That’s a compelling—even comforting—thought for many individuals. “We’re in an era where other paths to material improvement of human lives and our societies appear to have been exhausted,” Vallor says.
Technology once promised a path to a greater future: Progress was a ladder that we’d climb toward human and social flourishing. “We’ve passed the height of that,” says Vallor. “I believe the one thing that provides many individuals hope and a return to that type of optimism concerning the future is AGI.”
Push this concept to its conclusion and, again, AGI becomes a type of god—one which can offer relief from earthly suffering, says Vallor.
Kelly Joyce, a sociologist on the University of North Carolina who studies how cultural, political, and economic beliefs shape the best way we take into consideration and use technology, sees all these wild predictions about AGI as something more banal: a part of a long-term pattern of overpromising from the tech industry. “What’s interesting to me is that we get sucked in each time,” she says. “There’s a deep belief that technology is healthier than human beings.”
Joyce thinks that’s why, when the hype kicks in, persons are predisposed to consider it. “It’s a faith,” she says. “We consider in technology. Technology is God. It’s really hard to beat back against it. People don’t need to hear it.”
How AGI hijacked an industry
The fantasy of computers that may do almost anything an individual can is seductive. But like many pervasive conspiracy theories, it has very real consequences. It has distorted the best way we expect concerning the stakes behind the present technology boom (and potential bust). It could have even derailed the industry, sucking resources away from more immediate, more practical application of the technology. Greater than the rest, it gives us a free pass to be lazy. It fools us into pondering we’d give you the chance to avoid the actual exertions needed to unravel intractable, world-spanning problems—problems that may require international cooperation and compromise and expensive aid. Why trouble with that after we’ll soon have machines to figure all of it out for us?
Consider the resources being sunk into this grand project. Just last month, OpenAI and Nvidia announced an up-to-$100 billion partnership that may see the chip giant supply not less than 10 gigawatts of ChatGPT’s insatiable demand. That’s higher than nuclear power plant numbers. A bolt of lightning might release that much energy. The flux capacitor inside Dr. Emmett Brown’s DeLorean time machine only required 1.2 gigawatts to send Marty back to the longer term. After which, only two weeks later, OpenAI announced a second partnership with chipmaker AMD for an additional six gigawatts of power.
Promoting the Nvidia deal on CNBC, Altman, straight-faced, claimed that without this type of data center buildout, people would have to choose from a cure for cancer and free education. “Nobody desires to make that selection,” he said. (Just just a few weeks later, he announced that erotic chats can be coming to ChatGPT.)
Add to those costs the lack of investment in additional immediate technology that would change lives today and tomorrow and the subsequent day. “To me it’s an enormous missed opportunity,” says Lirio’s Symons, “to place all these resources into solving something nebulous after we already know there’s real problems that we could solve.”
But that’s not how the likes of OpenAI must operate. “With people throwing a lot money at these firms, they don’t have to try this,” Symons says. “For those who’ve got a whole lot of billions of dollars, you don’t need to deal with a practical, solvable project.”
Despite his steadfast belief that AGI is coming, Krueger also thinks the industry’s single-minded pursuit of it signifies that potential solutions to real problems, reminiscent of higher health care, are being ignored. “This AGI stuff—it’s nonsense, it’s a distraction, it’s hype,” he tells me.
