Can i stop working on my bachelors thesis if AGI arrives ?
Much like your eyes can't see blue the same way my eyes see blue, i assume your internal experience to be as much colored by the opinions and thoughts absorbed through social media as mine are. Processes in our subconscious notice, collect and distill what "they", read, other people, think. For a prehistoric human, alignment with the opinions and worldviews of others is essential for a good life in the prehistoric village. In modern times however, these processes are maladaptive. Instead of each input differing only slightly from the next, all referencing and being influenced by the same ground truth and events, worldviews are diverging faster and faster and show no sign of slowing down.
Twitter is the perfect example to illustrate what i've described above. This is because unlike Instagram, TikTok or Facebook. Twitters heavy focus on text, in contrast to TikTok and Instagrams emphasis on Shortform Video and Facebooks emphasis on AI generated content that tricks boomers into thinking that this dog just celebrated its 20th birthday by playing "Für Elise" perfectly on his grand piano, directly leads to its primary mode of expression: the proclamation of opinions without context. Other factors further increase this tendency. Twitters heritage, the now long gone limit on how many characters you could use, still influences the style of short, snappy and maximally expressive tweets. The absence of any moderation apart from the most basic has simultaneously lead to it being the only platform where anyone can say pretty much anything, and an exodus of more moderate thinkers, that can't bear this, to other, more moderated platforms like Threads or Bluesky.
Therefore, twitter at its worst is now almost a parody of social media. A cacophany of different voices, opinions, worldviews and sometimes just pure schizophrenic ramblings that scream at anyone who tries to listen. But i really enjoy it. There are so many good blogs, books, podcasts and works of art that i would have never known about, were it not for twitter. It's a chaotic, witty, information dense place. This, combined with our human tendency to subconciously collect and assume the worldviews and frames we absorb, leads to some curios outcomes.
In the field of AI, Sci-fi and the real world are collapsing in on each other. Scientists and Engineers currently compete to produce either: a Chatbot able to respond to queries about shipping and invoicing with 7% more emotional involvement than human call center personnel thereby increasing customer retention by 3% or god. I'm not convinced that the engineers working on it know which one it will be, much less whether these two will be different entities. On twitter, the conversation about AI therefore ranges from the completely mundane, to whether god will torture us indefinetely when he finally breaks out of his cage.
In the last weeks i've noticed, that my subconscious has noticed and catalogued both of these scenarios as possible futures, although i would assume that both are quite unlikely. I was daydreaming, while i should have been working on my bachelors thesis when it hit me. If they invent god in the next two months, all of my work will have been useless. The machine-god would be able to replicate the work of weeks in the blink of an eye, in the time it takes me to get back to work from my daydreaming, if he evens deems it necessary. If they invent god after i've finished my work and submitted it, it would still mean nothing. But the feeling that i myself did it, while it was not something trivial, but something only possible with the right education and tools would be worth it, even if it's reproduction would be a trivially easy for an AGI.
Therefore i trudge on, sit down and continue to work on something that could be meaningless if some insane people are actually right. But until the day comes, if it ever comes, i work on and pray that they only invent the ultimate customer complaint agent, instead of something that could annihilate finland just because it was bored and tired of their antics.