We seem to be inadvertently empowering some VERY wrong people. If you haven't noticed, a significant fraction of the population now believes AGI is already here in a BIG way - not the way people here are working toward, but in ways depicted in movies, etc. This appears to be leading in some BAD directions.
In replacing God with fake AGI, there is some significant collateral damage, like Buddhism and other ethics-based beliefs. This is now twisting our society in some strange ways - just look at prime time TV now FULL of crime drama shows that clearly present the proposition that might makes right. Some well-meaning people on this forum have inadvertently contributed to this with crazy-optimistic predictions that unbridled AGI was about to emerge. I once made the rounds speaking at various colleges explaining how it was physically impossible to shoot down sub-orbital warheads between their launch and re-entry phases, to stop the crazy spending on SDI. Time has proven me 100% correct, but time has also proven that the goal of SDI was to bankrupt Russia and NOT to shoot down warheads. Somewhere in Russia, my counterpart was probably saying the same things and being ignored - or worse. In short, I was right, but fortunately I failed to get my message to be generally accepted. My point here is that correctness and social benefit often have little/nothing to do with each other. Hence, we all need to do some self-examination to see whether we are the social equivalent of 3-year-olds with loaded guns. I see NOTHING good coming from publicly promoting full AGI at this time. However, it might be possible to reframe the discussion for everyone's benefit, e.g. by dissecting the AGI concept enough to be able to identify which parts are socially responsible to discuss in public, and which parts will only further twist our society, once the screenwriters get hold of them. In short, I think we should be attending to the ethics of our not-yet-a-profession. I would start with something like "AGI appears to be as potentially dangerous as cold fusion" and show surely-safe paths forward. It is one thing to have an intelligent problem solver, and quite another to arm a problem solver to enforce its (final?) solutions. So, is anyone here interested in discussing ethics? Steve ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T992b9674ba947ee9-M08d84f95b1fd75fbe6c176e1 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
