Who presses the trigger?

...a continuation of "Are we witnessing the end of humanity?"

I left the last open ended. It'll remain open of cause but now I'm writing this to reconcile or at the very the very least narrow down my previous takes into one argument and stand on it. 

AGI is not "if" anymore 

The "if" in if we reach AGI is a comforting fiction. It's kept alive by people who haven't been paying attention and by people whose funding depends on you paying attention. The honest question isn't whether --its how, who, where, and what the rest of us still get to be on the other side. Get past the charade of whether and your reasoning becomes a lot more undiluted.

Before anyone calls this alarmist, look at what already exists. Today's frontier models aren't AGI -- not even close. They're stochastic predictors trained on insane volumes of text and code, doing exceptionally good next token guesses at a scale that looks like reasoning until you stress them on something genuinely outside their training distribution (think the "how many r's are in strawberry" or the "walking or driving to car wash" thing), then they basically regurgitate crap. They don't think, they're just good at pattern matching.

Even with all that said, these glorified autocompletes already write production code, draft legal contracts, design protein structures, run consumer services for entire industries, and have rearrenged the entry level labor market in roughly 4 yrs. And this --compared to our glamorised imagination of AGI-- is just the floor, literally! That's what we get from systems that don't actually reason. Extrapolate logically to systems that do reason and think, and the polite for what's coming is transformative. The accurate word is something else.

If I'd to coin a term for what's coming I'd say god

what we mean, i believe, when we say AGI-- knowledge across every horizon, the ability to outthink any individual or institution in real time significantly or even immeasurably really-- is the engineering of something with the capability profile of a god. You don't need to be religious to see why the word fits the gap. So the real question is the one i half asked last time and will ask straight now:

Do you want to serve a god, or become one?

I think from my last blog its pretty evident where i stand, I'll go with the latter. I'd like for humanity to endure longer, and not retired by some ultimate creation of our own and having our species reduced to nothing by an artificial species that has no continuity with us, no debt to us, and no reason to remember us.

So with all this now comes may other questions, who owns the thing that runs all this? I believe decentralization is the key. "Become a god" isn't a finish line by itself. The shape of the becoming decides whether we end up sovereign or just newly leashed.

If cognitive placement ships through three corporations headquartered in two cities on one cost, we haven't escaped subjugation --we've just rebranded it. A centralized AGI is one chokepoint with one set of owners. A centralized RCI is the exact same chokepoint, only this time is wired into your skills, probably running some insane ads -- this is assuming some corporate douchebag managed to commercialise RCI. 

The version worth fighting for is decentralized symbiosis. Open architectures. Substrate diversity. No single entity that can throttle, update, revoke, or monetize human cognition. If a chip exists, the chip must be inspectable, modifiable, forkable. Anything less is feudalism with better latency, and the fact that it feels like progress doesn't change what it is.

I've said it before and i'll say it again, the current builders are unfit to steer this

The people currently building toward AGI are not the right people I'd trust to design the future of human cognition. The leading frontiers are run, as a class, by liars, cheaters, and manipulators-- driven by sub human desires like money and power, and i say this without flinching because the behavior is on the record.

They simultaneously claim AGI could end humanity and that they need to race to build it first. They lobby for regulation they fully intend to capture and basically throw a fit of over how outdated the law is if it doesnt favor them(true the law is crap but we know why youre saying it). They preach safety first in press releases and bleed safety researchers out the backdoor. They've turned their followers into believers and their critics into characters in a story they control. None of this is the behavior of stewards. Its the behavior of a hype cycle wearing a costume of a moral crusade.

I'm not going to pretend I'm doing this from some pure motive either. I have no halo. I don't need humanity to survive because i love humanity in the abstract -- i need humanity to survive because I'm part of it and I'd like to see my species endure and evolve. Now I ask you reader ...what are your thoughts? 

These are just my thoughts penned down, this writing is informal. As with my previous, I leave this discussion open ended