Ask HN: How do you cope with the existential dread of AGI?
At the tail end (we hope) of a global pandemic that <i>actually</i> killed millions of people, with multiple wars and threats of wars that will kill millions of people, how can anyone focus on LLMs and the fantasy of AGI?<p>If we didn&#x27;t call ChatGPT &quot;AI&quot; with all the sci-fi inspired baggage that label implies, would people still feel this existential dread?<p>If you know how LLMs work, even at a surface level, I think making the leap from there to AGI requires a kind of religious faith. Do you actually believe that a technology that has access to vast amounts of human-generated data and can imitate our language well enough to fool us a lot of the time will suddenly scale into or somehow spark itself into an actual intelligence with its own goals and ideas and a drive to survive and reproduce? Or that something that has no body or senses with which to experience the world can evolve itself?<p>LLMs display some remarkable abilities and will probably have significant utility, including replacing some jobs. I could say the same about laundry machines and fork lifts. But let&#x27;s stop worshiping the golden calf we made, stop with the conceit that we have created a sentient entity. We haven&#x27;t.<p>I don&#x27;t feel a bit of dread. I have lived through the threat of nuclear war since the 1960s. I survived COVID, a threat that didn&#x27;t need any intelligence, only human incompetence, to kill millions. And I have three children whom I think will do fine even though they will face a future I can&#x27;t predict.