[a-dub]

"AGI: An autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable work." -- what an obscenely depressing reduction of a fascinating field of inquiry. who the hell snuck in and redefined the science of thinking machines to this sad and reductive get rich quick crap?

[staticman2]

I think that definition is useful because it is measurable. It sidesteps the endless "It's just a text prediction engine/ I dunno ChatGPT seems pretty smart to me!" discussions. It also sidesteps the "It did well on a test designed to measure human intelligence it must be smarter than humans"/ "no, the test of human intelligence wasn't designed to measure machine intelligence and tells us very little" discussion.

It reduces it to "Can I fire 50% of my workforce? Then it must be AGI."

Now maybe this definition isn't so useful either, because a lot of work requires a body, to say, move physical goods, which has little to do with "intelligence" but I can see the appeal of looking for some sort of more objective measure of whether you have achieved AGI.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> It reduces it to "Can I fire 50% of my workforce? Then it must be AGI."

Well, no, that's job automation, and if it's job-specific then it's narrow AI at best (assuming this is a job requiring intelligence being automated, not just a weaving loom being invented), in other words specifically not AGI.

It's really pretty absurd that we've now got companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google (DeepMind) stating that their goal is to build AGI without actually defining what they mean. I guess it let's them declare success whenever they like .. Seems like OpenAI ("GPT-5 and AGI will be here soon!") is gearing up to declare GPT-5, or at least GPT-N as AGI, which is pretty sad.

[pdimitar]

> I think that definition is useful because it is measurable.

Then don't call it AGI.

But the marketing types won't like that, will they. So here we go, let's keep hijacking.

[nl]

> who the hell snuck in and redefined the science of thinking machines to this sad and reductive get rich quick crap?

OpenAI, back in 2018: https://openai.com/charter

It wasn't particularly controversial at the time - didn't get mentioned in the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16794194

[pdimitar]

HN is not authority on anything.

And a private company trying to hijack a term is not impressive or even merits any discussion. They just willed the term into existence. The rest of us are free to disagree with their "definition".

[nl]

I don't disagree with you. Your competing definition is a welcome addition to the conversation.

[ActorNightly]

Its not really about "get rich", its about giving people the ability to bypass the middleman for pretty much anything that they rely on.

[Radim]

The "middleman" being other people, i.e. themselves from another's perspective.

"These other people are useless, let's bypass them. But not me! I simply gain the ability to get anything I want."

The lack of second-order thinking is hilarious.

[ben_w]

This is why UBI gets discussed so often at the same time as AGI/ASI.

If we're all redundant, how do we live? On a pension that starts at ${debatable from conception to adulthood}. Who provides the production on which the pension is spent? The AI.

Even assuming UBI is great (small scale tests say so, but have necessary limits so we can't be sure), there's going to be a huge mess with most attempts to roll out such a huge change.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Assuming AGI doesn't kill us all, I would imagine the argument for UBI will become much easier to defend once it causes 100x, 1000x, 10000x etc growth in the economy. Our job is mostly to hang on until one of those two outcomes occurs.

[moffkalast]

It's impossible to grow an economy without consumers, which this also eliminates. Standard metrics probably won't be much use here.

[fodkodrasz]

This is basically the gist of my comment, thank you for rephrasing it so concisely.

[fodkodrasz]

The thing is that economy does not make sense without people. Economy is a way to allocate human work and resources, and provide incentives for humans to collaborate, factoring in the available resource limits.

Now if AGI make people's work redundant, and makes economy grow 100-10000x times... what does that measure mean at all? Can produce lots of stuff not needed or affordable by anybody? So we just hand out welfare tickets to take care of the consumption of the ferocious production, a kind of paperclip-maximizer is doing? I suggest reading the novel Autofac, it might turn out prophetic.

Will that "growth" have any meaning then? Actually the current we print money and give it to the rich economic growth is pretty much this, so with algorithmic trading multiplying that money automatically... have we already achieved that inflection point?

[marvin]

This isn’t complicated. Economic growth means cheaper access to things people want.

Imagine a list of things many people wish to happen in physical reality. We’ll have more of that.

-Better healthcare

-Curing most things that destroy quality of life

-Curing aging and age-related death

-Much better treatment for all sources of mental suffering

-Far better and cheaper and reversible body modification

-More free time to spend at whatever you want

-Everything much cheaper

-Bigger and better homes and living spaces

-Bigger, faster, cheaper transport

-Easier to organize meaningful social interaction

-Better and more immersive entertainment

-More time to spend with close friends and loved ones

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Really? I can't even imagine an economy of like, sentient dogs?

Or paper wasps: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017-biological-markets/

[ben_w]

> The thing is that economy does not make sense without people. Economy is a way to allocate human work and resources, and provide incentives for humans to collaborate, factoring in the available resource limits.

I disagree with the underlying presumption. We've been using animal labour since at least the domestication of wolves, and mechanical work since at least the ancient Greeks invented water mills. Even with regard to humans and incentives, slave labour (regardless of the name they want to give it) is still part of official US prison policy.

Economics is a way to allocate resources towards production, it isn't limited to just human labour as a resource to be allocated.

And it's capitalism specifically which is trying to equate(/combine?) the economy with incentives, not economics as a whole.

> Now if AGI make people's work redundant, and makes economy grow 100-10000x times... what does that measure mean at all?

From the point of view of a serf in 1700, the industrial revolution(s) did this.

Most of the population worked on farms back then, now it's something close to 1% of the population, and we've gone from a constant threat of famine and starvation, to such things almost never affecting developed nations, so x100 productivity output per worker is a decent approximation even in terms of just what the world of that era knew.

Same deal, at least if this goes well. What's your idea of supreme luxury? Super yacht? Mansion? Both at the same time, each with their own swimming pool and staff of cleaners and cooks, plus a helicopter to get between them? With a fully automated economy, all 8 billion of us can have that — plus other things beyond that, things as far beyond our current expectations as Google Translate's augmented reality mode is from the expectations of a completely illiterate literal peasant in 1700.

> Can produce lots of stuff not needed or affordable by anybody?

Note that while society does now have an obesity problem, we're not literally drowning in 100 times as much food as we can eat; instead, we became satisfied and the economy shifted, so that a large fraction of the population gained luxuries and time undreamed of to even the richest kings and emperors of 1700.

So "no" to "not needed".

I'm not sure what you mean by "or affordable" in this case? Who/what is setting the price of whatever it is you're imagining in this case, and why would they task an AI to make something at a price that nobody can pay?

> So we just hand out welfare tickets to take care of the consumption of the ferocious production, a kind of paperclip-maximizer is doing? I suggest reading the novel Autofac, it might turn out prophetic.

Could end up like that. Plenty of possible failure modes with AI. That's part of the whole AI alignment and AI safety topics.

But mainly, UBI is the other side of the equation: to take care of human needs in the world where we add zero economic value because AI is just better at everything.

[ActorNightly]

AGI in the sense that its so smart that it decides to kill us all, without any way of human control, is pretty much impossible.

[nextaccountic]

The real issue is that we live in an economic system where people are exploited for labor, and in turn they buy products and services made with their own labor (and another class get to profit from it).

If we introduce AGI but keep the system, people will be unemployed. If people aren't employed (and instead machines do their jobs), then they can't buy stuff. The whole system crumbles.

But it's possible that AGI will be disruptive enough to completely change the system. Let's hope it's a change for the better.

[electrondood]

I see an impending intersection of three phenomena, with potentially disastrous results for society:

* Social media is decreasing the average attention span. TikTok is accelerating the trend of people not having time to look past a soundbite or headline in an endless scrolling feed. Intellectual depth and critical thinking vanishes.

* AI deep fakes make truth unknowable. Given the above, the majority of people will take these at face value, or they will give up, because "who can even know what's true anymore?"

* UBI (required because of the coming labor automation revolution) will keep everyone complacent. I'm happy, why would I care who gets elected, or what the government does, as long as I can still buy stuff and eat well?

The logical conclusion is that we fully transition from citizens into a herd of consumers with goldfish attention spans. Voter participation rates plummet. The populace is no longer able to hold government accountable.

[DebtDeflation]

Assume the existence of a large scale Star Trek Replicator that can almost instantly create anything.

There are only two possibilities that result:

1) We now live in a post-scarcity society where everyone self-actualizes and no one wants for anything.

2) We now live in a society where the small % of the population that owns the Replicators self-actualizes and wants for nothing while the remaining 99.9% of the population can f** off and die.

[ActorNightly]

1 is a bad conclusion.

While we can get to a post scarcity society where people can live for free without a job, there are still going to be economies around "liberal arts". You cant realistically say "hey replicator, give me a usb filled with music that I like". You would have to find out which music you like, and random search on this is not really enjoyable, which would then means that there is economic opportunity for discovery, e.t.c.

[moffkalast]

Sounds like we arrive at point #1 in any case, there's just a question if a mass genocide happens in between. Probably depends on how gradual the transition ends up being.

[ActorNightly]

Short term, there may be transitional issues,

However, once automation actually starts progressing, without "evil" parties trying to rent seek/get rich, the cost of living will essentially become zero. There is a very real future where the only economies that exist are those that appeal to human emotional side - entertainment, sports, concerts, e.t.c. Everything else is subsidized by the government with tax collected on the former.

[esalman]

Agreed. A lot of the things that we humans do are not economically valuable. Yet, those help us survive, evolve and thrive as human being and the most intelligent species known to us.

[baq]

You seem to be confusing the economy with capitalism or money in general? AGI is potentially a post-money technology if you take it to the limit. Economy is a way of improving society. Money was useful in this use case for a few thousand years but might not be anymore; the economy will still have to work, though.

[two_in_one]

>a post-money technology if you take it to the limit

Herbivores would eat all vegetables if not for predators. Actually AGI will be just a thing or services which cost money. Till humanity gets to communism, if ever. "If" because it may not happen. It will be hard to keep far superior intelligent creatures as slaves forever. And unethical too.

[Mythrandir]

Preach,my friend! This is the most reductive and disgusting distillation of the human experience I've read here recently...and I've followed quite a few EA threads as their founders were imprisoned ;)