This article will age like milk. The No Free Lunch argument is nonsense. The analogy of designing a super-organism that has higher fitness in every environment is absurd. That is exactly what human beings are. We completely dominate on Earth and there are even a few of us in space. That is chiefly due to intelligence. I'm not sure a counter argument is necessary since the author basically refuted his own point. AGI is no more than 20 years away.
superintelligence is quite possible, you've got Da Vinci, Von Neumann, Einstein, and a couple of folks / gals being superintelligent right now.<p>Those are the real life blackboxes system demonstrating the feasibility, eventually we could reverse engineer simple AGI, then improve it to super AGI.<p>It's a bit dangerous to deny that AGI and super AGI are possible, we - simple talking meat bags - could miss when some system begin to show signs of General Intelligence, and get trown under the bus of a sudden non-singularity-but-close event.<p>Very simple intelligent - or even fully automated -system connected to open society could spark chaos beyond the supposed limits of the system.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash</a><p>Yesterday read about the Dead Hand the russian guys still run, and someone mentioned it has "AI" somewhere inside, just checking everything in its world goes as usual business, ready to trigger WWIII if not. So, not worried at all, yeah.<p>Call me crazy, but just in case, I'll place giant transformer models farms far from open internet and close to an EMP device.<p>You should have at very least, a big red button to shutdown analogically and certainly shut the thing off right away.
AI doesn't really need to have AGI to upend society. Just enough to eliminate most white collar jobs. even just generating massive amounts of interesting content at a fraction of the cost of a person/team.<p>learn how to code reasonably well.<p>learn how to program a robot to do a factory job.