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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I just see it as a (sad) reflection of capitalism. Those investors need some short term returns!

This does not make any sense. There's far more economic opportunity with AGI.

But if it’s more than a few years out then investors will start getting upset. They want money and are short term minded.

> There's far more economic opportunity with

Is there? Creating AGI sounds like a great way to utterly upend every assumption that our economy and governments are built on. It would be incredibly destabilizing. That's not typically good for business. There's no telling who will profit once that genie is out of the bottle, or if profit will even continue to be a meaningful concept.

I hear this comment a lot and I don't get it. Let's say AGI exists but it costs $100/hr to operate and it has the intelligence of a good PhD student. Does that suddenly mean that the economy breaks down or will the goalposts shift to AGI being "economical" and that PhD level isn't good enough? I still haven't gotten a heard a clear definition of AGI which makes me think that it will break the world.

It won't break the world, but it's warranted that it will break the world of people doing labor and getting paid for it. And when you think of it, even being a mediocre (or even moronic) investor is practicing a form of labor, so not even capital ownership is safe in the long run. And yes, generational wealth is a thing but there are tides that slowly shift wealth from A to B (e.g. from USA to China). Have a machine smart enough with even a sliver of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) to get some wealth for itself, and just watch what happens...

This is what Open AI themselves believe the risk is:

> By "defeat," I don't mean "subtly manipulate us" or "make us less informed" or something like that - I mean a literal "defeat" in the sense that we could all be killed, enslaved or forcibly contained.

Linked from https://openai.com/index/planning-for-agi-and-beyond/

Why not do both?

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