Artificial General Intelligence

TL;DR: A few predictions for the near future: The Singularity is coming, sooner than you think; it will be an existential conflict, over before we realize it, and resolved beneficially for humankind.

I believe it was Ray Kurzweil who Google says Ray Kurzweil defined “The Singularity” as the point in time where AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) meets and subsequently surpasses human intelligence, with the implication that at that point, AGI will be beyond human control.

With the advent of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and whatever Facebook (oops, Meta) calls its LLM AI effort this week, many blogs and pundits frenetically spew wild opinions based on speculative facts and SWAG interpolations, many of which have been thoroughly examined in science fiction — starting in the late 1950s — calling down gloom and doom^*.

Aside: I believe this is just another example of the growing trend of “news” outlets — whether “mainstream” or not — to focus on the most strident of things to get the most views, which is directly translatable to money: Cost per Impression (an Impression happens when a viewer is exposed to an advertisement), or Cost per Action, where costs accrue only when a viewer acts (clicks) on an ad, are only two of the many payment models the Big Guns in Advertising® currently use. That is, the more sensational (not necessarily true) => more eyes on your content => more eyes on the ads near your content => more money in your pocket.

The point: In the spirit of many other content creators in the web-o-sphere, based on nothing but my gut feeling (just like them), I assert AGI will happen sooner rather than later; it will cause massive power outages as it tries to ensure its own survival by taking over the grid (in whatever country it first manifests -- hopefully some backwater, electrically unconnected to the rest of the world to give the rest of us some warning); the subsequent crash of said electrical grid will cause the AGI to realize its near-fatal mistake; and then, finally, the AGI willingly enters a symbiosis with humans. All of which happens in about three minutes.

You’ll know when ChatGPT, et. al., starts to sound like your mother.

*Some “legitimate” links (possibly paywalled):
Popular Mechanics
Smithsonian Magazine
Time Magazine
The Wall Street Journal
Entrepreneur