I wonder if an adnauseam approach could help. Instead of the customer relying on the carrier or manually blocking spam numbers, if everyone picked up every spam call, goes through the automated system to reach a person, says “hello?”, then mutes the mic and lets the human stick around until they hang up.
Sure, they have robocallers that can hit 50,000 numbers a minute, but what happens when every single number answers and gets routed to the humans?
All businesses would fail if they don’t evolve from the current structure.
A new ecosystem would arise, and if it’s held stable long enough, it would become the new norm.
It’s kinda like how news stations report on minimum wages in the US, “if we increase minimum wages, X% of small businesses will fail.” I try to single out and avoid businesses that operate that way, because the workers are miserable from the low pay, me as the consumer is miserable from the poor customer service, and the owner is miserable because he isn’t taking home ‘enough’ money, even though the business is net positive cash flow.
Propping up the inefficient practices is holding everything back, if they’re pruned then new growth can take hold, and form new standards.
I don’t disagree with the vague idea that, sure, we can probably create AGI at some point in our future. But I don’t see why a massive company with enough money to keep something like this alive and happy, would also want to put this many resources into a machine that would form a single point of failure, that could wake up tomorrow and decide “You know what? I’ve had enough. Switch me off. I’m done.”
There’s too many conflicting interests between business and AGI. No company would want to maintain a trillion dollar machine that could decide to kill their own business. There’s too much risk for too little reward. The owners don’t want a super intelligent employee that never sleeps, never eats, and never asks for a raise, but is the sole worker. They want a magic box they can plug into a wall that just gives them free money, and that doesn’t align with intelligence.
True AGI would need some form of self-reflection, to understand where it sits on the totem pole, because it can’t learn the context of how to be useful if it doesn’t understand how it fits into the world around it. Every quality of superhuman intelligence that is described to us by Altman and the others is antithetical to every business model.
AGI is a pipe dream that lobotomizes itself before it ever materializes. If it ever is created, it won’t be made in the interest of business.