by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Because of what I engage with on Twitter, I’m being fed a growing amount of AI community content. What gets me is so many users — young men, presumably — are obsessed with accelerating AI development until we reach Artificial General Intelligence.
AGI would be much like Sam in the movie “Her.” But, given current advancements in robotics, it’s very possible that sexbots will become affordable enough within a decade that Incels will have absolute no reason to ever get anywhere near a living, breathing, biological woman. Ugh!
Before I go any further, I remember what it was like to be a young man transfixed by technology. In my instance, it was the Internet. I was very, very obsessed with every twitch of the Internet revolution when I was in college. It was that obsession that would ultimately lead me to have a very misguided time as a technology manager in the late 1990s.
Anyway, the key thing for me is that there is a good chance that AI will revolutionize humanity’s existence in much the same way that the Internet did, only far, far quicker. Instead of decades of gradual change, it could be years — or months! — of very, very fast change that will be looked back upon as something akin to a Petite Singularity.
As an Old, I just don’t see how anything like AGI being developed is going to help humanity. All these people touting the life of prosperity, luxury and surplus seem to be oblivious to the hateful, cruel nature of capitalism. The only way anyone my have any money in the future is if there’s a Universal Basic Income.
There is a real chance that AGI will cause either massive political and economic disruption or, in the end, there will just be the Poors and the Very Wealthy and that’s it. I continue to believe that MAGA may evolve into an anti-tech movement at some point in the near future.
