Comment by ascar
4 years ago
> I've since changed my mind and currently do not believe we can achieve AGI (ever).
Considering we (as in humans) developed general intelligence, isn't that already in contradiction with your statement? If it happened for us and is "easily" replicated through our DNA, it certainly can be developed again in an artificial medium. But the solution might not have anything to do with what we call machine learning today and sure we might go extinct before (but I didn't have the feeling that's what you were implying).
It is not a contradiction as I meant "achieving" in the context of creating it (through software).
The fact it happened to us is undeniable (from our perspective), but the how/why of it is still one of the many mysteries of the universe - one we will likely never solve.
FWIW this is the same argument once made against human flight. In the late 19th century, there were a lot of debates in the form
> Clearly flight is possible, birds do it
> Sure but how/why is one of the many mysteries of the universe, one we will likely never solve.
"Man won't fly for a million years – to build a flying machine would require the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics for 1-10 million years." - NYT 1903
The real answer to how birds fly is that they're extremely light weight so that wing muscles can lift them. Common pigeons or seagulls only weigh about 2 or 3 pounds. The largest birds of prey top out around 18. Anything heavier is flightless. A 150-pound human isn't getting anywhere on wing muscle power.
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Paper planes are over two thousand years old.
NYT is just the epitome of the dunning-kruger in the west.
Argument by analogy is not much of an argument.
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I’m curious why you think that. Do you think it’s a fundamental problem with the discrete nature of traditional computers? Or a problem with scale and computational limits? If it’s the latter, if a hypothetical computer has unlimited time and memory capacity, why do you think AGI would remain impossible?
Machines are good at computation, which is not equal to reasoning, but rather a subset of reasoning.
And not only they are good at computation, but they are exceptionally good at it - I have no illusion of trying to compete with a machine doing square roots or playing chess. And increasingly harder problems are being expressed as computation problems, with more or less success - most famously probably self-driving.
But at the end of the day it feels like using an increasingly longer ladder to reach the surface of the Moon.
While imaginable, and every time we extend the ladder the Moon does get closer, it is fundamentaly impossible.
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It's semantics at this point but we did not create ourselves, it was a complex process that took billions of years to create each one of us. Something being conceivable isn't the same as it being practically possible. I can imagine what you propose, but the same goes for traveling to distant stars or a time machine for going to the future. All perfectly possible in theory.
Yeah but interstellar and time travel haven’t been done, or at least we haven’t observed such.
Flight had. Intelligence has.
Intelligence is an abstract concept, it depends on what exactly one means by that. I have watched a rockets take off from earth. I have never seen a self-aware machine.
What are you talking about?
We have interstellar objects intrude and fly by our solar system all the time, on several occasions.