AGI will be business as usual?

What if this version of “business as usual” reality comes true. Seems like a good frame to have in your mental toolbox when thinking about the future path of AI.

in a post-AGI world, people will simply get used to the fact that computers can solve cognitive problems quickly, and beat us in any cognitive domain, just like we’re used to computers multiplying large numbers quickly now, or kicking our asses in chess and go. software and math will lose all their scarcity.

“pls create a MMORPG that is like Zelda: Breath of the Wild but with Pokémon instead, let me fly around the world as a Charizard and dive on the water like a Gyarados. give me an executable that I can send to my friends and we’ll all be connected to the same world”

you press a button and, 3 minutes later, done

I doubt that won’t work by 2027

“pls create a blockchain exactly like Bitcoin except it uses quantum resistant signatures like Lamport, and you can deploy smart contracts in a Lean-like language, and contracts are only accepted if they’re formally verified to be correct w.r.t the following specs…”

you press a button and done, you have a hack-proof chain

“in three space dimensions and time, given an initial velocity field, there exists a vector velocity and a scalar pressure field, which are both smooth and globally defined, that solve the Navier–Stokes equations”

you press a button, and done, you get a solution

math is fundamentally easy, and this will break some ppl’s worldviews. currently, math seems mystically hard, like chess once was, because we’re are animals that struggle with it, only a few of us are capable of adding fractions, let alone working on the edge, so hard problems stand for a long time unsolved, we praise our geniuses.

but it isn’t

once computers are doing it, that won’t be a thing anymore. theorem proving will be as trivial as multiplying large numbers. the “uh duh but godel?” folk will still be confused. and computers will come up with incredibly simple, clean Lean proofs for impossibly hard problems. and mathematicians will yell that it is just some trick to satisfy the checker, that it isn’t real math if we can’t understand it. but then we’ll ask the AI and it will kindly reveal the nature of a surprisingly clever mathematical structure that is so alien for our brains to come up with

and life will go on

automation will increase 100-fold
food and goods will be abundant
the price of everything will crash
other than things that can’t be copied
like human time and attention
which will be on all time high

and humans will still play chess
and humans will still write software
and humans will still do math
and we’ll dance, play sports and love
like we always did
for the love of it

software and math will lose their scarcity
computers will be truly general solvers

and we’ll get used to it faster than you think

and life will go on