Should we be optimistic? How do we know for sure AGI is going to be a net positive at all?

An AGI is still built by engineers paid by someone to build it

Hard to swallow pill: The people paying for it will be the ones to benefit from it. There’s absolutely nothing that says it’s benefits will be socialised. We live in a highly individualistic unequal capitalist system built and purveyed by the people with the money to fund this research and there’s no reason to believe they’d program it to favour some sort of socialist utopia; they’ll design it to protect their own privilege as they always have when designing our politician and economic system.

People in this sub often seem to assume that “discovery” is all that’s needed but that’s immensely naive.

The main barrier to benefiting from AGI and life extension is political, not scientific discovery. And likely it will take decades or centuries to win politically; and victory isn’t even guaranteed anytime soon.

I think it’s also dangerous to assume that AGI won’t have inbuilt biases based on those who built it and those who are designed to administer it. All software that exists already faces this issue.

So it will exist to benefit certain politically powerful people and shore up their privilege and advantage.

Those interests could be DIRECTLY opposed to what’s best for the rest of us. See: how military tech is used now; mostly for social control and political suppression.

It’s only really an ASI that would likely significantly benefit everyone and I hate to be a downer but I don’t think people who aren’t programmers quite realise how little chance there is of that arriving soon. A lot of sensationalist headlines, not a lot of substance there unfortunately