I'm seriously worried about the effect AGI would have on our economic structures and I do not think we are at all prepared for the kind of shock that would result from 75% or more of the current workforce becoming unemployed overnight.
To think about jobs after that event seems absurd.
"Your scientists were so focused on whether they could, they forgot to ask themselves whether they should".
The sheer power of it would be incredible, which is why this is a step that should not be taken lightly or accidentally.
I personally am interested in a society where work is 100% optional. And I think AGI would enable that.
How do you view AGI in relation to economic effects on the world?
People can keep doing petty political fights but they'll quiet down when the food and basic goods land in their house without them lifting a finger, I think. And it's going to be made better if it's done by robots and not other people.
People will simply divide in two: those who want the automated labor goods, and those who prefer hand-crafted goods. The latter will also be willing to pay more.
We do know when it might not appear. This isn't a movie where AI is created by a single person in an afteroon because they had a creative thought. It's an effort by many people over a prolonged period of time. Everything that we know from decades of AI research tells us that it certainly doesn't exist and that we aren't close to discovering it. Also your common sense should tell you that if Google had AGI, they wouldn't currently get most of their revenue from ads and they wouldn't have a smaller market cap than a company that makes phones.
2. Your statement is non-falsifiable. It's similar to claiming that I wouldn't be surprised if humans have already been to Mars. It's an outrageous claim that no one can accurately disprove. Non-falsifiability is also a way some conspiracy theories spread. Because when someone says "No way" to such a claim (like the sibling comment), you can always respond with "How do you know?". Falsifiability separates science from non-science - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
No, we don't. The progress in AI has been exponential. Anything exponential is hard for humans to estimate. This is perfectly illustrated by statements like "decades of AI research tells us ... that we aren't close". Every significant AI breakthrough has caught most AI experts by surprise (chess, IBM Watson, Imagenet results in 2012, Atari games, Go, GPT-2/3). If you made a poll of AI researchers a year or two before each one of these breakthroughs has happened, you would get estimates that would have been overly pessimistic in their timelines. We had no idea that scaling the original transformer would lead to GPT-3, and we don't have any idea of what's going to happen if we scale GPT-3 another factor of 100x.
if Google had AGI
We have no idea what an "AGI" would look like. More precisely, any ideas you might have about it probably came from Hollywood. For example, you seem to believe AGI will be superintelligent, even though it simply needs to be as intelligent as a regular human to be considered "AGI". It might be superintelligent, but we don't know.
Your statement is non-falsifiable
Relax. We are not proving a theorem here. Yes, it's unlikely Google has AGI. But I wouldn't be surprised if it does (ok, maybe a little surprised). But I would be very surprised if we don't have AGI within next 20 years. To me it's more likely we have it already than we don't have it within our lifetime.
Take barbers/hairdressers, for example. Could an AI do that job? Sure, in one sense, you just need robotic scissors. Do those robotic scissors magically appear immediately after the AGI does? No.
Or take welding. Sure, you can replace the welder with a robot. Who makes the robot? The AGI? Using what factory? Does the AGI, just by virtue of existing, own all the factories in the world? No, it doesn't.
Or take the person at the front desk of the hotel. Can you replace them with a robot? Maybe, but nobody wants a smile from a robot. They want one from a human.