> <checks social media...briefly> <asks wife>
Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets a bit shit if you're in software...is that what we get for billions of dollars spent?