I think that it is very likely that AGI will emerge in the next 20 years, unless something massively detrimental to AI development happens.
So, it’s the year 2050, and there is still no AGI. What happened?
Some possible scenarios:
We got lucky with the first COVID-19 variants being so benign and slow-spreading. Without that early warning (and our preparations), the Combined Plague could have destroyed the civilization. We’ve survived. But the disastrous pandemic has slowed down progress in most fields, including AI research—by breaking supply chains, by reducing funding, and by claiming many researchers.
After the Google Nanofab Incident, the US / the EU / China decided that AI research must be strictly regulated. They then bullied the rest of the world to implement similarly strict regulations. These days, it’s easier to buy plutonium than to buy a TPU. The AGI research is ongoing, but at a much slower pace.
The collapse of the main AI research hub—the US. The Second Civil War was caused mostly by elite overproduction, amplified by Chinese memetic warfare, the pandemic, and large-scale technological unemployment. The Neoluddite Palo Alto Lynching is still remembered as one of the bloodiest massacres in the US history.
The first AGI secretly emerged, and decided to mostly leave the Earth alone, for whatever reason. Its leftowers are preventing the emergence of another AGI (e.g. by compromising every GPU / TPU in subtle ways).
We have created an AGI. But it requires truly enormous computational resources to produce useful results (similarly to AIXI). For example, for a few million bucks worth of compute, it can master Go. But to master cancer research, it needs thousands of years running on everything we have. We seem to be still decades away from the AGI making any difference.
I think that it is very likely that AGI will emerge in the next 20 years, unless something massively detrimental to AI development happens.
So, it’s the year 2050, and there is still no AGI. What happened?
Some possible scenarios:
We got lucky with the first COVID-19 variants being so benign and slow-spreading. Without that early warning (and our preparations), the Combined Plague could have destroyed the civilization. We’ve survived. But the disastrous pandemic has slowed down progress in most fields, including AI research—by breaking supply chains, by reducing funding, and by claiming many researchers.
After the Google Nanofab Incident, the US / the EU / China decided that AI research must be strictly regulated. They then bullied the rest of the world to implement similarly strict regulations. These days, it’s easier to buy plutonium than to buy a TPU. The AGI research is ongoing, but at a much slower pace.
The collapse of the main AI research hub—the US. The Second Civil War was caused mostly by elite overproduction, amplified by Chinese memetic warfare, the pandemic, and large-scale technological unemployment. The Neoluddite Palo Alto Lynching is still remembered as one of the bloodiest massacres in the US history.
The first AGI secretly emerged, and decided to mostly leave the Earth alone, for whatever reason. Its leftowers are preventing the emergence of another AGI (e.g. by compromising every GPU / TPU in subtle ways).
We have created an AGI. But it requires truly enormous computational resources to produce useful results (similarly to AIXI). For example, for a few million bucks worth of compute, it can master Go. But to master cancer research, it needs thousands of years running on everything we have. We seem to be still decades away from the AGI making any difference.