It’s a compelling — even comforting — thought for many people. “We are in an age where other avenues for the material improvement of human lives and our societies have been exhausted,” Waller says.
Technology once promised the path to a better future: progress was the ladder we climbed toward human and societal flourishing. “We’ve passed that peak,” Valver says. “I think one of the things that gives a lot of people hope and that kind of optimism about the future is the return of AGI.”
Push that idea to its limits and, once again, AGI becomes a kind of god — one who can relieve earthly suffering, Waller says.
Kelly Joyce, an economist at the University of North Carolina who studies how cultural, political and economic beliefs think about and use technology, sees all these wild predictions about AGI as something more restrictive: part of a long-term pattern of overreaching from the tech industry. “What’s interesting to me is that we suck every time.” “There is a deep belief that technology is superior to humans.”
Joyce believes that’s why, when the hype kicks in, people are likely to believe it. “It’s a religion,” she says. “We believe in technology. Technology is God. It’s really hard to push back against it. People don’t want to hear it.”
How AGI Hijacked an Industry
The fantasy of a computer that can do almost anything a person can do is enticing. But like many widespread conspiracy theories, it has very real consequences. It has distorted the way we think about the stakes behind the current technology boom (and potential bust). It may also have derailed industry, diverting resources away from more immediate, more practical applications of the technology. More than anything, it gives us a free pass to be lazy. It fools us into thinking that we can avoid the real effort needed to solve tangible, global problems—problems that will require international cooperation and compromise and expensive aid. Why bother with machines when we will soon have them?
Consider the resources sunk into this great project. Just last month, OpenAI and Nvidia announced A $100 billion contribution that sees CHITGPT supply at least 10 GW of unmet demand. This is more than the number of nuclear power plants. A bolt of lightning can release that much energy. The flux capacitor inside Dr. Emmett Brown’s DeLorean time machine required only 1.2 gigawatts to send Marty back to the future. And then, just two weeks later, OpenAI announced a second partnership with chipmaker AMD for another six gigawatts of power.
CNBC, with a straight face, CNBC promoting the NVIDIA deal claimed that without such a data center being built, people would have to choose between cancer treatment and free education. “Nobody wants to make that choice,” he said. (Just a few weeks later, he announced it sexy Chats Chat will be coming to GPT.)
Add to these costs the loss of investment in more immediate technology that can change lives today and tomorrow and the day after. “To me, it’s a huge opportunity,” says Lerio’s Simmons, “when we already know that putting all these resources into solving a nebus has real problems that we can solve.” ”
But not in a way that the likes of Openai need to operate. “With people throwing so much money at these companies, they don’t need to,” Simmons says. “If you’ve got hundreds of billions of dollars, you don’t need to focus on a practical, solution-oriented plan.”
Despite his steadfast belief that AGI is coming, Krieger also thinks that his industry’s pursuit of uniformity means potential solutions to real problems like health care are being overlooked. “This AGI stuff — it’s nonsense, it’s a distraction, it’s hype,” he told me.