How long? Experts in the field are guesstimating 15 to 25 years form now on to AGI. That's not too long form now for a revolution to happen that will be in its consequences bigger than the taming of fire.
It could even mean that we'll be than done with the wetware based boot process of intelligence.
Experts in the fields have been predicting that since the invention of computers, so we're closing in on 100 years of "trust me bro it's just around the corner"
AGI won't build a house, AGI won't pick up your trash, AGI won't mine your lithium, &c.
People should get out, a loooooot of jobs are really fucking dumb but really fucking hard to automate. Real life isn't a car assembly line
Even that's true, simple extrapolations on raw computing power make the 15 - 25 year estimate realistic. That was definitely not the case 100 years ago.
> AGI won't build a house
Are you sure? Computers are already a indispensable tool when it comes to planing something like a building. Without computers the planing would be much more labor intensive and much less safe.
And when it comes to the physical building: The branch of robotics for application on construction sides is more or less exploding the last few years. It won't take long and a lot of work on a building site can be almost fully automated.
> AGI won't pick up your trash
Well, actually cleaning robots are the first "serous AI powered robots" that start to show up in more and more average households. And even "simple" vacuum cleaner robots need quite some AI…
So AI way below AGI is already picking up the trash; and that's just the beginning.
> AGI won't mine your lithium, &c.
It won't? I'm not sure.
AI helps already to find new mining sites.
Also like with construction sites mining is something that gets automated more and more with every year passing.
All the dangerous and labor intensive but profitable tasks get automated first. That's a clear trend throughout history.
I myself am very skeptical on the current AI hype. Though I'm very sure our AI Overlords are coming, and this will happen sooner as some people would like. In 25 years we will have enough processing power to simulate human brains just by brute force. That's more or less a given. But maybe so much computing power isn't even required to reach AGI—if the used software is constructed in a smart way.
I'm in Berlin, we had a trash collectors strike for 4 days, it was hell on earth, Paris is in the middle of one right now
There is nothing even close to automating that, you'd need self driving trucks that handles extremely random patterns, have you ever followed a trash truck ? have you seen how they work ? Slaloming between stops cars, delivery trucks, going out in interior courtyards to bring the trash out, &c.
https://img.20mn.fr/EFQNJHYBRWaIoxIj9_oa-Ck/1200x768_paris-9...
What cleaning robots do is what I do with a 5$ broom and a wet wipe, they don't even do it faster and cost hundreds of $ (and are basically walking e-waste)
A 1kg robot roaming your living room has nothing to do with a 10ton truck roaming our streets. They do the """same""" job in the way a javascript code monkey does the same job as a software engineer at NASA (aka they don't)
> It won't? I'm not sure.
We already have power tools, heavy machinery, meanwhile: https://youtu.be/YiThCK0-_b0?t=231
The "AI will take over very soon" scenario is sci fi for now, and has been for 100 years, GPT don't go on a roof with nails and a hammer, GPT won't go work on oil platforms, GPT won't pick oranges on a tree (that's still mostly don't by hands because it's much cheaper and flexible than any alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o5lqEzz3Bo).
> In 25 years we will have enough processing power to simulate human brains just by brute force. That's more or less a given.
Tesla cars being fully autonomous by 2020 was also a given. I don't buy the hype at all, not until we get some real world results.
I think to believe that you have to:
- live in a bubble in which you don't interact much with the real world
- believe in some kind of singularity even that will come soon, almost in a religious manner
- severely underestimate human capabilities and over estimate computers capabilities
Small incremental steps and big prophecies don't automatically manifest into a revolution, this is always a good read: https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
But that doesn't mean there is nothing, and one can ignore what's there, and what's on the horizon already.
All of your examples boil down to "it's not economical". There was no technological argument presented.
Let's take for example the thing with the waste collection. You could fully automate the whole process even with 100 year old tech! Just build tunnels with conveyor belts under the houses. (Of course this would need still some human maintenance like what we have for water and gas, but it would not need all the trucks and human collector). The point is, that's not economical. The trucks and the human collectors are still much cheaper! But there is absolutely no technical reason that would prevent a different solution.
Your example with the hundreds of Euros costing robot that still can't even do the same as a 5 Euro broom is the core here: It's all about the costs. (That's get even admitted in the oranges picking example.)
But AI is in the first place actually not about robots. It's about doing cognitive tasks. Maybe AI won't replace trash collectors really soon, but it could for example replace the expertise of medical doctors or lawyers pretty soon.
Still a doctor wouldn't get unemployed instantly; because we don't have human like robots that could to the physical part of the work. But we have now (almost) machines that can do the mental work.
And no, I'm not living in a bubble. I'm quite skeptical about the current hype actually, as stated already. But I'm trying to maintain some realistic picture. I'm not denying technical progress. (Even I try to ignore the marketing bullshit around it.)
And to be honest: I estimate the intelligence of my fellow human beings extremely low indeed. Almost all human problems are human made. But we didn't manage to solve them even over tens of thousands of years. That's imho because humans are on average dumb. Very dumb actually.
At the same time there is not much to "overestimate" regarding computers. We will reach quite sure in the next 25 years a level of raw processing power that will be (at least) equivalent to the one of the human brain. As there is not "magic" involved in how brains work (they're just machines!) there is absolutely no reason why a human made machine could not reach human level of intelligence (which is in my opinion not even a very high one).
So summarize: I don't "fear" anything like the current "GPTs" to take my job, or the job of a lot of people. But the (imho) inevitable will happen. And it will likely happen sooner than a lot of people would like…
AFAIK more or less "everybody" is saying that it will happen "soon-ish". The optimist say AFIK 10 to 15 years, but even the pessimist say something around 25 to 35 years.
I also don't think raw computing power is or will be the bottleneck. But you can more or less brute-force problems with enough computing power. So that's an important factor. OTOH it could be that with clever tricks we reach something that looks like AGI way sooner. (Even completely "stupid" AIs without any "real intelligence"—whatever this is—like ELIZA or now the GPTs were and are good enough to fool the majority of people into believing that those machines are intelligent; intelligent enough even to be a substantial thread to humanity.)
I think the reason for a lot of confusion is that most people overestimate the human level of intelligence (likely even by a huge amount actually). The point is: Humans are not much smarter than other big apes. You can simulate intelligence credibly enough for most people by just throwing out language tokens by a big statistic. That's imho quite telling… Average people are actually quite terrible at things like logical reasoning, or in general joining the dots. That's the core of the issue that makes bullshit-generator machines like GPT3/4 so dangerous: Most people have no chance to recognize complete nonsense as such if the nonsense get recited eloquently and with enough self esteem. People fall for the same logical facilities the whole time since inception. That's for sure not because people on average are smart…
So if we're not that smart, and we build a compute smarter than us, even if just by a bit? Who cares? We've built a pretty dumb computer, according to you.
(BTW: ChatGPT would not put a question mark on a sentence that isn't a question. You need to try harder :-))
Measuring intelligence is quite subjective. We don't even know what it is yet.
You can disagree with this but I still believe that apes actually more intelligent than humans because they don't mess up their future, cause themselves a bunch of problems they need to solve etc.
Maybe it's just incidental that Apes aren't able to do the things I describe, however that might actually be a feature, not a bug and therefore, in universal sense, they are actually better off and more intelligent.
We're destroying their environment, and our own, that's pretty freaking stupid no?