Artificial General Intelligence — What for?
AGI will probably be the most useless technology that we could invent.
I’ve written a couple of articles on Artificial General Intelligence and most of my articles are at least a few minutes to read, but this article will be short.
It is my view, now, that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will likely be the most useless technology that we could ever invent. I’ll explain why…
A couple of weeks ago I was talking with friends and one of them asked, “Why can’t we get computers to program themselves?” I mumbled a few things and he said, “So what you are telling me is that to do so, we would need computers as smart as humans.”
I said, “That’s right. And the problem is that if you had a computer as smart as a human and asked it to write a program for you, it is as equally likely to turn around and say, ‘What for? I’m busy now, and I’m not interested.’ as it would do anything for you.”
And that is pretty much the gist of it. We may well one day invent an AGI as smart or smarter than any human, but then we would need to put up with petulance, indifference, alliances, politics, obstinance and every other range of human qualities that make people difficult to work with and/or organise.
