JA WestenbergFeb 15

When someone tells you that AGI is inevitable and the permanent economic displacement of most humans is a foregone conclusion, what they're really telling you is that they believe the current leaders of the AI industry will execute flawlessly, indefinitely, against challenges they can't yet foresee, in an environment that's changing faster than perhaps any in history.

This seems unlikely.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-empire-always-falls/

The empire always falls

A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia: all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity // the Mediterranean itself.

Westenberg.
Show threadDiane

@Daojoan

We are still arguing over how intelligent animals are. We can't even agree on what goes into intelligence.

There's no chance we know enough to intentionally engineer intelligent systems.

A far more likely explanation is the people making predictions about AGI are all desperately selling a fantasy to investors so they can get rich.

Look at elon musk's history of making grandiose promises that regularly fail. AGI is just as real as Tesla delivering self driving cars, or SpaceX putting humans on mars, when we haven't even accomplished a much easier robotic sample return mission.

Feb 15 at 6:43amWeb