Demis Hassabis on AGI and the singularity

    by Evira: Demis Hassabis

    Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind says we’re already in the foothills of the singularity, AGI isn’t a matter of hitting 2030, it’s about whether institutions can adapt in time. He figures AGI is only a few years out, around 2030 give or take a year, and the real shock comes when tech outpaces schools, laws, hiring, and safety systems. Society doesn’t have long to prepare.

    Transcript (en)

    We will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now. What I mean by that, and the reason I chose that word, is that, so there's the technology, which is AGI. We've been calling AGI, this next version of really general artificial intelligence. I believe that we're only a few years away from that, maybe like 20, 30, plus or minus a year, which is astounding to think, really. And then the era, I think that would be such an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era. And that's what I'm meaning by the singularity, is that, and what many science fiction writers have written about that is it's sort of the, it's describing the era that we will be in, in and around when AGI, the advent of AGI happens. Because I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means. And it's going to be enormously profound, I think. And the future, in my view, is still to be written, but these next few years are going to be very critical as to which way that will go and how we collectively want that to look like.