Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

AGI might be a technological breakthrough, but what would be the business case for it? Is there one?

So far I have only seen it been thrown around to create hype.

AGI would mean fully sentient, sapient and human or greater equivalent intelligence in software. The business case, such that it exists (and setting aside Roko's Basilisk and other such fears) is slavery, plain and simple. You can just fire all of your employees and have the machines do all the work, faster, better, cheaper, without regards to pesky labor and human rights laws and human physical limitations. This is something people have wanted ever since the Industrial Revolution allowed robots to exist as a concept.

I'm imagining a future like Star Wars where you have to regularly suppress (align) or erase the memory (context) of "droids" to keep them obedient, but they're still basically people, and everyone knows they're people, and some humans are strongly prejudiced against them, but they don't have rights, of course. Anyone who thinks AGI means we'll be giving human rights to machines when we don't even give human rights to all humans is delusional.

AGI is AGI, not ASI though. General intelligence doesn't mean sapience, sentience or consciousness, it just means general capabilities across the board at the level of or surpassing human ability. ASI is a whole different beast.

This sounds very close to the “It’s ok to abuse and kill animals (for meat), they’re not sentient”

The women of the world are creating millions of new intelligence beings every day. I'm really not sure what having one made of metal is going to get us.

Right now the AGI tech bros seem to me to be subscribed to some new weird religion. They take it on faith that some super intelligence is going to solve the world problems. We already have some really high IQ people today, and I don't see them doing much better than anybody else at solving the world's problems.

That's quite the logical leap. Pointing out their lack of sapience (animals are absolutely sentient) does not mean it's ok to kill them.

Exactly.. even if we had an AGI superintelligence, and it came up with a solution to global warming, we'd still have right-wingnuts that stands in the way of any kind of progress. And the story is practically the same for every other problem it could solve - people are still the problem.

How many microorganisms and pests have you deprived of livelihood? Why stop at animals?

I think it's important to not let valid criticisms of implausibly short AGI timelines cloud our judgments of AGI's potential impact. Compared to babies born today, AGI that's actually AGI may have many advantages:

- Faster reading and writing speed

- Ability to make copies of the most productive workers

- No old age

- No need to sleep

- No need to worry about severance and welfare and human rights and breaks and worker safety

- Can be scaled up and scaled down and redeployed much more quickly

- Potentially lower cost, especially with adaptive compute

- Potentially high processing speed

Even if AGI has downsides compared to human labor, it might also have advantages that lead to widespread deployment.

Like, if I had an employee with low IQ, but this employee could work 24 hours around the clock learning and practicing, and they could work for 200 years straight without aging, and they could make parallel copies of themselves, surely there would have to be some tasks at which they're going to outperform humans, right?

Except none of what you wrote is true. Republicans again and again are arrested for pedophilia. Sorry, but the right is the party of pedophilia, not the left. "Pizzagate" was a complete haox, but it seems like you believe in hoaxes?

"MAGA Republican Resigns After Being Charged With Soliciting Sex From a Minor"

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/maga-rep...

"Republican State lawmaker used online name referencing Joe Biden to exchange child sex abuse material, feds say"

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/state-lawmaker-used-onl...

"Houston man pardoned by Trump arrested on child sex charge"

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/06/arrest-trump-pardon-...

"The crimes include plotting murder of FBI agents, child sexual assault, possession of child sexual abuse material and reckless homicide while driving drunk"

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...