Why Is Artificial General Intelligence a Dangerous Distraction?
Why Is Artificial General Intelligence a Dangerous Distraction? How to balance ambition with impact in the race for smarter machines. 📦Framing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a system that can think, learn, and reason across any domain like a human—has long been cast as the “endgame” of AI. Billions in investment now flow toward this vision. But here’s the dilemma: while AGI captures headlines, narrow AI is already delivering real-world impact—detecting cancers earlier, accelerating drug discovery, reducing emissions, and strengthening cybersecurity. The challenge isn’t that AGI research is useless. In fact, many foundational advances (like attention mechanisms and transfer learning) came from work framed around general intelligence. The challenge is emphasis and sequencing . Treating AGI as an imminent engineering goal risks diverting scarce resources from proven, high-impact applications. The smarter path is prioritizing measurable benefits now, while pursuing fundamental...