Happy New Year!
It’s a new year, OpenAI released a new model, and we might be at the dawn of Average General Intelligence (AGI) – a world with AI systems capable of understanding, learning, and applying intelligence across a wide range of tasks at human levels or beyond.
What are the implications? What will an AGI future look like?
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently wrote Machines of Loving Grace speculating on 5 domains that will be radically transformed by powerful AI. It’s essential reading on the topic.
I have my own hunch: the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
Introduction
I think a lot about an essay by Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google from 2011:
“A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade.”
This is a clear pattern looking back through history:
Automobiles
- Karl Benz invents the first automobile in 1885. It’s a luxury good.
- In 1908, Henry Ford brings his model T to the masses.
- Today, you can get in Twitter fights for suggesting car ownership is anything other than an essential right.