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Here's my definition of AGI

Would I trust to let an AI, with zero human input or oversight, to diagnose, come up with treatment plan, and ultimately operate on my l5/s1 disc that's been bugging me for the better part of my adult life?

Would I take a novel drug "discovered" by AI (I mean entirely by AI, no human input, remember we are talking AGI) that promises to cure some chronic neurological disorder?

In both of those cases, they are the biggest hell-no's I can emphatically say.

Until I can say hell yes to that question, we aren't close.

Preempting those who say "Well your doctor/drug companies are probably mostly using/going to be using AI to do that" -- not what we are talking about here, and in both cases, not AGI (and I would probably find a new doctor)


Humans are general intelligences. An average human can’t do either of those. Your bar is way too high.

Sounds like category error to me, you wouldn't trust teen or Einstein to do it either, right?

The G in AGI stands for general, correct?

Yes, but it means general the way humans are general. Clearly being a general intelligence shouldn’t require being any better at any individual task than the average human, or even the bottom decile of humans.

What is the way humans are general? How general is the average human? What constitutes average here?

The goalpost moving is getting exhausting.


Be the change you wish to see in the world!

Hopefully you are apprenticing many junior engineers!


How nice it is to live in complete comfort with no worries whatsoever of your own government coming after you.

For many that lived during the times of the Stazi in East Germany, or late Soviet days, or currently in China and North Korea however...

Ask one of those people who survived those regimes and ask if they should "just get over yourself" -- it shouldn't be too hard to find one.


Luxottica, the owners of Ray-Ban since 1999, realized after they survived the expose on their blatant monopolistic price gouging that none of this sticks. People just see something they recognize and go with it.


Counterpoint: Burberry.

Early 2000s, for variety of reasons, their iconic check pattern got associated with cheapness and violence.

Being expensive means your more exclusive. Being creepy, I don't see that helping.


Two reflections from me:

- Starting my career during the beginning of and through the peak of the open floor plan office trained me to use headphones as a signal to others that I wanted to be left alone / needed to focus on my task. Now I catch myself doing it in other contexts subconsciously, like the gym, and have to stop myself sometimes to make sure I am doing it intentionally. I am at the age now where like you, I either prefer silence, or reminisce about the bygone days where people struck up conversations, past the usual pleasantries - just deep conversation with a total stranger that you may or may not ever see again, which wearing headphones takes away that possibility.

- silence is generally, in my opinion, for content people and/or people not struggling with a mental illness. I'd venture a guess that our field skews towards people who have negative internal voices. Having something playing as a distraction can take you away from those destructive thoughts. I had to do a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy and soul searching to be content with silence.


Please, for the love of God, speak to someone who is actually from a war torn country and understand how privileged all of us have been to live in the west. Even the wars we have been part of in the middle east have been minor disruptions to the Pax Americana: we really don't feel the effect of the wars we are in.(another problem in of itself).

99% of us got to grow up without the fear of military violence, and go about our lives.


OP's point still stands?

They didn't say there were no wars, only that that are less deaths.

Not sure what the point of your comment is in this thread. The premise that is being discussed is volume of world wide war. Not war itself.


And its going to be incredible to watch how many of our own country will be gleefully cheering this on as if the replacement will be better for them.


Unrelated - but reminds me of my favorite quote by tenderlove:

"microservices turn function calls into distributed computing problems"


grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

seem very confusing to grug


"I will say nothing new!"

- St John of Damascus


> it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.

Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.


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