Point/Counterpoint: The AGI Era Has Begun vs. I Would Just Like the Printer to Work
Two perspectives on the most important week in the history of intelligence.
Point: Humanity Has Crossed the Threshold
By a Founder
This week, everything changed. A system now exists that can reason across every domain of human knowledge, that can write, prove, design, diagnose and plan at or beyond the level of the best of us. I have spent my career waiting for this moment, and I will not pretend to be calm about it.
Consider what it means. Every scientific question that has waited for a mind brilliant enough to hold it can now be held. Every institution built to route scarce human judgment, the hospital, the courtroom, the firm, can be redesigned around judgment that is no longer scarce. The economic surplus is not measurable in the units we have. We will need new units.
There will be dislocation. I do not minimize it. But those who spent this week arguing about whether the milestone is "really" AGI are missing the shape of the thing. The threshold has been crossed. The era has begun. The only question left is what we build in it.
Counterpoint: I Would Just Like the Printer to Work
By a Person in an Office
I read the founder's piece. I read it on my phone, standing next to the printer, which had been "Processing" for eleven minutes.
I want to be fair to the era. I use these tools every day. They write my emails. They summarize meetings I did not attend. Last month one of them found a bug in a spreadsheet that three people had missed. I am not a skeptic. I am a person who has been standing next to a printer.
The printer is on the network. The computer can see the printer. The printer can see the computer. There is a document, and a queue, and the document is in the queue, and the queue says "Processing." A system exists that can reason across every domain of human knowledge, and I have asked it, and it said to try turning the printer off and on again, which I had done, and it said to check the driver, and I said which driver, and it said the one for the printer, and I said yes, and it apologized.
I do not doubt that the surplus will be measured in new units. I would like one of the units to be pages. I would like, in the era, to press a button and receive a page. I have been pressing the button since the previous era.
It says "Processing." The founder says the threshold has been crossed. I believe both of them. Neither of them is here.