AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI

Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.

To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI.

No really.

You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today.

But, really, what else do you want out of the bots? Flying cars, cancer cures, frozen irradiated Mars bunkers? We were mostly getting there already. It'll speed thing up a bit, sure, but mostly just because we can't be arsed to actually fund research anymore. The bots are just making things cheaper, maybe.

No, be real. We wanted cold hard cash out of them. And even those crummy catfish bots back in 2015 were doing the job well enough.

We can debate 'intelligence' until the sun dies out and will still never be satisfied.

But the reality is that we want money, and if you take that low, terrible, and venal standard as the passing bar, then we've been here for a decade.

(oh man, just read that back, I think I need to take a day off here, youch!)

Only in a symbolic way. Money is just debt. It doesn't mean anything if you can't call the loan and get back what you are owed. On the surface, that means stuff like food, shelter, cars, vacations, etc. But beyond the surface, what we really want is other people who will do anything we please. Power, as we often call it. AGI is, to some, seen as the way to give them "power".

But, you are right, the human fundamentally can never be satisfied. Even if AGI delivers on every single one of our wildest dreams, we'll adapt, it will become normal, and then it will no longer be good enough.