Race to be the first with AGI, and then what?
Every month/week/day there is a post/article/podcast from one of the priests summoning AGI and it goes something like:
We all know we are bringing upon us the end of the world, but we got to speed up and be first at it, because other people cannot be trusted to do this, only us.
How incredibly delusional is this? How is it even ok to publicly say this over and over and not being laughed out of the public square?
But also, if we give credibility to this argument for a second, ok you will be the first to reach AGI, and then what?
What are you going to do with it and how is that going in any way stop your competitors from also reaching it soon after?
The (nuclear) arms race is brought into comparison often, and for good reasons, so if we take how that worked out:
- Revolutionary discovery in nerd world for infinite power trick
- Government uses new found power at its advantage
- Espionage while competitors try to catch up
- They catch up
- Proliferation everywhere
- World can end any-minute-now for 60+ years
- You still got to go to work and pay your mortgage
We can see that being first at AGI will change the world forever, and yet not change it in the way we would have thought.
For a moment the atom priests were superstars (heck we still do blockbuster movies on them even with non-existing charisma to tap in) but they were soon forgotten by the general public and went back to be high-priest only for the nerd church.
We live in the time of nerd priest superstars once again, but not for long (thankfully).