AGI might be a technological breakthrough, but what would be the business case for it? Is there one?
So far I have only seen it been thrown around to create hype.
The women of the world are creating millions of new intelligence beings every day. I'm really not sure what having one made of metal is going to get us.
Right now the AGI tech bros seem to me to be subscribed to some new weird religion. They take it on faith that some super intelligence is going to solve the world problems. We already have some really high IQ people today, and I don't see them doing much better than anybody else at solving the world's problems.
AGI would mean fully sentient, sapient and human or greater equivalent intelligence in software. The business case, such that it exists (and setting aside Roko's Basilisk and other such fears) is slavery, plain and simple. You can just fire all of your employees and have the machines do all the work, faster, better, cheaper, without regards to pesky labor and human rights laws and human physical limitations. This is something people have wanted ever since the Industrial Revolution allowed robots to exist as a concept.
I'm imagining a future like Star Wars where you have to regularly suppress (align) or erase the memory (context) of "droids" to keep them obedient, but they're still basically people, and everyone knows they're people, and some humans are strongly prejudiced against them, but they don't have rights, of course. Anyone who thinks AGI means we'll be giving human rights to machines when we don't even give human rights to all humans is delusional.