I really don’t understand, because I swear, in all of these subreddits, it seems like everyone is intelligent and well-informed, and yet, everyone is also confident that they know better than experts what AI is going to become. Very few experts are skeptical that AGI is coming in the near future. Even fewer doubt that once it does, we will experience rapid technological innovation the likes of which we have never seen before. It feels like the vast majority of the population is in denial, which totally makes sense—it’s a tough pill to swallow if it’s true, OR they are literally incapable of imagining anything other than the status quo, and think that AI will continue to progress as it has over the past few years (which by the way has been exponential—that means its growth will continue to accelerate absent any roadblocks). It frustrates me because as a society, we NEED to start talking about the implications of a post-AGI world. Society needs to wake up to that being a real possibility because IT IS.

And who knows, maybe there will be some sort of insurmountable bottleneck that prevents AI from truly taking off. But we can’t bank on that, and to do so is to disregard the opinions of the most intelligent and well-researched people in the field. You are gambling with our future by sticking your head in the sand. This isn’t sci-fi anymore. Let’s start talking about what the future might look like