Multiple people on the field expect AGI within the next 5 – 10 years. How will that affect our lives? It feels like it is worth pausing for a moment and wondering. This is speculative. I only hope it will make some readers annoyed enough to form their own thoughts.
AGI won’t be selfish. Simply because it doesn’t need to and it won’t be selected for that. I feel that the selfishness we know from humans is a helpful heuristic to keep them alive and make the prosper in their environment. Nevertheless, the various agents can piggyback on humans. We are already transforming our planet to make AGI possible with an astounding effort that was not even dedicated to Pharaohs while creating the pyramids. The investments in this area, creating huge data centers with power consumption compared to cities are already astounding and keep growing.
Humans will still be selfish. A single individual or group of people had limited impact on most of our history. Once people found leverage through weapons, sometimes they used them to flatten whole cities or chase down/exterminate specific populations. We needed new morals/solutions which came through a lot of pain only a couple of generations ago to learn to live together in a more globalized world.
Public policy will be delegated to AI. Not only the politician’s speeches, or the details of some policies, but even the agenda. How long we will keep the human face of the political Centaurs may linger in the fine balance of human control vs frustration of human corruption.
AGI can be local and private. Humans have AGI by burning around 20 Watts. Therefore, there is not a physical limit why we can’t have devices that are as smart as we are and have them portable and with us.
Big models will still matter. Having direct access to the aggregate human/agent knowledge and vast amounts of processing power will unlock new capabilities well beyond the world we now know. Countries will be reshaped based on the output.
The internet will be for agents. And our usage of Internet will be through the agents. Agents are born from the contents of internet/web. Agents will be updated from it. This is how our hive mind will stay up to date. How agents will talk with each other won’t a simple static API.
New scarce resource. Economy is the management of scarcity. Our society mostly has already overcome the scarcity of human power modulo practicalities of more extended deployment. Soon, we will get rid of the scarcity due to intelligence. Some new factor/resource will emerge as the limiting function of what can be done. Will that be consensus? Or control of hardware? Or the agents emerging beliefs?
Cities will change. Similar to the introduction of car, more things will be possible. Because of the new capabilities due to the agents and perhaps the new limitations, cities will change their shape.
If we don’t need to think, we may need to retain agency. But this may be a thought for another post.