tabooing "AGI"

posted on 2023-02-07

i've come to not be a fan of the term "Artificial General Intelligence", and i favor tabooing it in serious discussions.

we can't agree on what it even means; some think it's very remote from current tech, while other would say we already have it.

more importantly, i don't think it's super critical to AI risk mitigation.

it's not necessary for doom; recursive self-improvement seems easier, and possibly closer at hand, depending on your definition; dumber AI dooms are also possible, such as someone plugging a non-general AI into a protein-printing thing to see what happens and bootstrapping a nanobot swarm or superplague on accident.
depending on your definition, it might not be sufficient for doom either; some think we have AGI now, and yet we're not dead.
it's not necessary for saving the world; i think some simple agentic thing with recursive self-improving capability coupled with formal alignment would do it.
it's not sufficient for saving the world; this is the one point we're all more or less in agreement on.

so to me it doesn't feel like a particularly important crux of AI risk, and we're wasting a bunch of energy figuring out what it means and whether we're there, when it might end up fairly irrelevant to AI risk and alignment.

posted on 2023-02-07