this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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What is the point, though?
If you made AGI, you'd have a computer that thinks like a person. Okay? We already have minds that think like a person: they're called people!
I get that there is some belief that if you can make a digital consciousness, you can make a digital super-conciousness, but genuinely stop and ask what the utility is, and it's equal parts useless and evil.
First, this premise is totally unexamined. Maybe it can think faster or hold more information in mind at one moment, but what basis is there for such a creation actually exceeding the ingenuity of a group of humans working together? What problem is this going to solve? A "cure for cancer"? The bottleneck to cutting cancer isn't ideas, it's that cell research takes actual time and money. You need it synthesize molecules and watch cells grow, and pay for lab infrastructure. "Intelligence" isn't the limiting element!
The primary purpose is just to crater the value of human labor, by replacing human workers with workers with godlike powers of reasoning. Good luck with that. I'm sure they won't come to the exact reasoning as any exploited worker in 120 nano-seconds.
It's like Jason's problem-solving advice in "The Good Place":
Sure. Let's work ourselves to death forTHIS.
They’re all desperate that so much venture capital is being poured on this, so whoever promises more gets more money, and whoever has more money can bankrupt the rival. There’s no need for an actual AGI to ever exist here to win the game.
I don't think a device will ever have a thought. I find it somewhat akin to a belief in the anamism of objects, that it will aquire some form of life force of its own. What a thought is, is a complete mystery. Nobody knows why they happen, where they come from. So, who is even to determine whether an inamimate object is exhibiting signs of consciousness? There are some people that believe it, others are just running a con.