The Experts Aren't Always Right

"You Look Like a Thing and I Love You", written in 2019 by Janelle Shane, and recommended by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Daniel Pink, and Adam Grant, and described as "affectionately down-to-earth to the year's most hype-prone field of tech."

It's a great book to get a high-level understanding of AI and how it works.

Janelle has this to say about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI):

An AGI could beat you at chess, tell you a story, bake you a cake, describe a sheep, and name three things larger than a lobster. It's also the stuff of science fiction, and most experts agree that AGI is many decades away from becoming a reality -- if it will become a reality at all.

Under this definition, it's fair to say that AGI has been with us for a while. This was in 2019!

This is what makes me take AI very seriously. When a new technology arrives, optimists are almost always overly-optimistic, and underestimate timelines for things to come to fruition (Nuclear fusion has been "30 years away" since 1960). Incredibly, as the quote above shows, optimists in the AI space have repeatedly overestimated the timeline.

This is why I think it's prudent to prepare. AGI is imminent, and ASI will follow shortly thereafter.