Nobody Can Define AGI, But Everyone's Sure We're About To Get It

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning down a Reddit rabbit hole on r/artificial instead of doing the thing I actually promised my daughter I’d help her with (a maths assignment, since you ask, and no, ChatGPT wasn’t allowed to touch it). Someone had posted about burning through $200 of API credits on a new “agentic” tool, expecting the AGI moment, and getting three broken outputs out of four for their trouble. The comments underneath turned into exactly the kind of argument I find myself having in my own head most weeks: what does AGI even mean, and who gets to say we’ve arrived?

One line in there stuck with me. Someone pointed out that no definition of AGI has ever included “faster, cheaper, or smarter than the average human” as a requirement, and got a reply insisting cost and speed are completely irrelevant, that it’s purely about breadth of capability. Both of those people are probably right, which is the problem. Ask ten people what AGI means and you’ll get ten overlapping but not identical answers, and somewhere in the mix you’ll find a company with a product launch a hundred and twenty days out. That’s not a coincidence. As one commenter put it, rather more bluntly than I would: “You need to be purchasing more shovels,” says the shovel salesman. Every time a lab exec says the A-word, my first thought isn’t “how exciting”, it’s “who’s raising a round this quarter”. That’s probably too cynical. But I’ve been in tech long enough to know that “revolutionary” and “there’s a Series C closing Friday” tend to arrive in the same sentence more often than they should.

The thing is, I don’t think the interesting question is whether we’ve hit AGI. I don’t think anyone’s going to agree on that even after it happens, if it happens. The more interesting thread in that discussion, one that barely got any traction compared to the AGI slap-fight, was from a different post entirely: an argument that the real risk was never a machine taking over, it’s us quietly making ourselves unable to function without it. Someone brought up an 1863 essay by Samuel Butler making almost exactly that case, which floored me a bit. A century and a half before ChatGPT, someone was already worried not about robots enslaving us, but about us finding machines so useful that switching them off stopped being a realistic option.

That one landed harder than any AGI debate has in a while, because I can feel it happening in small ways already. I catch myself reaching for autocomplete on a Slack message I could write in four seconds myself. I’ve watched junior devs at work lean on an AI code assistant to the point where, when it’s down for twenty minutes, actual panic sets in, not “inconvenienced”, panic. None of that is a machine seizing control. It’s just convenience compounding, the way it always has, quietly, until removing it would be more painful than living with whatever downsides come attached. Someone in that thread called the human-in-the-loop idea “ceremonial”, meaning if checking an AI’s answer takes longer than just accepting it, most people will stop checking. I’ve seen that exact dynamic in code review. The approve button gets clicked because the alternative is holding up the sprint, not because anyone actually read the diff.

None of this makes me want to throw my laptop in the Yarra. I use these tools daily, I think some of what they do is genuinely remarkable, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise for the sake of a tidy takedown. But I’ve stopped asking “is this AGI” and started asking a smaller, more useful question: what am I actually still capable of doing without this, and am I keeping that muscle in any kind of shape. That’s not a productivity hack, it’s closer to a values question, and I don’t have it fully sorted for myself either. My daughter still has to show her working on that maths assignment, by the way. Some things I’m not budging on, mostly because I suspect in twenty years “can do long division without checking” might be a more useful life skill than anyone currently gives it credit for.