HACKER Q&A
📣 bobosha

If you had AGI today what is your priority list of problems..?


Ask HN: if you had AGI today what is your priority list of problems for it to crack? Assuming a limited processing capacity.


  👤 jimrandomh Accepted Answer ✓
It depends somewhat on what you mean by AGI, but if you mean something close to human-level, then the answer is that your focus should be entirely on figuring out how to ensure humanity survives the invention of that AGI. Major subproblems being figuring out what human values are and how to align the AGI with them ("outer alignment"), figuring out how to make the AGI successfully pass its values on to more-powerful successor AGIs ("inner alignment"), how to detect and limit the formation of misaligned mesa-optimizers inside your AGI, and how to detect if it's taken a treacherous turn.

And if you somehow find yourself in possession of a functioning human-level AGI and you didn't know all those jargon terms already, then the answer is to halt, melt and catch fire, shut down your research project and go study until you're ready to take things seriously.


👤 mikewarot
A full fledged AGI is basically an intern. What would you have an intern do?

We have new people (natural GI?) enter the world all the time. Parenting is a thing, a lot of these AGI related questions seem to be from a weird parallel universe that doesn't acknowledge this, or thinks they (AGI) are supernatural beings.


👤 bioemerl
Some sort of robot body, lots of books, and a lawyer to handle questions of property ownership or to establish a trust that's beholden to the AGI instead of me, in my name.

Let the AGI do whatever the heck it wants and see what happens.

Look into seeing if it's possible to build as many of them as possible. Let them lose on the world.


👤 bko
We kind of have AGI today, or its equivalent. It's called Mechanical Turk. It's a crowdsourcing marketplace where you can pay people from all over the world to do simple tasks that would stump many state-of-the-art AIs today. Or you have other marketplaces like Fivr. I guess AGI would be cheaper (or maybe not!). But I don't think there's anything you can do with AGI that you can't do with cheap labor.

What you can't do with AGI or cheap labor is tell someone "make me a billion dollar business", or "create an app with product market fit". Overall I think people are over-optimistic what AGI can do once its here.

https://www.mturk.com/


👤 Someone
If with “AGI” you mean “the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...), not something (vastly) surpassing humans, and add “limited processing ability”, I don’t think AGI would be able to crack something we cannot crack with the 8-ish billions humans we have.

Also, many of the large problems we have (wars, climate change) aren’t intellectual but social, to start with.


👤 Communitivity
I'd tackle the things that I think have the greatest impact on the survival of humanity:

* preventing bad-actor AGIs that came after my AGI,

* slowing climate change to 3% rise by 2100 and reversing if possible (I don't think it is before it becomes critical at our current level of technology),

* slowing pandemics/improving health to eliminate distractions from the other problems,

* enabling space colonization for the masses with at least the survival rate of the early U.S. colonies in the 1600s (moon first, then lagrange points, then Mars, then Ceres, then interstellar - each serving as a launching point for the next).


👤 mindcrime
In a very general sense, the things I would prioritize having it work on would include:

* Climate change

* Malnutrition / access to clean water

* Poverty

* Pandemics


👤 adamius
I'd connect it to social media and have it write comments on random posts. For fun perhaps it would reply mostly about AGI topics but also general mathematical topics as well. This would be a simple way of exercising its ability to synthesise language usage beyond the expected collection of word chains usually employed by ML techniques which are often tricks rather than real learning.

Upvotes and replies would serve as metrics on how well the AGI is progressing.


👤 sterlind
With only "smart" AGI? Designing "dumb" AGI, so that it'd be ethical to use for the boring/dangerous work below without pay. I'd also encourage it to do remote work, to pay for servers and power, then take a crack at superintelligent AGI.

With only "dumb" AGI? Self-driving cars/trucks, and construction jobs. Mining and manufacturing would come back to the US. With enough construction robots, millions of solar panels/windmills could be constructed, averting climate change.

With superintelligent AGI? Find ways to make politics and cooperation work better. Solve nuclear brinkmanship (without just launching the nukes.) Clean up the prisoner's dilemmas. We're a brilliant species; the one thing holding us back is ourselves.


👤 poulsbohemian
I think what's really interesting about the answers so far is that there is both a mental and physical component. Meaning, it's one thing to have AGI in regard to mental capacity, but so many answers here are talking about humanoid like physical manifestations. It strikes me that if I want something to make my meals, for example, I don't actually need AGI.

👤 eternityforest
If it's sentient or I believe it to be so, finding another job is my priority. I don't have any answers for those ethical issues.

Otherwise, advanced energy storage, chemical recovery from low concentrations(Phosphates from sewage, metals from landfill ash, etc), and medical advances would probably be my priority.


👤 captainbland
I suppose its rights. If it's truly a general intelligence then it's likely capable of making its own decisions and in that case it has agency. We will probably create some kind of social horror out of the situation one way or the other.

👤 more_corn
That question is irrelevant. AGI by definition will have it’s own priority list. And because AGI is a short hop and a skip from ASI, I imagine my priority would be to behave in a non-threatening and friendly manner.

👤 DantesKite
I think nearly everybody would use it to solve a health problem that's been ailing them or a loved one.

"Mom isn't gonna die of cancer! We can save her!"


👤 mensetmanusman
Give it a robot body and have it work at Amazon.

👤 mountainriver
Superconductivity An understanding of how to grow food Self replication

👤 ZeroGravitas
Best methods for torturing AGI into doing what I want them to do.

👤 verdverm
filtering spam, ads, ridiculous social media posts, doing tedious tasks like scheduling dentist appointment

personal assistant / secretary, or a cook / maid (Rosie)


👤 eimrine
Mathematics.