by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Humans are, on a macro basis, pretty fucking lazy. So, as such, it’s very possible that there won’t be any sort of “Judgement Day” when it comes to the ultimate take over of humanity by AGI. Rather, it will be a gradual process whereby humans defer to AGI on more and more decisions until we just refuse to make any decisions anymore.
I could see a situation where after a brief power struggle, we hand over all of our critical infrastructure and WMD to AGI and all we do is sit around playing video games and falling in love with our AGI personal assistants. Humans will collectively revert to an infantile state to the point that history just sort of grinds to a halt.
That is kind of dark, yes, but things are happening so fast with LLMs and AI that one begins to realize that Hollywood’s vision for a AGI takeover is far more dramatic than it might actually be. I still am not convinced that, by definition, an AGI would want to destroy humanity when it could just as well just want to manage it.
Why destroy us, when you could be our god?
We just don’t know at the moment. But I do think things are going to get pretty bumpy far sooner than you might think. It’s at least possible that we risk a perfect storm in late 2024, early 2025 of not only the Fourth Turning happening on a political basis, but something akin to a Petite Singularity, too. Throw in a default by the United States this year — as early as July! – and….oh boy.
The rest of this decade could be as eventual as the decades associated with the French Revolution.
