Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen—a before and an after that they are privileged (or doomed) to live through.
For us, that’s the promised advent of AGI. People are used to hearing that this or that is the next big thing, says Shannon Vallor, who studies the ethics of technology at the University of Edinburgh. “It used to be the computer age and then it was the internet age and now it’s the AI age,” she says.
In many people’s telling, AGI will arrive all at once. Incremental advances in AI will stack up until, one day, AI will be good enough to start making better AI by itself. At which point—FOOM—it will advance so rapidly that AGI will arrive in what’s often called an intelligence explosion ….
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The fantasy of computers that can do almost anything a person can is seductive. But like many pervasive conspiracy theories, it has very real consequences. It has distorted the way we think about the stakes behind the current technology boom (and potential bust).
