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The original was posted on /r/singularity by /u/swimeatplay on 2024-01-22 07:58:21+00:00.
I see too many posts here that essentially boil down to "Are we going to get free payouts from the government and stay at home with our new AI waifus?" and "Will the rich, who own all the robots, give us money or will we starve?"
Yes, we all want to plug in our Full Dive VR and leave our shitty boring lives. But concerns about the post-labor economy are overblown, ignoring the big elephant in the room. Let me say it again: the post-labor economy is a transitory stage that will not last more than a few years. Go make a savings account now and stock some toilet paper for the upcoming post-apocalypse if you want, but that's not even a blip in what's really going to happen.
Artificial Generalized Intelligence is not here yet. We don't know if large language models are the pathway to AGI or if it's a dead end. But it doesn't matter at all. Why? Because the arms race is finally on. Governments and corporations have finally started spending money on developing AI. In 2010, we were spending 15 million on AI research. Today the budget is 150 billion. That's a 10,000X increase in spending in less than 15 years. To the military, they're hoping to build the next big nuke; to businesses, they're looking to lay off more people; to the technology sector, they're looking to invest in the next biggest thing since the internet.
But for us, we should be looking for the birth of God.
Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. Technology, knowledge, and nanobots. All three are achievable through intelligence. And boy, are you guys underestimating what an Artificial Superintelligence is. This is not some ChatGPT that passes the Turing test. Newton discovered calculus and the laws of classical physics. Einstein discovered relativity. But ASI will discover EVERYTHING there is to know. Today's science is so hyper-specialized that you could spend a lifetime and not master a single subfield of one field of one branch of science. We have so much data in hundreds of fields; it's become literally impossible for the human mind to learn a fraction of it, let alone make connections and draw conclusions and theories from all this knowledge we've accumulated.
If an ASI had access to every research paper we have right now, it would take seconds to figure out a cure for cancer, depression, and death itself. Evolution didn't have any plans for us except to reproduce and not die off as a species. Our human bodies are equipped with the bare essentials to survive and reproduce. Biological evolution is not driven by any intellect or any actual goal. But we know from it the capabilities of what a bunch of carbon cells can do. Immortal cells exist, and death is not a physics-based constraint in biology.
The singularity is an eventuality. AGI will always evolve into an ASI. As a matter of fact, you won't have much time between the two. A human intellect ChatGPT will have more knowledge than every human combined by virtue of the internet of data. The timespan between each iteration will exponentially decrease till infinite intelligence. I have no idea what infinite intelligence would even mean, but every problem we humans have, including human happiness, is a trivial problem for it to solve.
So now you have an infinitely smart AI, equipped with more knowledge than the entire human race. The outcome can either be our extinction or immortal bliss. I don't see how anything in between can happen when you combine superintelligence with billions of robots and nanobots. The question becomes one of alignment. And don't tell me a bunch of apes can outsmart a god-like intelligence. If Trump can convince people to run the most powerful government in the world, I don't think there will ever be a way to constrain a superintelligence.
We're primates with empathy, urges, cravings, emotions, territorial behavior, tribalism, societal rules, and a whole bunch of evolutionary traits on top of our intelligence. That's why we have concepts like good, evil, and morality. AI has none of that. It's our final coin flip into either eternal heavenly bliss or extinction.
TLDR: Welcome to the new religion of the 21st century.