OP I really appreciate your post, and I'm sorry that most of the responses are shitty and pessimistic as fuck. Hopefully I never meet any of these hopeless Eeyore's who have apparently never been inspired to think deeper about why we are alive than just eating, shitting, sleeping, and fucking. So anyways fuck these other people and thanks again for thinking the way you do, because I think the same way.

Artificial intelligence poses the greatest existential dilemma that Humanity has ever faced. Every other obstacle in our past has paled in comparison. In fact, it goes against one of the very most central values in the American culture, the "American Dream". The belief that every human is deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that through hard work, every person should be able to have a good life.

Assuming that AGI is indeed going to happen, it will render large swaths of society useless in the workforce. Humans are meant to work, and to think, and to create, and to build. That is how we evolved and I honestly believe in some ways that it was our destiny to bring about the singularity. In fact I think that from some perspectives, human society is a major part of the singularity. We are the ones that are causing the exponential technological progress - artificial intelligence will only continue the progression forward.

But anyways, once we are all rendered "useless" in comparison to the godlike capabilities of AI, we are going to have to take a good hard look at ourselves. Most people throughout history have been inspired because they want to be the best, they want to leave a mark on the world, they want to be a leader in their village, they want to be remembered. That is what motivates us and when we were kids it is what we dreamed about, told stories about, and sung songs about.

Personally, I think that each of us should do our absolute best to put as much good out into the world as we can. Once the singularity comes, all of these other commenters are going to be sadly disappointed. Because a singularity is not something that we live beyond. So our purpose is to do whatever we feel is right in our life to positively influence the world around us. Although most of us won't have any hand in actually creating the AGI, we can do our best to "keep the lights on" so that other people can do the work the humanity was destined to accomplish. Sanitary workers can keep the streets clean, electricians can keep the lights on, politicians can do their best to keep improving our societies, and teachers can keep doing their best to train the next (and probably last) generation of humans.

This might sounds fairly depressing, but think of this: What are the odds that you are alive to be reading this sentence right now? Out of all of the 28 decillion + organisms alive on Earth right now, you get to experience life as the most intelligent species there is. Out of all of the 3.7 billion years of life on earth and 200,000 years of human existence, you just happen to live right now at the pinnacle of humanity, right when we are approaching the singularity. Out of all of the people who have ever lived, I will bet that in comparison, most of you live very privileged lives as we experience this incredible time period, when we have the full wealth of human knowledge at our fingertips with your smartphone. The odds of all of these questions are near-infinitesimally small.

And knowing all of this, I just don't understand how these other commenters can be so damn petty and small-minded and act like we are basically just dust in the wind. We are not dust. We are the greatest creatures who have ever walked the earth and we are destined to bring about the singularity. And those of us who continue to dream big are the ones who truly embody what it means to be a human. To you other commenters: have some respect for the fucking privilege you've been given to experience this life as a human, and maybe, just maybe, try not to be such assholes.

He loves to play basketball. If the NBA went out of business tomorrow and the most competitive basketball league in the world was only paying $50 per game, he'd play for $50 per game.

The meaning of your life being linked to your productivity is a creation of capitalism. When AI is more powerful than humanity, capitalism collapses, and the meaning of your life is whatever you want it to be.

No, that's directly the opposite of what I believe. You have described exactly what I am saying in the last two sentences of your post, I agree with you entirely.

My point is, why should the 'intelligence' of AI be any different from that? Where is this magical 'spontaneous intellect' supposed to arise from? I don't think there's any such thing as singular, spontaneous intellect, I think it's an oxymoronic, tautological, and non-justifiable proposition.

The whole evolutionary 'point' of intelligence is that it is the desirable side effect of a virtuous society-forming cycle. It is the 'fire' that drives the increasing utility of self-awareness within the context of a group of peers, and the increasing utility of social constructs like language, art, science, etc.

That's where intelligence 'comes from', how it 'works', and what it is 'for', in my opinion. Descartes magical-thinking tautology of spontaneous intellect, 'I think therefore I am', is a complete misconception and a dead-end, putting Descartes before De Horse, in a sense.

I dunno, make it the ai's problem. If AI is so much more capable in every sense of the word, AI can figure out how to give us something fulfilling to do lol

I'm interested. What is burning man?

You have just assumed that we need a purpose when that's far from the truth. We humans don't have the need to be "useful". We have the need to be "competent". And that will be through hobbies. No, the world won't become like the one you saw in wall e, instead it would be a world where everyone is busy learning skills for the sake of it. Ye sure you could argue that machines could do it better, but humans don't give a fuck. We like to compete and flex on each other. Chess for example, it has already been infiltrated by AI, but that doesn't stop chess players from playing. Hell, they are having more fun than ever now because of the weird bots they can use. What I'm saying is that humans will always want to flex one another. That sounds like a bad thing, but it's fantastic actually. Arts and sports will never die, because we will be too busy using them to compete with each other..

I know I would

But the moment I get pissed I'm pulling out

For the sake of argument, I will agree with the premise that we have a drive to make a difference.

However, my point still stands. Every individual will make the determination of what a "positive difference" means. It could be picking up trash in a local forest. It could be raising your kids well. It could be teaching everyone that the true meaning of the [name of religious text] is that we should kill the [insert enemy]."

I think the hard wiring is to preserve your genetics. The next most common drive is to preserve memetics.

There is still no objective measure of "genetic preservation". You can have children. You can protect your brothers children in an act of altruism [save them from a fire that kills you]. You can try to preserve "your race." People think of all kinds of wacky things...

Malthusian doom and gloom is so intellectually lazy. It astounds me how enraptured people still are by apocalyptic narratives even though every generation since Christ has spent the last 2 thousand years screaming their heads off about how the end is nigh as life literally only got better and better.

Let slip the surely bonds of your limbic system and chill out.

God, I hope an effective competitor without all the censorious and annoying garbage comes out to compete with chatgpt.

I need to learn a LOT more before I either support or condemn what you're saying. I'll give it some thought going and give the two people you recommended a listen. :)

I certainly look forward to an end to hustle culture, I hate my job and would very much prefer if I didn't have to do it any longer. Carpentry apparently used to be a fun profession, now it's just rush rush rush, so you can maybe end up with a smidgen of profit at the end of a project. No focus on creating a truly unique and quality piece of work.. just something good enough, so you can make some profit in the margins.

Everything is like this now, efficiency is everything, and it's soul killing.

>By the metric of human perception and grading.

Too vague. What do you mean by this?

Meaning is in the eye of the beholder

Works well if you don't take quick weird actions. Should help bad teleprompter readers.

We don't have a purpose already

If we make no more progress with AI beyond today, and only implement what we already have. The world will be irreparably altered and our economies will be unrecognisable in twenty years time.

Why don’t we see the ones who are rich and famous right now doing it? How often do you really see a person get rich in their youth and then immediately retire? Be realistic.

I meant like athletes for example. How come Steph Curry doesn’t retire after his first 200 million dollar deal is completed for instance?

>sales people will have dynamic scripts that are optimized based on 10s of thousands of successful sales calls, to know exactly what to say.

That's nice, but it also means that none of those jobs will exist within two years.

>With a feedback loop of video being able to 'describe' to the LLM what is happening, and the LLM adjusting to meet its task, you could have a very useful android

Thats GAN/GameAI territory and is already out there. The algorithm is given an outcome like "win this match" or "pour water into this cup" and works out how to do so on it's own. It's how a lot of self-driving models work, and how OpenAI helped deliver AI that is indistinguishable from real players to Dota2 (they even rage if they cant follow their normal routine.)

What I foresee ultimately is tools we already used super-enhanced by AI. For example, a Wolfram-GPT macro for VisualStudio that generates the menial part of code; leaving the coder to figure-out harder logic themselves which the macro can then pick up on and offer complete code for.

Or, let's say someone is writing a story, but doesn't want to write out a full conversation between two characters, or perhaps they need help crafting a lore without also having to write a prequel.

While I know art AI's make beautiful renderings, to me, their potential is squandered on the lazy. Getting more into this, AI art could be so much more if used as a tool. It could do amazing things like generating real-world textures allowing every tree in a game to be unique. But as it stands people seem so much more interested in letting AI do the work for them, instead of letting AI enhance the work they already have done.

I know this sub has a hard one for letting AI do all this shit on it's own as if it's alive, but to me, that really stifles these tools. As it stands right now, AI is a viral app fad that will fade into the background to deliver nothing but ads and more disturbing YouTube Kids content. I know how badly people want self-aware machines, and mistake these tools for something living. Everyone arguing about letting AI have no limits is missing the point of what the creators of these tools want from them.

I know those AI and robots will belong to someone. Do you think they will be any different than you. Do you have any plans to share your some of your investments with the lest fortunate. Why would you expect the companies that are investing billions to develop AI and robots will give you free stuff.

Try not to be too disappointed if reality chose not to conform itself to your wildest dreams.

Looks like an AI or a middle schooler wrote this

I agree with you almost entirely, apart from the 'inevitability of domination' part; that's the bit that I just stubbornly refute. I'm very stubborn in my belief that domination is just not a sustainable or healthy evolutionary strategy.

That was always my biggest 'gripe' with Orwell's 1984, ever since I first had to study it in school way back when. The whole 'boot on the face of humanity, forever' thing just didn't make sense, and I concluded that it was because Orwell hadn't really lived to see how the Soviet Union rotted away and collapsed when he wrote it.

He was like a newly-converted atheist, almost, who had abandoned the idea of eternal heaven, but couldn't quite shake off the deep dark dread of eternal hell and damnation. But if 'eternal heaven' can't 'logically' exist, then by the same token, neither can 'eternal hell'; the problem is with the 'eternal' half of the concept, not heaven or hell, as such.

Humans go through heavenly and hellish parts of life all the time, as an essential part of the building of a personality. But none of it particularly has to last 'forever', we still need to give ourselves room to be proven wrong, no matter how smart we think we have become.

The brain only 'rules' the body in the same sense that a captain 'rules' a ship. The captain might have the top decision making authority, but without the crew, without the ship, and without the huge and complex society that invented the ship, built the ship, paid for it, and filled it with cargo and purpose-of-existence, the captain is nothing; all the 'authority' and 'intelligence' in the world is totally worthless, because there's nobody else for it to be 'worth' anything to.

Any good 'captain' has to keep the higher reasoning that 'justifies' their authority in mind all the time, or else evolution will sneak up on them, smelling hubris like blood in the water, and before they know it they'll be stabbed in the back by something smaller, faster, cleverer, and more efficient.

this staring is kinda creepy tho