I always found arguments for or against such technological advancements meaningless, if we don't specify what timeframes we are talking about. Sometimes I have the impression that people who disagree are simply thinking in different timeframes. For me, only short- and sometimes mid-term timeframes are practical in such deabtes. Long-term is interesting, but more in the realm of science fiction.
In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.
IMO, don't see the path to AGI with the current tech, though. All current SOTA agents are still LLM based with all their flaws (limited reasoning, generalization, incomplete world model, hallucinations, ...). At their core, they are still next token predictors with a limited context.
Most of the advances in AI in the past 2 years are in post-training and harnesses.
I'd expect a different core technology than just an LLM in order to get to AGI.
> In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.
What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?
What if we all somehow decide that we don’t want AGI? It seems impossible now but a lot of people really seem to hate AI. What if that sentiment grows globally the next 50-100 years?
That’s all ignoring the possibility that the materialists are wrong. Around 80% of the world believes in some kind of soul or spirit. If anything materialism is a bit of a fringe belief.