The CMIP7 scenarios were just released. AR7 is not yet completed but it's the input for it.
The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible given policy already in place, renewable cost declines, and observed emissions.
The policy changes have changed the projections.
Warming will continue, yes. The consequences will have to be dealt with. In some regions this will be problematic. It's still political and economical factors that determines the outcome.
It's worth noting that there is a fair amount of eschatology or even apocalypticism going on. It's built into the human mind somehow.
> The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible
That's a strange way of structuring such a comment. The temperature increase and concomitant catastrophes are still on the table, what was considered the plausible worst-case scenario with regard to how early that particular milestone might be reached has (apparently) been pushed back.
If you're going to go networking in New York, maybe see if anyone is interested in running a study / pilot project on pushing carbonated water into ultramafic rock to kick start self powered (via hydrogen) carbon capture.
Some people are clearly doing less nothing: there are activists protesting, formal political action groups, scientists doing research, etc. What isn't as clear is whether any this can actually overcome the huge social and economic structural issues to actually make a dent.
When I was initially thinking about my personal impact to this, the first thing that came to mind is air-travel. I don't travel much, maybe once a year to see family. I have some friends who fly several times a year to "see the world", being well-traveled is a part of their personality.
But I think I may be wrong on flight being a significant contribution.
My guess is that we probably all contribute to this mainly through our SP500 index investments, which financially supports a number of companies that directly contribute to global warming. We're "voting with our dollars" as they say. Maybe we can all start picking individual stocks based on environmental values/promises, and less short-term gain. Somehow, I don't think it'll happen.
A flight can be a few tonnes of carbon. A European might emit ten tonnes a year. It’s pretty significant. For ourselves ( electric heating, well insulated house, no beef and low meat, no car )a flight can be half the year’s emissions.
and I'm not sure how much they need to do to drive up costs. During Covid the economy has started showing signs that the incentives are wrong and Trump 2 showed you can just buy government favours and tilt the field to your advantage.
Covid was early 2020, he lost too. Dems can just match it with 5K given approval comes from congress not EO. The congress will flip Nov 4. And congressional witch trials will be devastating in Jan 2027. If recession happens by then, congress can revoke SS protection after 2028. By then given worldwide mess and maybe AI havoc, I doubt we thinking about him more than our walmart cart. Sigh, a future that I am not looking forward to.
Even if they don't say that, it is the obvious thing to do. Elections are coming up in a few months. Already because of midterm elections the democrats were expected to gain seats (this is something you could predict the day after the 2024 elections before Trump took office again). The democrats are not so stupid as to not yell about gasoline prices in their advertisements - this is a big deal to a lot of people. Iran has a lot of power to affect gas prices (something they have long known) and so their best chance to harm Trump is to ensure the democrats win as many seats as possible.
The real question is what happens after the elections. There is a lot happening in Iran and nobody can figure out which factions really are gaining power (we know who is the public voice of power, but not if they have real power)
They use it like a marketing term, but it is unnecessary.
I am not aware of a complete operational definition, but it would not be that difficult to build a good tentative one. I have mentioned many different requirements several times.
Edit: "definition" (the 10 points above) that is cannot be that of "AGI", really. AGI just needs to actually implement Intelligence and requires very many features that are not there today. The list from Marcus is about "Artificial Super General Intelligence" - not the same thing.
You can implement a replacement for Intellligence - that is AI;
you can implement Intelligence - that is AGI;
you can implement Intelligence of very high value output: that is "ASGI" (or similar).
"With little or no human involvement, come up with paradigm-shifting, Nobel-caliber scientific discoveries."
Indeed far above the capabilities of almost all humans. I agree we should have a separate category for this. "ASGI" is still a bit unintuitive, imho. Maybe Artificial Excellent Intelligence.
With AGI explicitly meaning matching average humans, I would say that we really have already reached AGI. I can't think of any intelligence-only task where I'd think an average human would do significantly better than frontier AI provided with correct context.
It seems that "ASI" ("Artificial Super Intelligence") is in use, maybe it will get further traction. It should imply AGI.
> AGI ... matching average humans
Very bad definition. AGI has to implement Intelligence. And to be Intelligent it has to contain the missing pieces. Intelligence is not there - the implementation is unfinished.
No, I was saying that current technologies with emergent simil-intelligent behaviour miss properties that are necessary to have proper Intelligence.
The average human does have atrophied abilities, compared of course to proficient humans. And in fact, we certainly do not aim to simulate average humans. We aim to simulate or actually implement Intelligence.
??? This question makes no sense. We utterly disregard the "average human". There is no comparison (no competition) between the "average human" and an accomplished human. This makes using it as a parameter nonsensical.
Well, explain said "spirit of the question" then, because "human with an average IQ" gets the same reply as above (49606153).
Justify why we should have any consideration for the average human etc. in comparison to software systems - I have written we disregard it as a nonsensical parameter. "Does Stable Diffusion paint better than John's aunt": we cannot care.
It's a very simple experiment: Create a set of intelligence-only tasks with answers that can be easily graded for correctness, then instruct one or more humans with an IQ of about 100 to do the tasks, then compare the performance to that of frontier AI on the same tasks.
We should care because "John's aunt" might rely on her paycheck as a professional painter to pay her bills. Many average humans have average jobs, some of which require intelligence (or creative production) only. Ignoring this reality is folly.
So you meant: "we are already at a point in which many humans can be non-competitive in the professional market". Yes. We were still there some time ago already.
I did not mean that, but I'll take it as agreement that we've already achieved AGI if that is defined as being on average more intelligent than average humans.
If you wanted to be sure and date that: it happened around the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 - check Maxim Lott's trackingai.org .
But, again (and again), that which you propose cannot be a productive definition of AGI. In engineering we strive to understand "Fast", then to implement it, and then obtain "faster than a cheetah" - not "faster than a roadkill", which is really not a goal.
> more intelligent than average humans
Adequate language and ideas, please: one probably does not have actual intelligence, the other probably does not use it.
yeah i was like huh?
you wanna bandy about on valuation etc. whatever.
but part of why the whole circular financing is a thing
is nvidia has so much cash flow, it is not trivial to allocate
Well, was. They did a bad job of it these last few years which allowed any AI that could crawl the web to seem amazing for search because it could pick the best posts from Reddit or whatever other forum had the best context for your question, but now we're watching the AI snake eat its own tail.
Theoretically, Goggle doesn't care which websites run their ads, so they might as well give you the most useful ones. Search doesn't really work for engagementmaxxing.
If you send people to the optimal website containing exactly the information they are after, then you get fewer ad impressions than if you send them to a suboptimal website that has them going back and clicking on more links.
This is like suggesting you can show people more ads by keeping them in line at the DMV for longer. Try that at your peril. People aren't at the DMV to waste time and there's a reason the DMV is hated.
You also have to go to the DMV anyway, no matter how much you hate it, so nobody cares about how frustrated you are. The only people who will suffer your anger are the other people waiting at the DMV.
This is just another symptom of a lack of antitrust enforcement.
I rarely use image search, but I went to look something up recently and I was shocked at how many obviously AI generated images showed up. I couldn't even find an image of the thing I was looking for and eventually gave up. Bing has the same problem.
If you invert the question "why aren't people having kids" to "why did people want kids in the first place" then the fertility crisis makes more sense.
Kids were free labor and old age insurance.
Now they are extremely expensive pets. Materially they are a net negative in a modern society.
The way the pension systems are set up, you're donating your children's labor to the pension system as a whole. This means any investment into your children is purely an expense. Meanwhile if you don't have children, you can save money for retirement and let other people's children work for you.
This means children are a net positive to society as a whole, but a net negative to the parents raising them.
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