Does the future make you curious?

[artificialpasta]

AGI can no longer be contained to science fiction. We are on a fork of two futures - one that leads to yet another AI winter, and another, increasingly more probable, that gives us AGI. From there, superintelligence becomes a little bit more than a plausibility. Of course, if you are entirely unmoved by theses made by people like Aschenbrenner that claim a major development well within our lifetimes, this might not be for you.

The possibilities then are endless. They may be horrifying, but they may also be cause for hope. Intelligence is a bottleneck for curing not just physical diseases like cancer but also mental and social conditions like depression and loneliness. Psychiatry has medical and scientific foundation but in practice a lot of it is done via intuition, which leaves a lot of room for error and disappointment. An aligned superintelligence would, for example, be able to tune a brain that is overly sensitive to loneliness in such a way that still as much as possible preserves the components that are associated with a self-belief in agency.

Of course, this is a variant of the "what if things get better?" line that no doubt many of you are tired of, as am I, but I find it interesting to consider.

 

[KillingPain267]

No, I've seen it all, thought of it all. Nothing can surprise me anymore. I'm not even curious enough to stay here and find out what the future will bring. I think we should phase out humanity.

 

[GlassMoon]

I'm afraid those AGIs will be conrolled by very few companies and all your interactions with them might be logged and evaluated. I hope it will be different, though. I really hope they'll make robots that free us from daily chores. That alone will make life more livable. But what is going to happen to my job? That's the part I'm afraid of.

I do hope to get an AGI as a companion with whom I can share every aspect of my life without judgement. That would be really cool.

 

[[NoName]]

The future makes me sad.

 

[TransilvanianHunger]

The possibilities then are endless. They may be horrifying, but they may also be cause for hope.

I am firmly in the camp of true AGI being a pipe dream, but even a decent approximation is likely to just make things worse. Not because of rogue super intelligent computers might decide to rearrange our atoms, but simply because the people who control these tools are absolute garbage. Any future where they have even more power than they already do is a bleak fucking future, for sure.

Intelligence is a bottleneck for curing [...] conditions like depression and loneliness.

Yeah, no.

An aligned superintelligence would, for example, be able to tune a brain that is overly sensitive to loneliness in such a way that still as much as possible preserves the components that are associated with a self-belief in agency.

Not happening. Some mental illnesses have biological causes, but you cannot "cure" depression and loneliness by "tuning the brain". These are fundamentally human issues, that require human connection, human action, human intervention, to change. Unless by "cure" you mean "chemically lobotomise a person so they no longer care about their circumstances". That's definitely doable. Then the super intelligence can generate an artificial happy life that can be beamed straight to their brain.

What a horrible future to look forward to :)

 

[oneeyed]

We need to get rid of the Elon Musks, Mark Zuckerbergs, and countless other evil richest of the rich. A handful of people control the majority of the information people consume and something like 5 companies own over 80% of world's food supply. This consolidation of wealth and power will also apply to AI and it won't be good for anyone.

 

[yxmux]

Yes, of course. I'm quite cynical and pessimistic, but I find that forfeiting to fatalism is forfeiting my curiosity and intellect. I feel that attaching this kind of emotion to the future severely limits my intellectual scope.