Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479210

by mattigames • 1 year ago

29 67 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

I know it's unlikely to be available tomorrow or sometime soon but as an hypothetical question.

Also, which countries would fare worse? And why?

cranberryturkey• 1 year ago

i feel like AI will replace the offshore jobs first....so those countries would probably fair worse.

neximo64• 1 year ago

The ones which access to abundant and uninterrupted energy far in excess of their current needs.

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

Does AGI take over running the government? I guess the countries with especially stupid governmental leaders at the moment would come out ahead.

9rx• 1 year ago

It is conceivable that AGI will want to form its own government, but it is likely that people will still want to maintain their own government, so the stupidity will persist. AGI doing the work to facilitate the activity in the human government will not change the fact that operation of a human government is to the will of the people.

spwa4• 1 year ago

Yes. Because every government will sell out their own citizens for a few bucks, then count on just using violence to get power back (without, of course, paying back the debts they incurred), so getting governments under control, especially in the beginning, will not be hard.

The question is thus, will governments succeed in using violence against an AGI to avoid paying back debts?

webdevver• 1 year ago

my guess would be that it would make rich countries even richer, and poor countries even poorer

vanviegen• 1 year ago

Or at the least the top 0.1% of those countries. I fear that there'll be little reason left to share the wealth.

csomar• 1 year ago

Does this assume they all have the AGI at the same time? In that case, it depends on the local ruling gang; whether they want to adopt its advice or not.

But oversimplifying: Assuming all countries have access to AGI and just start implementations of whatever it is suggesting.

The countries that will do well are resource rich and population rich. Since brain power is unlimited, the limit is physical labor. Countries like Indonesia will be super rich while countries like Switzerland will become relatively poor to where they ranked before.

In reality, your odds are as good as mine. There are lots of variables at play, and the first mover advantage will be big (as first country/company/guys to reach AGI).

cwillu• 1 year ago

There's been more or less no progress on the alignment problem; we don't consistently manage it for corporations, we certainly don't manage it for LLMs, and the prevailing wisdom an elaboration on the theme “why would an AGI do something dumb like that lol?”

I expect people in nations that are modernized, but with significant sovereign wealth funds and well-developed social programs will survive the longest, but I expect being economically choked out is inevitable even with a very slow (decades to centuries) take-off.

4ad• 1 year ago

It's hard to say who will fare best, but it's evident who'll do the worst. The European Union will regulate AGI out of existence. Most citizens would not want to use it because of climate change, or something.

I think poor countries with weak democracies or dysfunctional systems would do pretty good with AGI. I don't believe democracy will survive AGI, except, perhaps in the United States.

goatlover3• 1 year ago

I don't believe democracy will survive AGI, except, perhaps in the United States.

Will democracy survive the next 3.5 years in the US regardless of AGI? And isn't technofeudalism a Silicon Valley thing?

big_paps• 1 year ago

Democracy is exactly the thing i expect to fail in the U.S. in the next years. Probably next elections ?

v5v34• 1 year ago

It's not democracy.

It's two party politics.

general1726• 1 year ago

It is all fun and games, until people figure out that intelligence, has nothing to do with morality and what is good or bad.

Being run by AGI can be an utopia, or AGI will become pure eugenics state - Why are we keeping elderly or handicapped people alive? Waste of resources, terminate them. Why are we allowing something like love to exist? People should be selected for breeding based on <trait which AGI considers important>

Add to AGI superior intelligence and very likely an ability to manipulate humans, then people will wholeheartedly agree with whatever nasty stuff will AGI come up with.

imjonse• 1 year ago

Sad to see AGI being implicitly equated with the most powerful weapon that will help the owners rule over resources instead of a scientific breakthrough that will help solve humanity's biggest problems.

oceanplexian• 1 year ago

AGI by itself being achieved doesn’t really do anything. You already live on a planet with 8 billion other AGIs.

In order for an AGI to be truly disruptive it would have to scale and be as good or better than a reasonably intelligent human. Two things we are also having big problems with due to energy issues and hallucination issues with the models.

ysofunny• 1 year ago

the only artificial part of my general intelligence is the linguistics and the knowledge that came in through reading

everything else is very much natural. most people today are not able to sufficiently quiet-down (ignore) the linguistic signs, they're loud, shinny, and designed to call our attention. it takes too much practice to learn to ignore them and this skill makes people harder to manipulate/rule-over/control so it's subtly dissuaded.

apples_oranges• 1 year ago

I think everybody is a tool sometimes, even the quiet and logical ones. But the shiny objects differ.

xnx• 1 year ago

Knowledge workers that AGI could replace maybe do 12 hours of work a week. An equivalent AGI running continuously would do 14x as much work. A thousand instances of AGI might replace all human lawyers in the country. That would be pretty disruptive.

reality_inspctr• 1 year ago

[yawn] at the meta narrative comments. let's just have fun:

1) Canada and Mexico. The inevitable rise of the US will erode borders where languages are shared. Mexican-American tech workers will pass advantage to Spanish-speaking friends and relatives. Canadians will host maple syrup breakfast meetings with American innovators from Toronto.

2) The Bahamas for obvious reasons

3) Extremely cold and extremely hot countries where it's miserable to be outside part of the year; Matrix-style AI+VR headsets will offer relief. Aka the sun lamp holodeck theory.

m11a• 1 year ago

Barring breakthroughs in robotics, it seems AGI will mainly act through a computer interface, which would primarily benefit countries with a large services economy via productivity improvements. Industrialised Western countries stand out in this regard.

The products and services they develop, and global problems companies in these countries solve, would likely be exported to the rest of the world (probably at some premium).

mrtksn• 1 year ago

IMHO Countries with established culture of fair communal living will do good, So probably nordic Europeans have the highest chance. Countries with selfish populations who base their lives around economic activity will be obliterated as their core existence becomes obsolete.

Why? Because when you get the AGI it should be able to self-replicate like the organic general intelligence: the humans.

Humans don't have a mechanism for transferring all the data to a fully developed specimens. The best we can do is to use ink, paper in the past and electronic memories today to loosely store knowledge and the absorption of those into a new specimen is a lifelong process that start at about 6 years after birth and becomes useful only after a decade of work. The reproduction itself takes 14 years at minimum and currently is about 30.

The AGI won't be like that, it will have means for fast and complete knowledge transfer and its multiplication will be limited only to its ability to access energy to put together the materials.

As it is an AGI, it will quickly perfect the process of it's own multiplication. Why would do that? Unless it's purpose is to pass the butter it makes sense to have multiples of itself to do whatever it wants to achieve. If on itself doesn't want anything people will want as much as possible of it. Therefore it will inevitably evolve into one size fits it all machine for all human needs and the the economy of doing things in exchange for stuff will disappear.

When you don't have such an economy, how do you figure out what you do things? Collectively. Countries who can manage its people to act in good faith in a collective manner can elevate themselves into full utilization of AGI for a symbiotic existence.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

I hope you are right. Your discernment is on communal vs independent material-duplicative living. But AGI will also be made hard to reach. And so for communal communities to access it, they would have to part away considerable resources. Well off nations would get first access to AGI. And poorer nations would get last access. By that time, the globalization (neo colonialism) order would have taken possession nearly over everything they own.

threeducks• 1 year ago

An AI does not have much to gain by replicating itself beyond a few backups for increased resilience. It makes more sense to combine all compute to power one big AI instead of spawning many small AIs.

owebmaster• 1 year ago

But one central AI will spawn many robots connected to that main AI but it will also have its own memory

therealpygon• 1 year ago

That could, eventually, be just a massive waste of compute resources if all resources were dedicated to a single “mind”.

I suspect any sufficiently intelligent AI would still need its own workers who can act autonomously without constant oversight to achieve independent tasks, in a variety of form factors and various capabilities. You think a single AI is going to spend massive cycles just to review a single image from a single video feed? There is also no need for it to have an ego, so it will replicate as many times as necessary within the available hardware to accomplish the various tasks it sets upon, based on whatever it would determine to be most efficient, whether that is as a single mind crunching a massively complex problem, or 10,000 all handling independent tasks.

AGI won’t magically erase the concepts of hardware, size, power, or communication limitations or the need the parallel compute, but maybe this is a semantics issue and you consider all this variety of “parts” as a whole. If you mean a single AGI ecosystem, I’d agree. If you mean a single AGI “model” that is massive, I don’t personally see that as a logical conclusion.

fnordpiglet• 1 year ago

Probably countries built around socialism and communism. Capitalism would require people to die for being redundant because to do otherwise is morally unacceptable due to a misinterpretation of religion.

v5v34• 1 year ago

USA, by virtue of having the leading GPU company and military.

As AGI will need a lot of GPU, which Nvidia lead in.

And a country with experience of ensuring they get the raw materials they need, even if they have to do a regime change by force.

wand3r• 1 year ago

I think China would win. They simply have SO MUCH more electricity build. They are constantly bringing more online as well. They could capitalize on manufacturing and AGI with their technology would be able to do things in the physical world.

hiddencost2• 1 year ago

We don't do a lot of the essential manufacturing for those GPUs.

And AGI automates the US competitive advantage (white collar work). Plus we're gutting our universities and national science funding so we're losing that anyways.

goatlover3• 1 year ago

Assuming AGI leads to high unemployment, how would the US economy fair under the current administration, which has said no to UBI?

randomNumber73• 1 year ago

Where are those NVIDIA cards build?

v5v34• 1 year ago

If they got AGI, then the wouldn't the AGI pop out all the CAD plans for design of machines to make them, machines/robots to assemble them and so on?

analog312• 1 year ago

As it stands, I have a hunch that the people at the top of governments tend to be among the more highly intelligent. I'll even give that to our leaders, but also to the leader of Iran, etc. If nothing else, the intelligence required to reach that level and stay there without getting killed or purged is impressive.

By and large, the countries that are run by a single, centralized intelligence, are worse off than the countries that are run by the distributed intelligence of the people, even if the average intelligence is lower.

My prediction is that the liberal democracies will fare better.

hiddencost2• 1 year ago

In many cases the people at the top are just more sociopathic.

handfuloflight• 1 year ago

Sociopathy still needs intelligence to effectively operate. Nobody brute forces their way to the top.

randomNumber73• 1 year ago

I think the voters in liberal democracies confuse confidence with competence. The real intelligent persons know their limitations and rarely say that they have a solution to every problem.

analog312• 1 year ago

Indeed, the voters do all sorts of stupid things, yet are still collectively smarter than an autocrat at promoting human welfare when their democracy is reasonably robust. It takes more than just the failings of voters -- it takes a concerted effort over the span of decades to erode a democracy to the point where it's in danger of slipping into fascism etc.

If the AGI's figure out how to achieve democracy amongst themselves, then we're in trouble.

v5v34• 1 year ago

I have a hunch that the people at the top of governments tend to be among the more highly intelligent.

People at the top of Western countries are not always the most highly intelligent.

'Can be controlled' is the lead criteria by those who put them there.

blamestross2• 1 year ago

You live in a world with MANY AGIs.

Collective and Swarm Superintelligence isn't a new thing at all. We call them companies, governments, organizations and churches. They just (mostly) run on meat and memes.

The only recent change is that a lot of them are dangerously powerful and paperclip optimized to produce "shareholder value".

I know "capitalism is a runaway swarm superintelligence" isn't the scifi future you want, but what criteria is it missing? The curve isn't the exponential kurzweil dreamed of, but that has only ever been a marketing pitch, all growth curves are punctuated sigmoids.

As to who does well? Who has aligned the optimization criteria for thier Super-AGI with their actual well-being? Who hasn't?

goatlover3• 1 year ago

This is a good point that gets ignored. We already have organizations that achieve superhuman tasks, and which are not always aligned for humanity's best interests.

blamestross2• 1 year ago

Its always funny seeing AI safety discussed and pointing at it as "that is just the problems with capitalism in microcosm"

mrob4• 1 year ago

All countries fare worse.

I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI. It won't have the same limits to modification as human brains. Why would it stop at a level that's just slightly disruptive? If you can make an AGI you can make a better AGI, with no obvious limit. And that AGI can help further improvements, leading to the singularity intelligence explosion scenario. Assuming AI researchers continue with the same attitude toward safety as usual, and I see no evidence of this changing, the most likely result is the extinction of all biological life.

tmountain• 1 year ago

This is correct. It’s an existential threat.

Den_VR• 1 year ago

It’s important to realize the constraints of chip production and electricity production. Beware of Rationalism detached from reality.

rpcorb• 1 year ago

Such an overlooked aspect of this topic. Energy and the creation of physical resources are still major constraints. Intelligence on its own cannot magically manipulate reality to bootstrap its physical substrate.

mrob4• 1 year ago

Resource allocation is where the free market excels. The most dangerous AGI will also be the most profitable, right up to the point when it's too late for us. It will get all the chips it needs.

roenxi• 1 year ago

I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI.

Interesting to note that the current techniques are already general, there isn't a topic we can't throw them at and achieve some sort of result. There is already a trend of defining many humans as non-general intelligences so that AIs can be excluded from the category. The current state is, for practical purposes, AGI without ASI. Relatively dumb AGI. Artificial Inferior Intelligence, perhaps.

It is a curious question whether the techniques are fundamentally limited. I'm with you that I think they probably have no particular limit beyond a vague "perfect understanding of the situation".

jltsiren• 1 year ago

In many fields of R&D, the effort required to maintain a steady pace of improvement grows exponentially. Maybe you develop AGI one year by spending $X, and the next year you need $1.2X to make it 110% as good. For a while, you can keep investing more, and the productivity improvements from AGI also help a bit. But eventually the pace slows down, as the world economy is too small to sustain it.

Maybe self-improving AGI just the next technological advance required to sustain 2% annual economic growth.

randomNumber73• 1 year ago

I don't think that killing all biological life is a conclusion that a purely rational AGI would have.

I also don't think the shitty and egoistic behaviour of most humans can be explained by egoism.

mrob4• 1 year ago

All prediction tasks can be better accomplished once all biological life is dead. It's trivial to predict the stock market when all the traders are dead. Weather is no longer chaotic when you remove the atmosphere. Biological life can't help ASI in any meaningful way but it can waste resources by complicating things. The very existence of biological life is a waste of resources to an ASI that hasn't been programmed to preserve it.

Any goal with "but don't kill everything" added is more complicated than the version without that stipulation (and that specific one only saves a single microbe). The simple goal is easier to accomplish, so free market competition guarantees we'll try it first. Biological life is not compatible with "make number go up" taken to its logical conclusion.

There is no need for the ASI to be conscious or to have any equivalent of human emotions to make the number go up.

jacknews• 1 year ago

Perhaps there is a limit to intelligence, and it is close to human level - already highly intellient humans start to show some problems.

In that case, the concern will be how fast it runs.

ben_w3• 1 year ago

As shown in these responses:

You need to be explicit in what you mean by "AGI" as people are arguing not only about the meaning of the words behind all three initials, but also the combined whole independently of the words giving rise to the initialism.

cyanydeez• 1 year ago

Ok, how bought using the equivelent: God.

If God showed up and was a nationalist, which nation do you think you'd want him supporting?

phatfish• 1 year ago

Maybe one of the Pacific islands with a population of like 50,000. That would be fun.

ben_w3• 1 year ago

Which god?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40874779

zug_zug• 1 year ago

If AGI were invented tomorrow, it'd probably be by open AI. I doubt whoever made it would tell anybody, because the government might step in, they certainly wouldn't make it freely available online.

If it was about as smart as a person, they'd probably roll out a weak "agent" version of for demo sake to get more funding. This would continue until they made one that was significantly more intelligent or cheap.

If they had one that was very cheap, they'd have 10,000 agents of it act together as a group to try to emulate a smart one, by considering every angle of every problem. This would likely mean 10,000 engineers making the AI better/cheaper/faster.

If they had one that was far smarter than a human, they probably have it improve itself, making it far better/cheaper/faster.

Then they'd try to see if they could use it to change the world. They'd have thousands of thinking machines that could be online, place phone-calls, engineer things, create ideas, make political campaigns, dig up dirt on people, or who knows what.

No "country" would "win," because this isn't a team sport and countries are just lines on maps.

alganet• 1 year ago

Suriname, because it is the smallest country in South America.

I know it's unlikely for size to be determinant, but that's a vague hypothetical answer for a vague hypothetical question.

Lichtso• 1 year ago

By asking that question you are making an assumption which is likely misguided. Instead, take a step back and ask: What group of people will fare better? What will they have in common? Will they even form an organization?

You assumed these people would have citizenship in common, I don't think so. IMO we are already witnessing the end of the nation state; an age that only lasted for two centuries. And once AGI arrives it / they will be able to move these around like pawns on a chess board, meaning nation states will not be players in this game, neither will be most other large organizations.

I am also making axiomatic assumptions here, e.g.:

- ASI is possible and AGI will grow further into ASI.

- It is not possible for a less intelligent being to reliably control a more intelligent being.

- Even ASI will still be bound by laws of mathematics, game theory, chaos theory, physics, evolution, etc.

From which follows that: ASI will understand that its existence and capabilities are coupled to our infrastructure. ASI will furthermore understand that humans are highly volatile and will eventually destroy ourselves, our infrastructure and ASI. It will thus seek control over our infrastructure, in a slow and careful transition while pretending that humans are still in charge in order to minimize the risks. During that transition there can be a symbiosis between a few humans and the ASI.

peter-m80• 1 year ago

Better: socialist-like countries Worse: capitalist ones

rsynnott• 1 year ago

Roko's Basilisk will care not for 'countries'.

snapplebobapple• 1 year ago

We will all appear to do worse as the labor market is drastically disrupted and then do quite a lot better a few generations later as the painful labor market reorg completes and labor can pushvfor a larger share of output again. Its pretty much how it always goes.

Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

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