I warn about AI. I don’t care about AGI (yet) because we are far from it.
I’m worried about (in no particular order):
Software companies amassing technical debt because AI-generated code gets used without proper review
Massive security problems in critical infrastructure, for the exact same reason
Cost savings being used to make the rich richer while the people who used to do the work are just fired
Companies forcing AI into every single product even if it doesn’t make sense, just to make their shareholders happy
Rapidly increasing prices of RAM, SSDs, HDDs, graphics cards and consequently pretty much all electronic devices
The environmental impact because companies would rather build new power plants than optimize AI for efficiency
A lack of education about the limitations of current implementations. People tend to feed every question they have into ChatGPT and trust the results even when they’re completely incorrect
The inherent privacy nightmare that comes from funneling that much data into a centralized service
Nothing about this is small or cute.
I would be totally fine with something that I can supervise and that can run locally on my laptop without cooking it and doubling my energy bill. Also an economy where productivity gains benefit the workers, not the CEO. If I can do the same work in half the time, let me have the rest of the day off at full pay instead of doubling my workload and firing half your staff.
Hey! They also destroy communities by forcing them to pay for infrastructure upgrades while the companies get tax holidays in return for a bunch of jobs that only last 2 years during the construction phase and only add about 25-50 permanent jobs to the local economy long term.
Let’s also not forget bringing back mothballed coal plants instead of building new ones.
The same way the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs are small and cute compared to a modern hydrogen bomb…
If we don’t solve the AI problems we already have, there is no point speculating about AGI because our lives will be unbearable long before it arrives.
I warn about AI. I don’t care about AGI (yet) because we are far from it.
I’m worried about (in no particular order):
Nothing about this is small or cute.
I would be totally fine with something that I can supervise and that can run locally on my laptop without cooking it and doubling my energy bill. Also an economy where productivity gains benefit the workers, not the CEO. If I can do the same work in half the time, let me have the rest of the day off at full pay instead of doubling my workload and firing half your staff.
Hey! They also destroy communities by forcing them to pay for infrastructure upgrades while the companies get tax holidays in return for a bunch of jobs that only last 2 years during the construction phase and only add about 25-50 permanent jobs to the local economy long term.
Let’s also not forget bringing back mothballed coal plants instead of building new ones.
Compared to AGI it is. We don’t know how far away we are from creating it. We can only speculate.
AGI talk seems for now to be merely hype to get investors.
LLMs seem likely to be dead end for any logical thought: https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/ This means at the end of the day you just get a sloppy illusion with no useful coherence as soon as it exceeds the complexity of a literal lazy copy&paste job: https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
There is currently no technological innovation to fix this. Instead, AI progress seems to be stalling: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/experts-concerned-ai-progress-wall
The same way the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs are small and cute compared to a modern hydrogen bomb…
If we don’t solve the AI problems we already have, there is no point speculating about AGI because our lives will be unbearable long before it arrives.