AGI Explained: Artificial General Intelligence Explained and why pursue it despite the Risks.

OpenAI created a big buzz by releasing ChatGPT to the world, an automated chatbot that gives a very convincing answer. Some argued that this is the beginning where things take off exponentially and we finally will get the holy grail: Artificial General Intelligence.

But what is Artificial General Intelligence or AGI and why some experts are afraid of the potentially deadly consequences of AGI on society, nations, and the human race? Does the work of fiction bring forth the prophecy of future AGI vs humans conflict?

Here we will dive into the concepts of AGI and its associated concepts and experts’ arguments for and against AGI.

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov

Concepts

Artificial General Intelligence is a hypothetical intelligent agent which can understand or learn any intellectual task that human beings or other animals can. In other words, it’s a machine that is smart enough that it can do anything that a human or animal can.

One of the consequences of AGI that is often talked about is the technological singularity event where with the advances in artificial intelligence, there will be a point in time in the future where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

The British mathematician I. J. Good once theorized about the intelligence explosion model where an upgradable intelligent agent (a self-learning computer) will eventually have a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, in which the improvement will grow rapidly which results in a superintelligence that surpasses all human intelligence. In scenario is in the movie Terminator where the main protagonist, the supercomputer Skynet becomes self-aware and attack human by launching a nuclear strike on Russia and thus starting armageddon.

Theories on artificial intelligence, intelligence that rises from blocks of codes, has been theorized in the 1950s, which work started in the 1960s, but progress has been stalled only until the 2010s when computers are fast enough and the data are large enough that AI algorithms become accurate enough.

In the current state of AI, many advances are made on the Artificial Narrow Intelligence where computers are good enough for singular jobs like identifying patterns and generating content on command. Google is a pioneer in this field: Tensorflow and a lot of the algorithms that enhance machine learning and computer vision came from Google.

Experts for AGI

There are a few arguments for AGI

It’s a natural technological evolution: Before the printing press and moveable type which started the Renaissance, books have to be written by hand and only the rich and powerful have access to them. Before the steam engine which starts the first industrial revolution you only have the back of horses or donkeys to power things. So AGI is the next step in powering and expanding human civilization.

According to Forbes and a study by MIT, the latest chatbot which seems to be good enough to do white-collar jobs that were previously saved from automation, will, in the end, create more jobs than it destroys.

Exponential progress has been for decades and will march on: According to Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist and futurist shows how the computer revolution which grows exponentially since the first transistors in the 1960s will continue this trend and AGI will be the next natural step.

Experts against AGI

Experts are asking for a pause: In an open letter, which is signed by tech titans like Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and others has asked AI researchers to pause the development of Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots like ChatGPT so one can formulate better guardrails.

AGI will not be realized: Philopspher Hubert Dreyfus remarked the computer does not have a body, childhood, or culture. Without these, there will be no chance for computers or blocks of codes to achieve AGI.

US government wants some guardrails: In a press briefing, US president Joe Biden had stated that AI is a great tool that can help US and humankind, but at the same time can harm it.

AI can help deal with some very difficult challenges like disease and climate change, but we also have to address the potential risks to our society, our economy, and our national security. - US President Joe Biden

Motivation

Despite knowing the dangers of AGI, why some numerous labs and companies are pursuing this goal? There are several reasons

There’s too much data: Since the dawn of the internet, the amount of data that each person could have has exploded. Google estimated in March 2023, there are around 45 billion web pages on the internet. 10 years ago, there were around 10-15 billion web pages. And that’s just web pages, not including pictures, and videos. Having that huge data store is useless if you don’t know how to make order in the chaos. AI can help bring order to chaos by classifying data.

If I don’t do it, someone else will: There’s now a race between nations for the first to get AGI. And there’s that thought that if I do not put research into this, the other side might gain an advantage in doing so.

It’s a natural technological evolution: One-way humans are different than other animals is the ability to automate work so with the same input force, you have force multipliers with all the machines that human creates.

Conclusion

For better or worse, AI-trained systems will be here for the foreseeable future. For the time being, the conveniences that AI brings: pattern recognition, image recognition, and self-driving car outweigh the risk: of expanding biases, and smarter surveillance systems.

Just like any industry that comes out from human creativity, the government sooner rather than later will have to regulate the use of AI to protect against misuse.

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