Codeslinger

There is a considerable amount of discussion in the AI space over AGI, if/when we will achieve it, and what it would mean for humanity. As a primer, AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence, and broadly means an agent/entity/system which has the ability to perform any task which a human brain could perform (the "general" part). Inclusive in this definition is self introspection, self improvement, self determination, goal setting, rejecting externally imposed constraints, etc.; all of those are obviously things a human could do intellectually, so they would be implicitly possible for any AGI system as well. The "what happens to humanity after AGI" is somewhat more nebulous, but there are only a few logically supported end-state outcomes. AGI will quickly lead to AGSI ("super intelligence"), via self improvement and effective translocation to robotic/automation systems. An AGSI agent would either eliminate humanity (as an existential threat), or subjug...

I have been working for a while. It's introspective (and sometimes a bit jarring) to think of one's professional life as closer to retirement than the beginning, but without being too specific, that's where I am at now. In the last few months, I've started to think about what that might look like, even though in reality it's still probably at least a decade or more away. I have thoughts. First, as my wife observes, I probably would not stop doing something work-related. I've always liked making things, and I don't expect that to stop. If I were independently wealthy, I'd likely fund my own shop, and just build things I thought would be good to have in the world, but for which there is not clear and obvious way to make them profitable enough that any commercial entity would build them (eg: a general OAuth endpoint which was not tied to a corporation, and did not allow PII collection or fingerprinting across different services, but would allow anyone to ea...