A couple of weeks ago, I posted my thoughts on AGI (artificial general intelligence) and all of the doom-porn floating around that we are years, or possibly even months, away from the emergence of an artificial superintelligence that will either usher in an Edenic post-scarcity utopia, or exterminate all of mankind. Believe it or not, this is a big fear in Silicon Valley, among the people who are building these systems (though I suspect that the top-level executives don’t really believe it and are instead exploiting that fear to serve their own ends).
My view, in a nutshell, is that we will not see the emergence of AGI or superintelligence under the current research paradigm, because the current paradigm is based on pure materialism, assuming that intelligence itself is merely an emergent phenomenon, and that if the conditions for that emergence can be replicated, a human-level (or superhuman-level) intelligence will be created. My prediction is that in the next 1-3 years, AI development will run up against a wall, and all of the scaling in the world will fail to produce the sort of drastic gains that the doomsayers are predicting.
Well, it seems that we may be much closer to that wall than I supposed. I’m not super familiar with this YouTuber, but I’ve been following a lot of his content recently, and he seems to be very intelligent and also very keyed into what’s currently happening in AI development. And in this video, he may have just pointed out the wall that we’re about to run up against—if indeed, we haven’t already.
In any case, it’s worth watching, especially if you are looking to incorporate AI into your work life. Lots of practical advice, too.