Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of AGI
We&#x27;re all already part of a society-scale, distributed hive mind--have been since the invention of language. Birds flock together, they eat together, they <i>think</i> together. Families, friend networks, cities, global societies, they all form communication topologies that have analogs in the brain. Thoughts bounce from person to person, memes spread amongst the computational fabric of groups of people. It&#x27;s nothing new.<p>We as a society have formed networks and systems to solve problems like finding energy, producing food, and organizing economic output. We live in a distributed intelligent system that disseminates knowledge and programs our preferences, responses. We&#x27;re all utilized as work units, and economics does that. 
I think it&#x27;s a mistake to think of AGI as something separate from us, something that doesn&#x27;t already exist. We&#x27;re more like a cybernetic superorganism. We&#x27;ve put so much computational power in charge of the choices that we make, and we rely so often on recommendations from computational systems, that if you zoom out far enough, it becomes clear that we are part of a huge, cybernetic Overmind.<p>The Overmind is just moving more computation away from humans because hey, they&#x27;re slow. It doesn&#x27;t really speak to us. Do you speak to <i>your</i> neurons? Nevertheless, it has its goals, its resources, its needs, its preferences. People carry out its wishes, statistically. It turns out that its wishes align very well with economics: More computers! More network! More screens! Connect all the stuff! All the companies doing this are making huge dollars. The mind or minds are just <i>centralizing</i> now, and economics drives that. Computers already fully run the stock market. They run shipping and logistics. They are used to optimize all kinds of economic outputs. And they are used (by humans) to design better computers.<p>At the broadest scale, we are already that self-improving intelligent system, it just doesn&#x27;t look like it from meatspace just yet.<p>It&#x27;s kind of irrelevant if it could utter the words &quot;I think for I am.&quot; Who would it tell that anyway?