This time we're building AGI, so yes, this time is different.
... but the little dgx spark is in the room with us! it's pretty smart-ish, in a pinch!
(Scare-quote absolutely necessary: even with maximal anthropomorphisation, we have no way to differentiate between "rewarded for work well done" vs. "punished for not working or half-arseing").
It also exists is a very different state that biological life. Biological life has a brain that either has activity or doesn't. Once the activity is gone, the brain is forever off and nothing can start it back. So we associate the activity as life and as the intelligence running. AI has weights with vast interconnections, but they can easily be turned on and off, rewound, paused, and so on in a way that we couldn't dream of doing with biological intelligence.
So, maybe these differences are enough it isn't intelligence. But it is something, something that is getting better at quite a higher speed. Some that approximates intelligence in many ways. That passes the Turing test. So that something needs a name, and intelligence seems a hard enough to define thing that it is easy to stretch it and include this new factor as falling under the term.
Great strategy. Like growing a metric ton of HeLa cells in the hope someone will assemble a super brain out of them.
I imagine the first thing that would happen is that some people will declare AGI is here and some people will be in denial and call it a "stochastic parrot" because they either feel threatened by it, cynical or just ignorant. Then we just continue business as usual for a while because most people wouldn't know what to do with it and definitely don't want to be replaced even if they aren't against the idea of using AI. A lot of research is also useless without collecting data, experimentation in the real world and hardware, all of which take time.
"The intelligence we already have" is why we're splitting atoms and the other primates are splitting rocks. That took us a few hundred thousand years, of course.
But if you have our mere equals in digital form, that only takes as long to change everything as it takes to build a factory to produce the same number of equally dexterous robots.
Every time is different, that doesn't stop it rhyming.
I am watching the dawning realization among the management class that even if coding costs drop to zero, Amdahl's Law means that perhaps productivity doubles for most software engineers, rather than goes to the MOON. AI can help some of the other bottlenecks, but not 100%.
On the positive side, we programmers have been trying to collectively explain to management for decades now that our jobs are not just 100% banging away at code on keyboards, we're not just interchangable code monkeys. Well, they're getting their noses rubbed in it now, complete with metrics and charts and all the other things they value more than the feedback from their employees.
In fact I was just noticing this week... in the past few months I had been really banging away at a lot of code projects. I was doing that whole "3 or 4 streams going on at once" that many of us have talked about, with a variety of mixed feelings. But in the past few weeks that seems to have starved out. I seem to have burned through the things that I was blocked on code for, and had a reasonable business case to pursue. Now my projects are all blocking up on non-code things again... communication with other teams. Review of documents that are irreducibly things humans need to review. Coordination and planning. Applying human attention to cover over the way that even the best frontier models still seem to have huge gaps in their superficially-expansive automated testing code that they write for their own code. I'm still sometimes unblocking multiple things at once and can briefly have multiple projects going, but then I hit a blocker somewhere and I end up unable to continue having multiple simultaneous code projects going at once.
(The document review is a particularly interesting case. The documents in question are something we expect some humans to at least skim, but are going to be basically a meta-program for AIs programming the rest of the company's code. It is important to get it right because every error is going to magnify quite a bit. AIs are helping a lot with that document, yes, I certainly agree we are proceeding more quickly with it than the same project 5 years ago would have gone, but it is also irreducibly sopping up a lot of human attention.)
Point of all this being that the casual presumption that AI will just utterly destroy the entire economy because it is good at coding may prove to be, well, yeah, exactly the same as the assumption that we are going to all be rich by 2002 because we'll just shift the entire economy to be on the internet and everything will multiply by 1000 in just a couple years as a result. But everything can't be shifted on to the internet. I can't eat a web page. AI can't do everything, and as it advances the things it can't do become a larger and larger percent of the remaining pie as a result. It seems to rhyme a lot with the dot com crash.
I kinda hope that one stays around for a long time, because robots controlled by AI competent enough to guide those robots through every step in their production from mining raw materials to end-of-assemble acceptance testing, is one where tiny mistakes kill everyone.
Like, say you've got a sticky 0 key and accidentally ask for more burgers than there is carbon in Earth's biosphere and atmosphere combined: if the sufficiently-competent AI is a little too eager to obey and not quite willing enough to say "no" or listen when told to "stop", that's enough to kill everyone.
Abou sycophancy, I sense that it's much lower now with Opus 5.5. Yesterday I had to argue my viewpoint for quite a bit before it relented, on an issue I'm pretty sure I'm broadly correct. It's becoming a better sparring partner that actually pushes back and raises counter-arguments.
To a first approximation, none of them.
There's a huge difference between "zero" and "a little" when it comes to Amdahl's Law and scaling up, let alone the things where it won't be "a little". Which is one of those things that sounds obvious when I say it. But clearly a lot of people are predicting a future that is based on costs and times being "zero" that won't be.
If you sold stuff directly, handling transactions was still a pain; PayPal had to be invented, and that was only 1998.
If you ran on advertising, you had to invent the ad network and convince people to buy ad slots.
The web WAS a bad idea though.
The internet and web were revolutionary, no one can deny that. They completely transformed our society. Nevertheless, the bubble popped. The current bubble is no different.