I don't see how AI can bring about 10%+ annual economic growth, let alone infinite abundance, without somehow crossing the bit-to-atom interface. Without a breakthrough in general-purpose robotics - which feels decades away - agents will just be confined to optimizing B2B SaaS. Human utility is rooted in the physical environment. I find digital abundance incredibly uninspiring.
svara|1 month ago
I think we'll see more specialized models for narrow tasks (think AlphaFold for other challenges in drug discovery, for example) as well, but those will feel like individual, costly, high impact discoveries rather than just generic "AI".
Our world is human-shaped and ultimately people who talk of "AGI" secretly mean an artificial human.
I believe that "intelligence", the way the word is actually used by people, really just means "skillful information processing in pursuit of individual human desires".
As such, it will never be "solved" in any other way than to build an artificial human.
Applejinx|1 month ago
If superhuman intelligence is solved it'll be in the form of building a more healthy society (or, if you like, a society that can outcompete other societies). We've already seen this sort of thing by accident and we're currently seeing extensive efforts to attack and undermine societies through exploiting human intelligence.
To a genetic algorithm techie that is actually one way to spur the algorithm to making better societies, not worse ones: challenge it harder. I guess we'll see if that translates to life out here in the wild, because the challenge is real.
tim333|1 month ago