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It's obvious if you assume the models will improve up to, and then past human level intelligence.
At that point every job that can be done from behind a computer becomes trivial to automate. The remaining jobs become trivial once AI control of robots improve as well.
Now we're not there yet, and maybe we won't ever get there, but it's pretty hard to be confident one way or the other.
It continues to frustrate me that nobody seems to have found (or be seriously looking into, as far as I can tell) theoretical bounds on "intelligence", and some philosophers in these parts seem to assume that something "smart enough" can derive a complete physics, the universe, and divine the state of everything in it given nothing more than the text of the ten hundred most relevant books, which feels very ontologically lazy.
Although I'd be interested in reading anyone looking at this mathematically, presumably needing a very heavy dose of information and complexity theory. Links are appreciated.
I didn't mean to imply that "beyond human level" meant "machine god". But even going just slightly past average human level has potential for massive societal upheaval as it would very quickly devalue much or most human labour (even if some number of high performing humans can still outperform AI, many of us aren't fully using our cognitive capabilities in our day to day).
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Does a set of all sets contain itself?
Yeah, but now you're into the territory of religions, specifically those that suggests a deity actively maintains the (finite?) state of the universe in this way.
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I think this includes a number of questionable assumptions built into the idea of 'human level intelligence'. The models we have now are very good at doing some things that humans struggle with, but are also completely incapable of some things that are trivial for humans. There isn't a unified 'intelligence' where we are at a specific level, and machines are approaching. Rather, human intelligence is a highly-correlated cluster of aptitudes; aptitudes which do not necessarily correlate in machines. It seems at least plausible to me that existing AI models continue to get better at the sorts of things they are currently good at without ever becoming the kind of thing we would recognise as intelligent.
Now on one level that doesn't matter - I'm just suggesting that AI might keep improving without ever becoming AGI. But AI doesn't need to become AGI to cause technological unemployment, or to give some nation or other a major military advantage, or whatever else it is we're worried about. But I'd still like to know what the mechanism we're predicting for that unemployment, or military advantage, or whatever else might be, because it is not immediately obvious how a language model produces any of those things.
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