I always found arguments for or against such technological advancements meaningless, if we don't specify what timeframes we are talking about. Sometimes I have the impression that people who disagree are simply thinking in different timeframes. For me, only short- and sometimes mid-term timeframes are practical in such deabtes. Long-term is interesting, but more in the realm of science fiction.

In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.

IMO, don't see the path to AGI with the current tech, though. All current SOTA agents are still LLM based with all their flaws (limited reasoning, generalization, incomplete world model, hallucinations, ...). At their core, they are still next token predictors with a limited context.

Most of the advances in AI in the past 2 years are in post-training and harnesses.

I'd expect a different core technology than just an LLM in order to get to AGI.

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sarchertech 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.

What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?

What if we all somehow decide that we don’t want AGI? It seems impossible now but a lot of people really seem to hate AI. What if that sentiment grows globally the next 50-100 years?

That’s all ignoring the possibility that the materialists are wrong. Around 80% of the world believes in some kind of soul or spirit. If anything materialism is a bit of a fringe belief.

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tspng an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?

Looking at history, there is not really an argument for progress to stop in the long term. I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human mind gets to a limit what it can comprehend and reason about. But lots of research and progress have been augmented by technology in the past 70 years or so, and I don't see a reason why it wont continue along that path. I agree that there is a limit to everything. But it is almost impossible to forsee when and where that is going to happen.

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seanclayton 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What is a globally accepted sentiment found in every nation, tribe, village, and domicile across the globe today?

	▲	sarchertech 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The prohibition against unjust killing is pretty much universal. What is or isn’t unjust is variable, but all societies have the concept of and prohibition against unjust killing. It’s true that if AGI is easy for a small group of people to build prohibition isn’t really possible. But if AGI takes a massive data center and billions of dollars, it could be.