Brief in the imminent arrival of super intelligent AGI that will transform society is essentially a new secular religion. The technological cognoscenti who believe in dismiss the doubters who insist on evidence as fools.
Automation has been radically changing our societies since before Marx wrote down some thoughts and called it communism.
Things which used to be considered AI before we solved them, e.g. automated optimisation of things like code compilation or CPU layouts, have improved our capacity to automate design and testing of what is now called AI.
Could stop at any point. I'll be very surprised if someone makes a CPU with more than one transistor per atom.
But even if development stops right now, our qualification systems haven't caught up (and IMO can't catch up) with LLMs. Might need to replace them with mandatory 5 years internships to get people beyond what is now the "junior" stage in many professions — junior being approximately the level which the better existing LLMs can respond at.
"Transform society" covers a lot more than anyone's idea of the singularity.
Well people have odd beliefs but super intelligent AGI is coming for real in the next couple of decades while the religion stuff isn't happening. There's a difference there.
I would say a definition for GAI is a system that can improve its own ability to adapt to new problems. That’s a more concrete formulation than I’ve typically seen.
Currently humans are still in the loop, but we already have AI enabling advancements in their own functioning at a very primitive level. Extrapolating from previous growth is a form of belief without evidence since past performance not indicative of future results. But that’s generally true of all prognostication and I’m not sure what kind of evidence you’d be looking for aside from past performance.
The doubters are dismissed as naive thinking that something is outside our ability to achieve something, but that’s only if you keep moving goalposts and treat it like Zeno’s paradox. Like yes, there are weaknesses to our current techniques. At the same time we’ve also demonstrated an uncanny ability to step around them and reach new heights. For example, our ability to beat Go took less time than it took to develop techniques to beat humans at chess. Automation now outcompetes humans at many many things that seemed impossible before. Techniques / solutions will also be combined to solve even harder problems (eg now LLMs are being researched to take over executive command control operations of robots for example instead of using classical control systems algorithms that were hand built and hand tuned)
"Surely I come quickly. Amen."