I'm reminded of the the old adage: You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the hiker next to you.

To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI.

No really.

You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today.

But, really, what else do you want out of the bots? Flying cars, cancer cures, frozen irradiated Mars bunkers? We were mostly getting there already. It'll speed thing up a bit, sure, but mostly just because we can't be arsed to actually fund research anymore. The bots are just making things cheaper, maybe.

No, be real. We wanted cold hard cash out of them. And even those crummy catfish bots back in 2015 were doing the job well enough.

We can debate 'intelligence' until the sun dies out and will still never be satisfied.

But the reality is that we want money, and if you take that low, terrible, and venal standard as the passing bar, then we've been here for a decade.

(oh man, just read that back, I think I need to take a day off here, youch!)

> You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so.

He's_Outta_Line_But_He's_Right.gif

Seriously, AGI to the HN crowd is not the same as AGI to the average human. To my parents, these bots must look like fucking magic. They can converse with them, "learn" new things, talk to a computer like they'd talk to a person and get a response back. Then again, these are also people who rely on me for basic technology troubleshooting stuff, so I know that most of this stuff is magic to their eyes.

That's the problem, as you point out. We're debating a nebulous concept ("intelligence") that's been co-opted by marketers to pump and dump the latest fad tech that's yet to really display significant ROI to anyone except the hypesters and boosters, and isn't rooted in medical, psychological, or societal understanding of the term anymore. A plurality of people are ascribing "intelligence" to spicy autocorrect, worshiping stochastic parrots vomiting markov chains but now with larger context windows and GPUs to crunch larger matrices, powered by fossil fuels and cooled by dwindling freshwater supplies, and trained on the sum total output of humanity but without compensation to anyone who actually made the shit in the first place.

So yeah. You're dead-on. It's just about bilking folks out of more money they already don't have.

And Ashley Madison could already to that for pennies on the dollar compared to LLMs. They just couldn't "write code" well enough to "replace" software devs.

I think AGI has to do more than pass a Turning test by someone who wants to be fooled.

For me it was twitter bots during the 2016 election, but same principle.

I think that's another issue with AGI is 30 years away, the definition of what is AGI is a bit subjective. Not sure how we can measure how long it'll take to get somewhere when we don't know exactly where that somewhere even is.

By your measure, Eliza was AGI, back in the 1960s.

> But the reality is that we want money

Only in a symbolic way. Money is just debt. It doesn't mean anything if you can't call the loan and get back what you are owed. On the surface, that means stuff like food, shelter, cars, vacations, etc. But beyond the surface, what we really want is other people who will do anything we please. Power, as we often call it. AGI is, to some, seen as the way to give them "power".

But, you are right, the human fundamentally can never be satisfied. Even if AGI delivers on every single one of our wildest dreams, we'll adapt, it will become normal, and then it will no longer be good enough.