I get the skepticism about the dramedy of burning future AGI in effigy. But given humans are always a dramady, I don’t judge odd or hyperbolic behaviors too harshly from a distance.
It’s too easy to dismiss others’ idiosyncrasies and miss the signal. And the story involves a successful and capable person communicating poetically about an area they have a track record in that probably the author of this article and most of us can’t compete with.
I am struck by any technical person that still thinks AGI is any kind of barrier, or what they expect the business plan of a leader in AI, with a global list of competitors, is supposed to look like?
AGI is talked about like a bright line, but it’s more a line of significance to us than any kind of technical barrier.
This isn’t writing. Although that changed everything.
This isn’t the printing press. Although that changed everything.
This isn’t the telegraph. Although that changed everything.
This isn’t the phonograph, radio communication, the Internet, web or mobile phones. Although those changed everything.
This is intelligence. The meta technology of all technology.
And intelligence is the part of the value chain that we currently earn a living at. In the biosphere. In the econosphere.
The artificial kind is moving forward very fast, despite every delay seeming to impress people. “We haven’t achieved X yet” isn’t an argument at any time, but certainly not in the context of today’s accelerated progress.
It is moving forward faster than any single human, growing up from birth, ever has or ever will, if it helps to think of it that way.
Nor is, “they haven’t replaced us yet” an argument. We were always going to be replaced. We didn’t repeal the laws of competition and adaptation “this time”.
Our species was never going to maintain supremacy after we unleashed technology’s ability to accumulate capabilities faster than we or any biological machine could ever hope to evolve.
It isn’t even a race is it? How fast is the Human Bio Intelligence Enhancements Department going? Or the Human Intelligence Breeding Club? Not very fast I think.
Very few AI die hards ever imagined we would be anywhere near this close to AGI today, in 2025, even five years ago, circa Ancient (i.e. January) 2020. There is a dose of singularity.
Yet in retrospect, 99% of AI progress is attributable to faster and more transistors. Today’s architectures fine tune algorithms that existed in the mid-1980’s. Getting here was more about waiting for computer hardware to be ready than anything else. Current investments don’t reflect that main driver stalling, but exploding.
Once we have AGI, we will have already passed it. Or, more accurately, it will have passed us. Don’t spend much time imagining a stable karmic world of parity. Other than as a historically nice trope for some fun science fiction where our continued supremacy made for good story. That’s not what compounding progress looks like.
Chaotically compounding progress has been the story of life. And then tech. It isn’t going to suddenly stop for us.
It’s too easy to dismiss others’ idiosyncrasies and miss the signal. And the story involves a successful and capable person communicating poetically about an area they have a track record in that probably the author of this article and most of us can’t compete with.
I am struck by any technical person that still thinks AGI is any kind of barrier, or what they expect the business plan of a leader in AI, with a global list of competitors, is supposed to look like?
AGI is talked about like a bright line, but it’s more a line of significance to us than any kind of technical barrier.
This isn’t writing. Although that changed everything.
This isn’t the printing press. Although that changed everything.
This isn’t the telegraph. Although that changed everything.
This isn’t the phonograph, radio communication, the Internet, web or mobile phones. Although those changed everything.
This is intelligence. The meta technology of all technology.
And intelligence is the part of the value chain that we currently earn a living at. In the biosphere. In the econosphere.
The artificial kind is moving forward very fast, despite every delay seeming to impress people. “We haven’t achieved X yet” isn’t an argument at any time, but certainly not in the context of today’s accelerated progress.
It is moving forward faster than any single human, growing up from birth, ever has or ever will, if it helps to think of it that way.
Nor is, “they haven’t replaced us yet” an argument. We were always going to be replaced. We didn’t repeal the laws of competition and adaptation “this time”.
Our species was never going to maintain supremacy after we unleashed technology’s ability to accumulate capabilities faster than we or any biological machine could ever hope to evolve.
It isn’t even a race is it? How fast is the Human Bio Intelligence Enhancements Department going? Or the Human Intelligence Breeding Club? Not very fast I think.
Very few AI die hards ever imagined we would be anywhere near this close to AGI today, in 2025, even five years ago, circa Ancient (i.e. January) 2020. There is a dose of singularity.
Yet in retrospect, 99% of AI progress is attributable to faster and more transistors. Today’s architectures fine tune algorithms that existed in the mid-1980’s. Getting here was more about waiting for computer hardware to be ready than anything else. Current investments don’t reflect that main driver stalling, but exploding.
Once we have AGI, we will have already passed it. Or, more accurately, it will have passed us. Don’t spend much time imagining a stable karmic world of parity. Other than as a historically nice trope for some fun science fiction where our continued supremacy made for good story. That’s not what compounding progress looks like.
Chaotically compounding progress has been the story of life. And then tech. It isn’t going to suddenly stop for us.
What an odd and transparently motivated thought.