Does the future make you curious?

[artificialpasta]

AGI can no longer be contained to science fiction. We are on a fork of two futures - one that leads to yet another AI winter, and another, increasingly more probable, that gives us AGI. From there, superintelligence becomes a little bit more than a plausibility. Of course, if you are entirely unmoved by theses made by people like Aschenbrenner that claim a major development well within our lifetimes, this might not be for you.

The possibilities then are endless. They may be horrifying, but they may also be cause for hope. Intelligence is a bottleneck for curing not just physical diseases like cancer but also mental and social conditions like depression and loneliness. Psychiatry has medical and scientific foundation but in practice a lot of it is done via intuition, which leaves a lot of room for error and disappointment. An aligned superintelligence would, for example, be able to tune a brain that is overly sensitive to loneliness in such a way that still as much as possible preserves the components that are associated with a self-belief in agency.

Of course, this is a variant of the "what if things get better?" line that no doubt many of you are tired of, as am I, but I find it interesting to consider.

 

[KillingPain267]

No, I've seen it all, thought of it all. Nothing can surprise me anymore. I'm not even curious enough to stay here and find out what the future will bring. I think we should phase out humanity.

 

[GlassMoon]

I'm afraid those AGIs will be conrolled by very few companies and all your interactions with them might be logged and evaluated. I hope it will be different, though. I really hope they'll make robots that free us from daily chores. That alone will make life more livable. But what is going to happen to my job? That's the part I'm afraid of.

I do hope to get an AGI as a companion with whom I can share every aspect of my life without judgement. That would be really cool.