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My personal AGI benchmark is an unemployment rate of 20-25% within most or all developed countries. I do agree that most (all?) of the benchmark worship is largely pointless but you can't really hype your way into that kind of unprecedented structural unemployment.
Yeah I mean the AI companies would tell you this themselves. If we really get a level of AI that enables 50% knowledge worker structural unemployment it's unprecedented levels of disruption to the political system and to the economy even before accounting for x-risk thinking. Honestly the only glee I've seen is from blue collar workers who don't seem to realize that we're all fucked together if anything approaching this level of disruption to white collar work does materialize.
Assuming you're referring to this report, it's not saying what all the headlines are claiming it says. The exposed tasks in blue here refer to tasks that could be theoretically doubled in speed using either a LLM or using LLM tooling, even tasks that LLM's categorically aren't doing right now like authorizing drug referrals.
It's not claiming that LLM's can assist with all of these tasks at current capacities and it's not claiming that all of these tasks can be fully automated even with significantly more powerful LLM's. This is a bit of a spurious claim, but it's been taken hugely out of context, and the report even admits that employment trends in jobs exposed to LLM's are currently indistinguishable from jobs that aren't.
This isn't really an argument against short-time AGI believers though; even extremely maximalist predictions like AI2027 predict that pretty much nothing happens in the broader employment market until the models reach a tipping point and suddenly large swathes of the population become unemployed and things start getting very weird very quickly. Even if you believed lawyers, researchers and SWE's are all irrelevant by 2028 you still need to hire them to get the models over the finish line.
The disconnect seems to be that the bears point at the lackluster current capabilities relative to AGI expectations(which is largely true) and bulls point that the trend lines are still holding (which is also largely true); the trend lines have to bend eventually but that could be well after the employment market is annihilated, and we are all living in luxury gay space communism or have been paperclipped. Frankly nobody just has a good answer on whether this all leads.
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