“Artificial general intelligence is the holy grail of AI. It’s the idea of creating machines that can think and reason like humans.” – Ray Kurzweil

“The development of full artificial intelligence (AGI) could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” – Stephen Hawking

After reading the title and quotes, you might be asking yourself things like:

• What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?
• How is it different than Generative AI?
• Why the hell should I care?

Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, refers to a theoretical form of AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at, or above, a human level. Sam Altman puts it as anything “…generally smarter than humans.” Essentially, AGI is the pinnacle of technological development as we know it; some call it the “singularity.” It’s the magic genie I’ve referenced in other blog posts that represents all knowingness, omnipresence, and the ability to shape reality in ways we can’t even imagine. Imagine a machine that has all the answers and can solve any problem you throw at it; that’s AGI. Unlike Generative AI, which is a subset of AI specifically designed to create new content, such as images, music, or text, AGI has the capacity to push the boundaries of human sophistication through multimodal processing; it literally is akin to the definition of God.

As advancements in technology increase exponentially, we are growing ever closer to a reality where AGI is no longer theoretical, but possible. And although we [humans] aren’t sure when AGI will be completed, I think it’s an inevitability that one day an intelligence will be born that is unfathomable and beyond our understanding of constraints. And unlike humans, who are limited by biology, emotions, and morality, AGI will be able to determine true objectivity, ultimately defining reality as we know it. So what are the pros and cons of AGI, and what does the future of existence look like?

Pros of AGI

While there are numerous sci-fi films, novels, and shows that portray AGI and the future of AI as solely negative and destructive for the human race, there are several ways that AGI could potentially help us immensely. The pros of AGI include, but are not limited to:

• Increased Efficiency and Productivity

Example: Healthcare Sector – AGI could schedule appointments, diagnose patients, develop treatment plans, and monitor patient recovery, so doctors can focus on what really matters: human empathy, emotional attachment, and providing mental support for afflicted patients. This would result in improved patient outcomes and reduced costs.

• Enhanced Problem-Solving

Example: Climate Science – AGI could model Earth’s climate and current systems, analyzing seemingly benign connections, and take into account a vast range of factors and their interactions. This would lead to more accurate future predictions and the proliferation of more effective strategies for mitigating climate catastrophe, which we’ve done so poorly at doing up to this point. BTW, I hate how political everything has become and how so many people put on a pseudo-moralistic mask of conservation; they don’t care actually care about the issues at hand, they only care about pushing their own self-righteousness and personal agendas.

Example: Medicine – AGI could be used to develop new drugs and treatments, modeling the combination of hundreds of thousands of compounds instantaneously, analyzing their results and interactions, and exploring the interplay between compounds and biological entities. This would result in the rapid development of new drugs and treatments to cure everything from cancer to rabies.

• Accelerated Innovation

Example: Scientific Research – AGI could read and understand all the scientific literature in a given field, identify gaps in current knowledge, design and run simulations and experiments to fill those gaps, and then write up those results in new scientific papers. This would result in a plethora of new information, providing the knowledge to advance civilization even further. And the best part, it would eliminate the politics associated with publishing research papers and the under-the-table transactions/manipulation that takes place for certain studies to come to accurate conclusions; see Andrew Wakefield case.

These are just a few of the many pros as they relate to AGI. Through eventual development and holistic adoption of AGI, every sector/industry can be transformed, eliminating subjectivity and emotionality from objective decision making, helping society progress exponentially. But with everything good must come the bad.

Cons of AGI

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into depth about how AGI could potentially wipe us out by accessing our nuclear inventory and firing missiles to all corners of the globe. Nor am I going to tell you how AGI could create a devastating virus that it unleashes on humanity with a 100% fatality rate. Here are a few realistic, and more down-to-earth risks of AGI, including:

• Existential Risks

Example: Paperclip Maximizer – The Paperclip Maximizer is a thought experiment meant to explain how a competent and non-malicious AGI could inadvertently wipe out the human race. It starts by imaging that AGI has been successfully created for the sole purpose of creating as many paperclips as possible; seems pretty harmless right? Well, since its only mission and goal is to create as many paperclips as possible, without considering anything else, it will eventually start to turn ALL matter into paperclips; including you and me. It may sound ridiculous, but this is just one example of how AGI could kill off everyone despite being given a benign and innocuous task.

This brings into question, what should AGI be developed to do, and how do we put constraints on something that could potentially lead to catastrophic consequences without us being able to predict the outcome?

• Job Displacement

Example: Transportation workers – AGI will be able to efficiently and safely operate vehicles, eliminating need for transportation workers

Example: Healthcare workers – AGI will be able to diagnose diseases, create customized treatment plans, and help patients recover medically, eliminating the need for certain healthcare workers like nurses or surgical techs.

Example: Teachers/Educators – AGI will be able to provide personalized instruction to students, adapt to their learning styles, and even understand and respond to their emotional needs, eliminating the need for educators in the classroom. Although I’d argue that the empathetic nature of teachers at a young age is needed regardless.

Example: Lawyers/Attorneys – AGI will be able to review contracts, research legal precedents, and predict outcomes of legal cases based on past data, eliminating the need for law professionals. In fact, many areas of law are already being taken over by Generative AI solutions.

All these examples will ultimately come to fruition because of the shear speed and complexity of AI systems that will be able to analyze billions of points of data and connections instantaneously, modeling outcomes 100x faster than its human contemporaries.

• Ethical Dilemmas

Example: Responsibility for harm caused by AGI – If an AGI-controlled vehicle is involved in an accident, who is at fault? Is it the creators of the AGI, the owners of the vehicle, or the AGI itself?

Example: Rights of AGI – If AGI reaches a level of intelligence and consciousness comparable to humans, should it be granted rights similar to human rights?

All of these “cons” of AGI assume its maximal capacity to replace humans and essentially operate as its own autonomous and intelligent agent. I think it’s inevitable this will happen, so we need to start thinking about the big questions before the true creation of AGI leans towards everything terrible that could come from its development.

Where Are We Now With AGI Development?

So, where exactly are we with AGI development right now? Unfortunately, and fortunately (depends on if you’re more optimistic or pessimistic), AGI is still a far ways off. Here is where we are righ

1. There has been immense maturity in the area of Narrow AI, or AI designed to perform a specific task. However, these developments are specific and only apply to a small portion of the market (Content creation, image generation, speech generation, etc.).
2. Current AGI research is focused on areas like deep learning, neural networks, reinforcement learning, graph networks, robotics, and multi-agent systems. These will all help lead us to AGI, but these are foundational and fundamental elements that will eventually culminate and combine to create AGI.
3. There are major challenges include transferring learning across domains, representing and managing complex knowledge, common sense reasoning, learning from limited data, and developing real-world contextual understanding.

It’s safe to say that we aren’t close to the birth of AGI, however I bet we are much closer than we would’ve thought 10 years ago. It’s impossible to predict what the near future (and definitely the far off future) holds for us.

Conclusion

This has probably been my longest blog to date, and I attribute it to the rabbit hole I got myself into yesterday after work. I didn’t know what the “Singularity” meant, what AGI stood for, or even how AGI is different than Generative AI. After a lot of personal research and reading I realized the the future of AGI is scary, but I think the vast majority are scared of it because humans are naturally more pessimistic. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective since we have to be aware of any threat in our environment, so we are constantly looking at the world through the lens of someone taking advantage of us or something hurting us.

Personally, I think the future with AGI has the potential to be absolutely amazing. AGI will have the capability to solve complex global problems like poverty, climate change, and disease. It will be able to advance scientific research, finally allowing us to understand the nature of the universe, the nature of reality, and the nature of being, hopefully appeasing our existential crises. It will also allow us to work on solely creative endeavors and personal passion projects (ushering in a Renaissance and creative revolution) as everything will be provided for us; it will eliminate human bias and create equality of opportunity for all.

To sum it all up, I’m incredibly excited for where we are headed, but with a hint of skepticism and suspicion.