Taking the AGI bet - Built Not Found
Thinking about LLMs, it's hard to not get flashing glimpses of the potential doom we are facing. In the brief and hazy visions of the future, our societies and economies are ripped apart and reordered uncountable many times. The changes happen so violently and so incredibly fast that the eyes overwatching the history of humankind are likely to miss it all if they just do as much as blink.
But maybe something much worse happens - nothing changes. We stagnate. The capabilities we have today, end up being what, very roughly, we have in 5o years. We build incrementally better tools, some jobs are lost, and some are gained, however, on the cosmic scale, humanity's trajectory doesn't move by more than a couple of inches.
In other, less kind words, we continue to sentence every single one of the 8 billion people to certain death. For some, this may be at the age of 120, but death nonetheless.
In this stagnation scenario, we accept that we never get to answer the hard question of consciousness. We accept that half of the short lives we do have will be spent sleeping (not too bad) and that a third of our non-sleeping lives will be lost at work without the choice to do otherwise (not great). And that's just for the lucky ones.
