[mitthrowaway2]

AGI folks have to rely on speculation because AGI does not exist. But Goddard and Tsiolkovsky had to rely on speculation because, in their day, rockets didn't exist either. They were ridiculed[1] for suggesting that a vehicle could be propelled through a vacuum to the moon.

But there's speculation of the fantasy sort, and then there's speculation of the well-grounded "this conclusion follows from that one" sort, and the AGI folks seem to be mostly in the second camp.

And yeah, unlike GPT-4, AGI isn't here-and-now. But GPT-2 was an amusing toy in 2019, and GPT-3 was an intriguing curiosity in 2020. In 2014, "computers [didn't] stand a chance against humans" at Go[2], but two years later, it was humans who no longer stood a chance against computers. The here-and-now is changing fast these days. Don't you think it's worth looking even a little bit up the road ahead?

Isn't there some role here for speculation?

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/kbzd3a/the-new-york-times-19...

[2] https://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/