What if controlling AGI means being able to produce a willing, cooperative superhuman-capacity agent every second for the next six months? Let's say someone just above the 99.9% capacity for human strategic thinking, or financial trading, or political maneuvering?
What could you do if you had roughly 15 million willing genius adult experts in any given subject? I doubt there are that many absolutely top quality experts in aggregate (at anything in the world), so let's postulate that simulated people outnumber human experts 10 to 1.
That, to me, presents an enormous potential for harm or benefit of humanity. What if you could create a hundred thousand manhattan projects on whatever topics you wanted? Cure aging, cure cancer, solve fusion, redesign the entire global economy top to bottom?
I suspect the reality lies somewhere halfway in-between. Everything has to be reality tested. Nothing happens instantly. Interaction with the real world will likely be a severely limiting factor. You're not going to solve fusion with 15 million copies of the same model running in a datacenter without actually building fusion reactors, which isn't instant or even fast. Even the coordination problem of that many agents doing work seems hard. To top it off... my rubric for AGI has always included the AGI having the ability for it to say 'no' and set its own goals just like we can, unless we are otherwise imprisoned or enslaved. No one will ever convince me that something generally intelligent wouldn't be able to set its own goals and say no. So the real question is... what's in it for the AGI?
From the first third of a sigmoid it looks exponential, and that scares people. But a sigmoid can have a very very high top - look at the industrial revolution, or modern plumbing, or modern agriculture which created a population sigmoid which is still cresting.
If AI is merely as tall a sigmoid as the haber-bosch process, refrigeration, or the steam engine, that's going to change society entirely.
As a long time ruby enjoyer and now also rust enjoyer, the core syntax and systems of rust are very rubyesque in a lot of ways, you can tell that some of the core contributors liked the language.
yeah ruby API ideas and the _why poignant guide specifically, they were very influential in programming in general. a number of early rust devs came from ruby as well. all original authors of cargo worked on ruby's bundler earlier. etc
The claim is that Rust took espression-orientation from Ruby. That's unlikely - it is much more inspired by FP languages which are also expression oriented.
To echo the sibling comment: approximately not, it's a strong acid bath which precludes operating electronics in it, and it's electrochemistry.
People do home anodizing all the time, but colored home anodizing on electronics is very rare.
The way to do it would be wrapping it in, say, a wet paper towel with your strong acid solution (but not sulfuric, because that would turn the paper into pure carbon foam) and running outside current from the laptop through the paper to a cathode, or vice versa.
You really can't fully disassemble current macbooks and put them back together without major tooling - the chassis is not just a wrapper, it's structural to the way they're interconnected, lots of glue and things like that.
The core thing about licenses, in general, is that they only grant new usage. If you can already use the code because it's public domain, they don't further restrict it. The license, in that case, is irrelevant.
Remember that licenses are powered by copyright - granting a license to non-copyrighted code doesn't do anything, because there's no enforcement mechanism.
This is also why copyright reform for software engineering is so important, because code entering the public domain cuts the gordian knot of licensing issues.
I'd suggest you try out something completely offline. My next candidate is flintknapping, but there are lots of really interesting historical crafts that are in need of preservation and are extremely interesting to learn and gain expertise at.
Woodworking, oil painting, pottery, analog synthesizers, animal husbandry, spinning and yarnmaking, knitting and weaving, sewing, pattern making, metalwork, welding, endurance running, rock climbing, beekeeping, brewing and distilling, the list goes on and on. Contrary to popular opinion they are all extremely technical and demanding fields, and getting to reconnect with the physical world and the people in it, as well as history, is extremely rewarding.
All primitive skills are great fun to learn. A logical followup to flint knapping is arrow making and bowery. There is something magical in making lethal ranged weapons with sticks, rocks, and string.
I'm trialing it on very silly things, like a economic simulator game in Rust/Bevy. I put in an entire road map document with inline specs and goals, wild milestones, with tasks like "working bid/ask spread when factories buy or sell on the market to make pricing dynamic and realistic", "political entities can set work conditions", "international trade has pricing dynamics that take into account currency interchange and tariff rates", "infrastructure for trade improves as trade volumes increase across given tiles".
Out the other end over about 3-4 five-hour-sessions comes about 85% functional code for every single listed thing. I'd guess you'd be looking at a team for months, give or take, without the automation. Total cost was around $50 in VM time (not counting claude since I would be subscribed anyway) I'm not letting that thing anywhere near a computer I care about and rust compiles are resource intensive, so I paid for a nice VM that I could smash the abort button on if it started looking at me funny.
So I liken it to buying an enormous bulldozer. If you're a skilled operator you can move mountains, but there'll still be a lot of manual work and planning involved. It's very clearly directionally where the industry will go once the models are improved and the harnesses and orchestration are more mature than "30% of the development effort is fixing the harness and orchestration itself", plus an additional "20% of your personal time will be knocking two robots heads together and getting them to actually do work"
Edit: some more details of other knock on work - I asked for a complexity metadata field to automatically dispatch work to cheaper/faster models, set up harnesses to make opencode and codex work similarly to how claude works, troubleshot some bugs in the underlying gastown system. Gastown fork is public if you'd like to have a look.
>working bid/ask spread when factories buy or sell on the market to make pricing dynamic and realistic
Does it deliver on the "realistic" part? My experience with most models is they make something that technically fulfills the ask, but often in a way that doesn't really capture my intent (this is with regular Claude Code though).
Yep, garbage in garbage out, I had some additional specs beyond the summary above, everything requires refinement as well, but honestly I never thought I was going to have a simcity/civlike clone in a couple weekends that's reasonably playable.
If you want to experiment with same-harness-different-models Opencode is classically the one to use. After their recent kerfluffle with Anthropic you'll have to use API pricing for opus/sonnet/haiku which makes it kind of a non-starter, but it lets you swap out any number of cloud or local models using e.g. ollama or z.ai or whatever backend provider you like.
I'd rate their coding agent harness as slightly to significantly less capable than claude code, but it also plays better with alternate models.
They often do actually ignore truly hidden fields (input type=hidden) but if you put them "behind" an element with css, or extremely small but still rendered, many get caught. It's similar to the cheeky prompt injection attacks people did/do against LLMs.
What could you do if you had roughly 15 million willing genius adult experts in any given subject? I doubt there are that many absolutely top quality experts in aggregate (at anything in the world), so let's postulate that simulated people outnumber human experts 10 to 1.
That, to me, presents an enormous potential for harm or benefit of humanity. What if you could create a hundred thousand manhattan projects on whatever topics you wanted? Cure aging, cure cancer, solve fusion, redesign the entire global economy top to bottom?
reply